Another good idea ™ from the stables of the ‘Moose. Actually - this probably isn’t all that original, but I wanted to post it online anyway.

I’d really like to see an online groceries shopping system which, rather than being tied to a supermarket, was tied into the local butchers, bakers, grocers, fishmongers, etc in your area (based on your postcode). The idea being that the suppliers subscribe to you, and the consumers do too, and you link them together in a single website that acts like a supermarket.

mrBen

For the last 3 years now, I’ve endeavoured to relisten to the entire back catalogue of LugRadio episodes in the run up to the awesome LugRadio Live. Last year, I got caught a bit short, but I wrote a little program to keep track of my listening.

This year, I’ve started a lot earlier (144 days to go), but I thought I should add something to the script. So I’ve included listening times to it. Hurrah. Or Something.

Enjoy!

Notes:

1. The % are still based on number of shows, not on listening times. So sue me.
2. The code for the original is still at http://mrben.jedimoose.org/listener.html - when I get around to it I’ll post the updated code (which is even uglier

mrBen

* Apparently this analogy is not, and has never been, accurate.

Those of you at LugRadio Live last year, or who read my review may remember the quiz software that I wrote for it, which did a dual screen setup, and used the Namtai Buzz! controllers for the buzzers.

Anyway - I’ve finally got around to releasing the code into the wild, under the GPL, using launchpad. You can get it here.

(Hopefully someone talented will finish it )

mrBen

Every now and then I feel the need to put up a post purely because it took me ages to find a solution to something online, and I reckon that it might save the next person a bit of time. Apologies to the regular reader for the purely functional nature of this post

The Background
Linux (or specifically Ubuntu) uses a neat program called Network Manager to manage all the network connections. It’s taken a while for it to get there, but I personally think it’s pretty good. It remembers the details of my home wifi network perfectly, and seems to have a better time connecting than the ‘IBM Access Connections’ program that came preinstalled on the Windows half of my work laptop. However, in my case it took it’s trick of remembering stuff too far.

The Problem
I setup my new Linksys router with WPA2 encryption, which works fine under Linux. Sadly, Windows XP doesn’t come installed with this by default (at least, teh wifes laptop didn’t have it as an option). Rather than faffing about with Windows Updates, I thought it would be easier to change it to standard WPA encryption - took about 30 seconds in the Linksys control panel. However, NetworkManager insisted on continuing to try and connect with WPA2, which doesn’t work. In order to connect to the network, I needed to use the “Manual Configuration” option, which wasn’t ideal.

The Solution
One solution would have been to rename the ESSID on my wifi, but I didn’t want to do that, really. There is, however, a better way. NetworkManager stores all it’s data in “gconf” the registry-like component of gnome. Fire up gconf-editor, and navigate to /system/networking/wireless/networks/. All your saved wireless network details are in there. You can then either delete the entry, or, as I did, edit the wpa_psk_wpa_version from 4 to 2 (if you did the same thing as me in the first place). Problem solved.

mrBen