On The Move

Individual Choice

No Comments

Has the UK population or indeed that of the world lost the ability to make individual choices when buying tech?

It seems too many people are followers and are missing out because they only buy what everybody else has.

The thought spurred by a colleague remarking that he’s going to buy a sat nav system. On asking which one (like I didn’t already know the answer) he of course said TomTom. When asks why that make in particular he merley commented that it was what everyone has so must be good.

NOW, I have a sat nav and no its not a TomTom I researched lots of differnt makes and models accessing reviews functionality etc before I made my choice but it seems the population are far too lazy to contemlate such a notion and simply want quick-fix-tech.

Indeed ask someone what MP3 player you should get and they 99% of the time answer IPOD the other 1% is me who would simply advise to get the one that suits your needs best.

People ask me what GPU they should get I don’t immediately say ahh well you need 2 2GB dedicated memory Nvidia cards in crossfire that will suck more power than the combined usage of kettles during the ad break of the x-factor final. No I simply ask "what do you use your computer for?" Where it transpires the only game they every play is solitaire.

People are stuck in the PC World mentality of `You must have the newest most expensive piece of equipment because obviously that means its best for you`if you were to walk into a store tomorrow and enquire about laptops you can bet your all ready stretched budget that they will show you one towards the top end of their price range.

Continue Reading

Techy

Router Upgrade

No Comments

I think i’m due a router upgrade at home. I’ve had a Linksys BEFSR41 running happily since my Demon days and a Linksys WRT54G for wireless & wired stuff. I also have a Linksys 8 port gigabit switch which I don’t actually use that much. 

I’m looking in loose 1 or maybe even 2 of them if I can find something up to the job. The only trouble is that even with 8 wired ports I still don’t have any spare? I can’t even think what they all get used for ha. My desktop is still on wired as only have Wireless G. I think next natural progression would be the Linksys WRT350N as I could free up some wired ports by using the faster N protocol in a couple of my boxes. This model also has 4 wired ports but with the added bonus of them all being gigabit.

Or do I give up on what I know and go to the Dark Side and try a Belkin N1 Vision? BUT does it appeal to me purely because of the asthetics ie the fancy LCD UI?

Continue Reading

NSLU2

open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy

No Comments

I had strange problem with my EyeToy which meant if I plugged it in before and then booted the slug I would get the following error when I tried to start webcam

v4l2: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy
v4l2: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy
v4l: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy
no grabber device available

However if I plugged it in after it had booted it worked fine. Thus I did the following….

fuser /dev/video0

/dev/video0:          1871m

ps -aux | grep 1871

nobody    1871  0.0  2.4   5492   732 ?        S    19:55   0:00 /usr/bin/camserv

This showed me that the software camserv was trying to access the dev. After reading this I had a ‘Ahhh now I remember moment’ i’d installed a few webcam software when I was looking for the right one amnd not removed it hence the conflict. All is working as it should now.

Continue Reading