Laptop is really dead now
Apologies for the delay in writing, my laptop got fixed, then blew up again the next day, and is currently waiting to be fixed.
I have a whole bunch of work to do, so have had to buy a new desktop computer on finance, as I’m supposed to finish a web design contract at the end of January, and I’m going to have difficulty without a computer until this new one is built and delivered.
Anyway, please hold, service will be resumed…
In the meantime, a list of the interesting things I did while waiting for a working computer
- Downloaded nerdvittles Vmware image and got a working asterisk system, and signed up for some uk phonenumbers from sipgate. Combined with voxee and voipdiscount
I can phone out to UK, US and Canada free for 3 months for about £15, and have a phone number that will go with me when I move house!
Quality seems fairly good despite me running under a virtual machine on a PIII 500 machine with 256M of memory in total (VM has 192MB for memory) - Got my VPN working with my router. I use the very nice IPCop router operating system (built on Linux I believe) in a VMware installation with 32MB of memory.
The VPN built in is really hard to configure and get working with Windows, but ZERINA OpenVPN addon has an excellent howto that guides you through the whole process. Over christmas I was able to copy my private certificate onto the loan laptop I was working on, and dial back into my office to access my source control system and network servers. - I updated my PGP key, prompted by a freind who updated his and wanted me to resign his new identities. PGP is a way of provided encryption and digital signatures. I discovered then that the GNUPG project has actually got together a great windows addon that works well for windows. Combined with Mozilla’s thunderbird email client and the excellent Enigmail plugin, I now sign all of my emails.
- In fact, I fully recommend using Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express or Outlook unless you have a real need to. I’ve been using Non-Outlook email clients since 1995 and have never once been affected by an email virus. Thunderbird by default will flag messages it thinks are spam, support News, RSS and Email (POP, IMAP and more), and doesn’t display HTML by default, but you can turn it on if you want.
I also borrowed a copy of Bill Bryson’s new book, the Thunderbolt Kid, which is an entertaining overview of growing up in the 50’s in America. That really helped to pass the time.
I should go back to finishing this web development, we have some cool web design announcements coming soon, and I’ll try to blog a little more as soon as my stress levels have reduced!