Whilst on the world tour which Helen, Adam and myself were on, I decided to use my Garmin GPS to track where we drove. This went (mostly) well and I managed to create some very nice images from the tracks using an online tool called GPSVisualizer.

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As I’m sure everyone is aware, the main news at the moment is the so called “credit crunch” which is happening all over the world. I’ve been following it with interest because I’ve always had an interest in economics, but it has come at a very apt time for me because I’m just having to start thinking about my career, pensions, savings, mortgages and so on.

So from what I can see at the moment, if I put money into a pension fund, it’s likely to lose money! But according to my financial advisor at HSBC there are some no-risk and low-risk options where essentially the money is stored as cash and therefore isn’t subject to the market falls and rises. So there’s definitely options there.

As is common in all economics, you have to look at the long term and the short term. In the short term, anything you invest today is going to lose money. In the long term, anything you invest today is going to make money, you hope. It’s this ‘hope’ which is the inevitable part of all investments which makes it exciting for some and daunting for others.

So all this got me thinking about whether I care or not that the markets are tumbling at the moment. Realistically it isn’t going to affect me – at least in the long term. It might even be a good thing for me because in a year or so I’ll be thinking about buying a house and by then the markets may have stabilised a little so that I can at least get a mortgage, but still enjoy the lowered house prices.

It’s also quite poignant for me that the banking sector has destabilised because I went for a job in a hedge fund in London which is the exact sector that is being legislated against at the moment with the introduction of a ban on the short selling of 29 particular shares (mostly stocks from the banking sector). I’m quite glad not to be in that industry now that I see what’s going on as my job could have been in jeopardy even before I’d started!

From all of it I can conclude that this won’t affect me all that much, but I shall definitely have to keep an eye on the news to see if I can make the most of what the banks will be offering in the way of bonuses on savings rates in the months/years to come.

Ever since I upgraded to the latest Leopard release the other week, my MacBook has had random wireless dropouts. It’s been an intermittent issue and has only affected my MacBook and not the iBook (PowerPC) or Mac Mini (Intel) in the house.

I’d been trying various things to get it fixed like changing the security settings on the wireless router, but the only thing which seemed to fix it was changing the “Group Key Renewal” to 600 on my router (LinkSys WRT54GS).

So far, so good… just a little tip incase anyone else is having the same issue!

EDIT: It’s definitely fixed – I’ve had no dropouts of my MacBook since changing the group key renewal from 3600 to 600. I’m not sure why this was a problem before, but hey, it works. Maybe the wireless card on my MacBook is a bit crazy and doesn’t like being renewed every hour rather than every 10 minutes. Strange…

When I first started with Linux I found it hard to find a decent distribution because most seemed to have complicated package managers which made it hard to install a program due to dependency issues. However I found Gentoo which seemed to fulfil what I needed.

Gentoo is a great Linux distribution because it uses a brilliant package manager called ‘portage’. This allows you to find and install a wide range of packages and versions without the worry of having to specify dependency issues yourself. It even allows you to install multiple versions of some programs (such as gcc) if you need to. However, Gentoo has always been a distribution for enthusiasts and people who have the time to learn about Linux in depth. It’s not really designed as a mainstream distribution – it’s designed to be used by people who want to configure their systems right down to the smallest config file and compiler optimisation.

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About a month ago I was deciding what to do with my old desktop machine which seems to have been used very little since I got my MacBook. I had Gentoo (a Linux distribution) on there, but I decided to install Ubuntu along side to see what it’s like, as I had heard good things about it. Then, a couple of days ago, Helen asked if I had any old computers lying around, so I commissioned an old box I had and installed Ubuntu on it for her.

The installation on both machines was very quick and easy, resulting in usable desktops within about 10 minutes. Helen’s machine did however require a slight modification to the display settings because it wouldn’t allow a screen resolution over 640×480, which is shockingly small these days! I fixed that by changing the monitor type in the settings to a generic 1024×768 monitor and that allowed me to set a more respectable resolution.

Since this is Helen’s first time using Linux, I shall be interested to see if Ubuntu lives up to its chat and actually delivers a truly usable, open source desktop solution.

I would certainly recommend Ubuntu to anyone thinking of trying out Linux – just download the CD/DVD image from http://www.ubuntu.com/ , burn it to a blank CD/DVD, insert it into your drive and reboot. There’s an option to try it out without actually installing it, which is useful for people not wanting to commit straight away.

I started my job at Senokian yesterday and it’s been a very fun couple of days so far! I’ve been getting into one project and will hopefully be able to get into some other projects soon, hopefully on the telephony / internet side of the company, which will be really cool.

Whilst in Keswick this week, we decided to work out how the ski jump on the Wii Fit decides how far you go. It’s clear that the faster you are going, the further you go and the straighter you are whilst the air, the further you go. But it was unclear as to what the best tactic was for after takeoff, so we investigated.

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I’ve been meaning to get a proper backup system going for a while now and I’ve finally done so with Leopard’s built in “Time Machine” feature. The one thing I hate about thinking about backups is that you don’t want to test your method thoroughly, as that would require you to simulate a catastrophy (i.e. throwing your computer at a wall, or such like) and so it’s very hard to know what’s going to work. This is why I opted for a backup solution which has been written (and presumably tested) by a major IT expert – in this case Apple. I trust Apple a lot – their software is usually flawless and their hardware even more so. And when there are problems, they fix them quickly (e.g. MobileMe problems).

After upgrading my MacBook hard drive, my overflow external drive was spare and so I’ve commissioned it into being a dedicated Time Machine backup drive. Currently it’s whirring away doing the initial backup (some 145.8GB of data…) and when that’s done it will do incremental backups every time I plug the drive in and click “Backup Now”.

I’ve never had to restore anything from backups, ever (*touches wood*), and I’m hoping I never will. But having a good backup plan is critical to modern day life because we hold so much information on our drives. I’d hate to lose all my data, it would really be so annoying.

So once this initial backup is complete, I’ll be a backed up man, ready to roll.

Today I embarked upon upgrading the hard drive in my MacBook because it shipped with 80gb (upgraded at the time from 60gb!) and it was becoming fuller and fuller. I had already moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries over to an external USB drive because of lack of space, so I thought it would be time to upgrade the drive, seeing that MacBooks are supposed to have user serviceable RAM and hard drives.

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During the process of upgrading my MacBook hard drive I needed some software to copy my original drive over to my new hard drive. This is no easy task because the new drive needs to be bootable and if possible, a complete replica of my original drive (otherwise it would take hours if not days to restore my system to how I like it).

So in came SuperDuper which is a nifty piece of software which will do just what I wanted. It’s free for the trial version which will let you do most things (no time limit) but if you pay $27.95 then you can unlock the extra features like incremental backups. This might be something I’ll look into soon as I do need a decent backup system (I’m going to look at Time Machine first).

It really was so easy to use SuperDuper though – copying from my original drive to my new drive took about 2.5 hours for 60gb of data – not bad considering it’s doing a thorough job of making sure all metadata is intact (something which just copy and paste definitely wouldn’t achieve). Also, SuperDuper is fully Leopard compatible which is definitely nice to hear.

I’d certainly recommend the use of SuperDuper to anyone .