Sleep Interrupted

Louise is away at the moment, visiting her aunt, uncle and cousin down in Devon. This makes me solely responsible for the children for a whole two days, which is a rare experience. So far so good, though.

This morning I took the children to do the weekly grocery shopping. We left fairly early to beat the rush, which wasn’t hard seeing that they’d been awake since 6.30 with me following (inevitably) shortly after.

We rocked out to some Kings Of Leon on the way. Later, Ben asked if he could buy the same “music stick” as me when he grew up. I asked him why and he said it was so that it could have cool music like mine on it. Go the Kings!

We drove through the now-characteristic British summer weather — grey skies and light rain — and easily found a spot in the car park. This was when I realised that I’d forgotten the carefully prepared shopping list. Oh well, I thought, I’ll wing it and probably won’t forget too much.

My… god! I hate shopping. Louise normally coordinates our shopping activities. If I’m in attendance, it’s more as mobile child minder and high shelf reacher than as an active shopper.

This time I had to make all the choices myself. Now, if I didn’t care about Issues then this would have been easy. But Fair Trade and Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fernley Bloody Eats-It-All have done too good a job at educating me to the plight of farmers and chickens and the environment in general, so now I have to think about everything I purchase.

Is that chicken from the UK? Is it farm assured? Where have those apples come from? What?! I can’t get apples from the UK? Oh, maybe that’s right: seasonal. So how far have these ones come from? Brazil?! New Zealand?! So, which of those is further? Can you get Fair Trade apples? Argh!

And don’t even get me started on China. Here’s a little challenge: Go into any homeware section of a supermarket and find something made somewhere other than China.

Now that last paragraph might sound a little xenophobic and I would be lying if I said that wasn’t a component of the sentiment — I don’t like the thought of our country being beholden to another entirely alien culture on the other side of the planet. But… is it really right that a large proportion of the goods purchased in this country are shipped from halfway around the world from a country that has such differing standards to us when it comes to environmental concerns and civil liberties? People often ask “how can they make these so cheap?”– there is an explanation but I don’t expect they want to hear it.

So, I’ve managed to spiral this post from something cheery and life-affirming into a bitter rant on the injustices of the world. Perhaps I shouldn’t write at this time of night but it is kind of how I feel right now… I learnt about stagflation today. Yeah, the future’s looking bloody marvelou right now.

If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time you’ll know that I bang on about Firefox. The web browser not the film, Tim. Firefox 3 has been released and I would thoroughly recommend you upgrade if you’re a Firefox 2 user or just give it a try if you’re not. Why should you bother? Aside from being free, it makes the web a faster, more pleasant and safer experience.

I’m very  glad to see that Mr Watkins is back. With Mr Moore rationing his output I was beginning to feel very lonely. Come back my wayward blogging buddies, all is forgiven!

On the BitTorrent front, I’m very interested to find out about Mininova from Tim. I’ve been using The Pirate Bay so far but the lack of dodgy adverts at Mininova is appealing. Since iPlayer came out at the top of the year we’ve started using it frequently. Having become accustomed to watching programmes on our laptop, I want to be able to access all TV programmes this way. Downloading them with BitTorrent works very well, especially because we get free overnight bandwidth from the nice folks at PlusNet. But that endorsement can wait for another post.

One tip I’d pass on to Mac and Linux (and *nix) users would be to use Transmission. It takes all the insanity out of BitTorrent downloads and just works.

I’ve been a very happy resident of Linux land for a long time now and one of the few gripes I’ve had is the stability of my Netgear MA311 wireless network card. With every new release of Ubuntu it’s got less reliable at connecting and when I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 it got really bad, such that often it took four reboots to work and reboots are not something you have to put up with often in Linux.

So, I bit the bullet and bought a new Netgear WG311T, which the nice people at EfficientPC promise will work with Ubuntu. Given that my free time is so precious these days, I find myself much more inclined to buy may way out of problems than ever I was in the past.

With the order placed — which was fulfilled in a very timely and efficient manner — I took a moment to wonder if anyone else out on the intertubes had come across the same problem. A little light googling showed that a few people had issues and it didn’t take long before I came across Jun Sun’s page on how to flash the firmware on the MA311. For the uninitiated, this basically means updating the software that runs on the network card itself. The danger here is that if you get this process wrong you can write off the card.

I had a new card on order, so what was there to loose? I downloaded the appropriate firmware images for the MA311, followed the instructions given on the page and held my breath… Would it work? Would I trash the card?

The network card was still working! Result! I rebooted. It connected first time and continued to work perfectly. I rebooted again and again it connected immediately. Five reboots later and it was still working flawlessly. Years of intermittent behaviour solved in about an hour.

Of course this means I’m now the proud owner of two Netgear wireless network cards but I’ve taken the opportunity to upgrade to the faster 802.11g networking from the slower 802.11b networking supported by the MA311. I’ve picked up a DG834GT wireless router/modem from eBay for just over £20 and I can now safely pass the old MA311 on to friends or family knowing it won’t cause them any problems.

For anyone else using Ubuntu who is experiencing these problems, the following steps should resolve the problem:

1. Download the PK010101.HEX and SF010802.HEX files from Jun Sun’s collection of firware images into your home folder.
2. Open a terminal and enter the following commands:

• sudo apt-get install hostap-utils
• sudo prism2_srec -v -f wlan0 PK010101.HEX SF010802.HEX