Tesco sherbet lemons have CHANGED!

Bought a couple of packs just now, hoping to find the not-at-all-like Barratt's Sherbet Lemons of past purchases, but no, they are now just like Barratt's Sherbet Lemons.

What a disappointment. I really liked the old ones - crunchier and fizzier. And more yellow.

Shame on you Tesco's.

More good customer service

We recently had a new bathroom fitted, and had bought all the bits ourselves, with the fitter (next door!) doing all the real work. Anyway, one of the taps handles on the very expensive (£126) tap unit on the bath kept working loose, and repeated tightening later eventually stripped the thread of the grub screw hole. So, I phoned up the people who we bought it from, explained what had happened and could we have a new handle please. A couple of days later a COMPLETE tap unit arrived FOC. Yes, the whole £126 worth.

Thanks Victoria Plumb, that's excellent customer service.

Unity, or, what happened to my Ubuntu

So, bit the bullet and installed the latest Ubuntu with the new Unity UI.

Firstly, the install had a failure right at the end - I think maybe my fault. I did it from the LiveCD rather than the usual upgrade and dismissed some windows I probably shouldn't have, and I lost a lot of settings and installed applications. To be honest, it was only an hour or so of reinstalling apps and I was back to normal, but still a pain.

Anyway, to Unity itself. So far, and contrary to what a lot of people are saying, I've been getting on OK. It has quite a few rough edges, but on the whole it seems to work OK. Some things take a bit longer to do than before - finding apps needs to be improved - if you don't know the name of it and it's not on the launcher there a quite a few button presses to get to the right place. Some things are a lot easier - I like the workspace switcher, and the mechanism for selecting which window of an app you want. I just out that middle button on the mouse launches a new instance of an app from the launcher, which is very useful.

On the whole, some way to go to make it really useful, but not a bad first effort given the short development time.

Attaching old hard drives

I have a draw full of old HD's ranging from 4-80GB. All from old PC and repairs over the last few years. I was thinking of getting a caddy so I could plug them in to check what was on them, but found an even better bit of kit. It's simply a USB cable with an adapter on the end that plugs in to SATA, 2.5 IDE or 3.5 IDE drives, plus a power supply. So I can plug the two cables in to the bare drive, plug in to the USB on the PC - Linux auto mounts, and hey presto, I can get all the old data off, and shred as necessary.

A very well spent £10, from Ebuyer IIRC.

HandBrake and DVD::Rip

Up to now I've been using DVD::Rip to rip DVD's for playback on my media streamer. It's worked fine, but have had various sound sync issues, and for the life of me cannot get H264 encoding to work.

Now I'm using Handbrake, which is pretty good. Not quite as friendly as DVD:Rip (or maybe I'm just not used to it), but have been able to encode to H264 (via x264) which means that's the way I'm going for the moment.

LibreOffice vs OpenOffice

Just installed LibreOffice on my Ubuntu box, and have been very pleased so far. Certainly starts up very quickly when compared to OpenOffice. Did it via a PPA rather than a package install, all worked well. Used the instructions here Ubuntu Wiki

Not seen any issues yet, but I'm not a heavy user. The better MS compatibility should be a boon, and the further away from Oracle's grubby mitts the better!

Getting old Inventel Wireless adapter to work on Ubuntu Linux

I've had an old Inventel USB adapter (UR054g)hanging around for a while, and previous attempts have failed at getting it to work in Ubuntu. I think this was supplied when we first had a LiveBox from Freeserve (bought by Orange - may be wrong was a while ago)

However, latest effort has gone very well! I'm using Ubuntu 10.10, and the following process seems to have got it working. The device is auto loaded by Ubuntu when you plug it in, but the important step is to make sure you have the correct firmware that is loaded to the stick when it is plugged in.

I used the instructions from here...http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/p54

which basically boil down to download the right firmware, in my case the chip inside is a isl3887usb, so I downloaded from http://daemonizer.de/prism54/prism54-fw/fw-usb/2.13.25.0.lm87.arm, rename the file to isl3887usb and copied it to /libs/firmware (you need to do this as root).

You can find out the chip used in the device by using lsusb in a terminal, and one line shows something like :

Bus 002 Device 008: ID 1435:0427 Wistron NeWeb

I then used the device ID 1435:0427 in Google and found out it was the isl3887usb.

Restart the driver by

modprobe -r p54pci

modprobe p54pci

Add hey presto, it all starts working.