Category: Life

These days I try and keep my toe out of politics – particularly if it’s the politics of another country. However, when that country is the US and anybody voted into a position of power will therefore have a big influence on the rest of the world, then I’m interested.

Sarah Palin I worry about.

A “Hockey Mom” she may be, but she’s also a strong Christian, is pro-gun and anti-abortion (quite how those last two go together I don’t know).

Her Christian views means that she wants to promote creationism and, as a Mayor, even approached her library to ask how she might go about having books banned – details here from an article in Time Magazine:

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.

Palin also voted against having a bigger library built, but did raise taxes to pay for a new sports hall which even now is “in the red”.

And, although without any backing of the source of the information, there’s even a worrying list of which books she wanted to ban.

But, let’s move onto a different subject. Oil and the environment. Her husband works for BP and has stated many times that she does not believe Global Warming is man made and that “the jury is out”. No it’s not.

She has pushed to have a natural gas-pipe line from Alaska’s North Shore and even wants to drill in Alaska’s protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (something she mentioned in her speech last night). She collected $13,000 from lobbyists who represent oil and gas industries in her campaigns, including donations from employees of BP, Exxon Mobil, Anadarko Petroleum, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell.

There is a site named “Sarah Plain is Dangerous” (and from what I’ve read about her, I agree) which has more information. It’s not dribbling lunacy, but has source information on information it provides.

Besides, her daughter is called Bristol. Who in their right mind would do that?

Well, it couldn’t get much worse. I came home to….. a broken wireless modem/router. Noooooo.

It was dead. And a new power supply on it didn’t revive it either.

So I bundled it into a bag and took it to a nearby small computer shop. Thankfully they sold a modem with the same type of power supply so tried that on the modem… dead. They tested my power supply… dead. It was plugged into a surge protected socket and everything else is okay, so we can only assume that one of these (the router or the power supply) took the other one out as well.

Not wanting to be without the internet for too long I bought a replacement there and then. I daren’t look at how much cheaper it would have been buying off of the internet. But, hey, it’s quick and hassle free – if it doesn’t work, it’s easy to take back.

Now, the router I DID have was a Netgear DG834GT, which has Super-G, giving better speed and range with compatible receivers. Such a receiver is in my daughters computer. However, Super-G only works if you’re transmitting on a particular channel – I had to change mine recently because of interference from somebody else on the same channel, so I no longer use the Super-G facility. So faced, at the computer shop, with the Super-G and standard version of this router, I plumped for the later.

I now have a Netgear DG834G – version 4, which includes ADSL2 compatibility.

It was set up REALLY easily – my router name and password is set the same but I’ve put a stronger password on the admin panel. All of this meant that everything wireless around the house burst into life without me having to change anything on them.

Naturally, something went wrong. I took the opportunity, as I was just setting it up, to flash the router firmware to the latest level. It was going through as a strip adapter that I was using (shoddy bit of kit) shorted and tripped the power off. Potentially, the router was knackered already. However, it looks like it had gone through by the time the power went off as the firmware level is correct and it’s all working fine.

One thing I did learn from this…. make a note of my ADSL username and password. I hadn’t and it was buried deep in my Gmails. Thankfully I could use my phone to access and search my mail account. But, now, it’s noted.

I’ve made a few changes (again) to this blog.

• After realising I’ve earned a whole 60p from adverts on this blog and equally realising that they were slowing the site down, I’ve removed them!
• After realising that the language translator never appeared to work, I’ve disabled it.
• I’ve moved the admin options to the side
• I’ve added quick shortcuts to various categories in the top menu bar

I hope you like the changes 😀

I’ve got a lovely digital photo frame. With many of these types of new technologies, I’ve waited for quality to improve and prices to drop.

This one works best from an SD card (as it’s more discreet) – I’ve put in a spare 2 GB one that I had. This gives me loads of rooms for photos based on the resolution of the screen.

So, how to best get my photos onto the frame.

First of all I used Picasa to go through my photos and find those I wanted. It’s a shame there isn’t an easy way of moving copies to a new folder, so I had to do this manually. But from this I built up a seperate folder containing the photos I wanted to use.

Next, I re-dimensioned them with Image Cropper – I tried a number of cropping programs but this worked the best. The ratio of the frame does not match my photos, and this allows me to adjust the are of cropping for each photo. The only downside to this program is that it doesn’t seem to retain all of the configuration – even though there is an option to load/save configuration options.

Anyway, this program let me one-by-one crop to the right ratio, as well as change the pixel size to match the screen.

Once all of this was done, I wanted to randomize the photos in some way (and possibly rename them too). I’m sure there’s an easy way, but I came across VIPBase – a collection of image and video processing utilities. Amongst these is a batch file renamer, which includes a button to randomize the files before being renamed.

The results were copied onto the SD card and have worked a treat.