OliJ

Chav Justice

oliver — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:51:14 +0000

God bless Darwinism. Yes I am aware of the irony with that.

OS X has died and you didn’t sync your iDisk?

oliver — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 10:23:53 +0000

Dead Mac? Need to grab the latest version of your iDisk files which haven’t been synced? I had this problem and had trouble locating the files..

Download Ubuntu and burn it to CD
Insert into Mac and hold C down when you power it on.
After a short while you will see a menu option for testing ubuntu without installation – choose this.
Under acccessories > Terminal type: “gksudo nautilus” this will gain admin rights to open your mac files and open a file browser. Navigate to media > disk > users > UserName > library > file sync >”UserName”> “user.name”_iDisk.sparsebundle
Copy the sparse bundle file to a new folder called ‘New’ that you created in the media folder (do this now).
At the top, choose: System > administration > synaptic package manager and search for ‘Samba’. Highlight it and install.
Open a terminal (applications > accessories) and type: sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf
Search for “workgroup” and change “workgroup = workgroup” to “workgroup = insertyourworkgroupname“
Browse to the end of this file and type:
[share]
path = /media/new
browseable = yes
read only = no
guest ok = yes
Save the file and close it.
Now type the following in Terminal: sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart
check the output to ensure that it stops and starts ok.

Then on another network PC open up windows explorer and type \\broken.mac.ip.address\share
(or on a mac, in finder hit command+k and then type smb\\broken.mac.ip.address\share
and you should see the sparse bundle file for you to copy locally.

When you get OS X reinstalled, copy over the sparsebundle and you can mount it on your desktop and get the files out that you need.

Guide to linux on the 2009 MacBook Pro

oliver — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:27:36 +0000

Found this guide to linux on the 2009 MBP and thought I’d reference it here as I’m having a minor issue with my MBP’s hard drive! Can’t boot into any operating system other than ubuntu linux using the Live CD environment at the moment – which has been vital for saving a few files that hadn’t been backed up! I may write a guide as it was a bitch to find my iDisk files…

Top week!

oliver — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 07:19:32 +0000

Just back from 5 days in Les Carroz with some great company and great conditions for a fantastic week!!

I’ve tested a new gallery for these – as well as being on the gallery page (link at the top of the page), you can see my pics and upload yours by going to the new album here. If you want a full res image of any of the pics for printing, leave me a comment below with your email addy.

Word of warning – some of the pics are a tad… well. hmm..

Another photo slideshow

oliver — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:20:06 +0000

I have a couple of these listed on here, however this one is a nice, simple piece of javascript that applies a fade transition between images. Javascript fading slideshow.

6 bloody hours..

oliver — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:36:04 +0000

..it took! 6 hours to cover the 25 miles home from work!! They closed the M3 so everyone decided to try and fit down the A30. Which didn’t work. I gave up in the end – I abandoned my car in Sunningdale, had a really nice curry and then got the train home.

Snow!!

oliver — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:04:29 +0000

Everyone loves a snow day

File types and codecs for importing to iMovie

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:40:42 +0000

I’ve been messing around with video editing recently – it’s something I have never really looked at before as I have never had the power to do it properly, but one of the first barriers I ran into was suitable file formats for importing into iMovie.

I had a few old video’s that I wanted to play with (skiing vids / holidays etc) and I tried to import these into iMovie but I could not get them to work (they were in a variety of formats).

The video’s were a mixture of wmv, avi and other formats but iMovie refused to import them (or it pretended to import the file, which was even more frustrating!).

After much research I ended up using handbrake (which I use to transcode video for playback on my iPhone) and I set up a small file and transcoded it into about 12 different combinations of file type (the container, such as .avi or.mp4) and the codec (the file itself).

In the end I found creating a MP4 format file that is encoded with MPEG-4 using the ffmpeg codec worked a treat and iMovie was able to import the file with no problems.

Formula One

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 06:32:36 +0000

It is astonishing how such a group of well meaning individuals can truly fuck something up – I was looking forward to this as my family used to go to Donnington to watch the BTCC and MotoGP when I was younger (Guinness sponsored a couple of different manufacturers = corporate hospitality )

Ok, so that wasn’t quite formula one, but they were giving the place a much needed refresh to welcome the British Grand Prix to its new home and everything looked quite exciting.. the track is well on it’s way to being finished and all they needed was the £135m to support the event but they couldn’t find it. What is sickening is that at least this figure was spent on legal fees and arguing over track designs / changes to be made before anything was even done.

Without Formula one, how will the place ever survive with the massive debts they must now have? A victim of the credit-crunch, or just cack-handed management?

Fire in the hood…

default — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:43:05 +0000

Didn’t expect to be woken up by the fire brigade at 2 o’clock this morning!

Me: ‘Better check our car park to make sure our cars are ok…’

Sophia: ‘Ooh, fireman – look at their powerful hoses!’

Gemma made tea.

Typical!