After crippling my system (don’t update libjpeg when every single one of your GUI based apps is built against it) I found myself having to reinstall E17.
Two major issues seems to jump out at me, though both are easily fixed.
I’ve been using the g1 for a few months now on a daily basis, and for the most part I’ve been quite happy with the screen and have never had to change the brightness settings.
I was a little upset when trying to give directions earlier in bright sunlight, as I was squinting quite a lot.
My upset was quickly replaced by amazement as I realied ILd been running for 3 months with the screen brightness turned to 0%; change it to 30% and it was bright and readable again. Fantastic!
Truth be told, as screens go, its almost too bright, I keep finding myself reading in bed and wishing I could make the screen dimmer, but it looks like -15% screen brightness (would not only suck all of the light out of the world, but also) is beyound easy reach.
-as a side note, its quite hard typing on the g1 when you’ve but off the end of your finger chopping onions 
A week or so ago, I started playing about with the Raq in the hopes of being able to quickly get it doing something (and preferably hidden in a cupboard and not on the desk next to the bed).
I quickly got ahead of myself, and in the process of trying to update it managed to completely screw it to the point where all it would do is display Kernel Panic on the LCD Screen. Turns out that by updating the kernel on the eeprom, it can no longer boot its OS.
If I understand correctly, then the boot sequence for the Raq3 goes like this (when booting from the hard disk).
There are some interesting things to note about this. For a start there is no bootloader (eg lilo or grub) as you would need on most hardware as it is built into the eeprom. The eeprom on a Raq3 is limited to 1024k making it quite hard to fit a modern kernel on it, which leads to some interesting issues.
The Raq3′s built in OS uses a customised version of RedHat and boots a linux-2.2 (iirc) kernel which is completely obsolete and has been for quite some time (we are currently at 2.6.29-r1, see this for some idea of context), which then passes off to a linux-2.2 stage 2 kernel on the hard drive.
The latest possible kernel for the eeprom is a linux-2.4.24 kernel, which is still obsolete in terms of current features, but has the power to let us do something clever. There is a sourceforge project you can get this latest cobalt-rom (2.10.3) release (containing the afformentioned 2.4 kernel) but bear in mind the project was last touched in 2003.
When I updated the eeprom to the 2.4 kernel, its quite obvious that it would freak out when trying to load the 2.2 kernel (stage 2). -Or is it the 2.2 freaking out at being loaded by a 2.4?
It was at this point it got shelved for a couple of weeks whilst I flailed about the great intertubes trying to find a fix.
One thing became clear; The only way out is up!
So I got gifted a Sun Cobalt Raq 3, and before I had the chance to see it, I thought I was onto a winner.
Cobalt sounds cool, and hey, its a 1u Sun box, surely its gotta be ace!
Turns out to be a 498mhz K6-2 (apparently it was a 300 as default), a very strange boot sequence and a bodged version of redhat 2 (iirc) which I don’t care for.
Anyway, after trying to update the firmware and managing to brick it, I’m in the process of trying to get gentoo on it.
Annoyingly, there are no k6-2 stage 3 builds, so I’m currently creating a recent one and am hoping to post it shortly.
I was looking at nagios (ah, gcc has just re-built itself. That took long enough) which is what set me off on wanting a proper server, and I only want nagios as I got gifted a cisco 2900 to play with.
So, its been busy recently. And I’ve been trying to teach myself protools and re-wire a studio. Too much smoke, not enough sleep 
After fudging with partitions, sometimes the computer will make me reboot before I get dev nodes.
There has to be a way of forcing udev to rescan the partition layout. I need to find out how.
After showing off my G1, a friend of mine came round with an iPod Touch (8GB) that he got to play with.
It seems its already been jailbroken, but to be honest we have no idea whats going on with it. One thing that is evident, is that the battery indicator shows whatever it feels like at the time.
I figured the device would have a diagnostic menu that might shed some light on what the battery is actually feeling, but after much googling, it seems that there isn’t a Diagnostic Menu on the new iPods at all.
For those of you with an older ipod (with buttons on it) there is a fantastic boot-menu key sequence over at command-tab.com which is well worth bookmarking.
`eix` is possibly the most handy tool in the (gentoo) world. Rather than having to use `emerge -s` to search through portage (or any of your overlays), `eix` keeps a database of the contents and returns search results up to 100 times faster than using emerge.
Sadly, it seems that if you add an overlay to gentoo (for example `layman -a jokey`) and then run `eix-update`, it does not include the newly added overylay, even though it re-scans the default portage tree and any other overlays you might have installed. This, is very annoying!
Windows 7; Pretty Fish
The first thing that has to be noted is the absolute PITA it is to try and downland a copy of the new Windows 7 Demo.
The web page where you get the download link and a serial number (I found) to be really badly obfuscated; ActiveX being necessary to register for a serial number, meaning I had to use Internet Explorer on a windows box1; which also meant using the proprietary Microsoft Downloader rather than something truly useful like wget.
Arguments over ‘whether you should have to pay anything at all to Micro$oft to use its on-line service` aside, I found myself needing to buy and xBoX360 Live Gold membership (for the bf).
I decided there is no point getting 3 months for half the price of 12, and I didn’t fancy walking down to the BlockBuster’s Video to pay over the odds.
I didn’t want to wait for delivery either, its a pain in the ass and I don’t trust the post. I don’t want to have to pay more for the sake of a piece of cardboard.
So after a little googling I payed £29.99 for a 12+1 Gold subscription to be “instantly emailed to me” via InstantLiveCodes.com.
It was my attempt to track down some of the more amusing kernel source code comments I’d heard, that led me to thinking I’d broken the advanced tagline plugin (tho it wasn’t).
It was also this quest, that led me across this most fantastic graph, showing Linux Kernel Revision against #of swear words contained.
Many thanks to Mr. Holden of vidarholen.net for posting this (and amusingly he’s currently using the same theme we are )