So this is Christmas and what have you done, the old year is over, the new one just begun! Note for Mr Lennon, buy a new calendar mate.

It's been the usual sort of Christmas festivities, I collected Charis from University earlier this month in what proved to be a fairly strenuous exercise in transport and the national rail system.

Preparations for Christmas were pretty much of a muchness and consisted of buying more food and drink than two people could hope to consume, while at the same time failing to have food for basic meals (unless you have somehow come to decide that dinner can be had from a handful of peanuts a bottle of brandy and cheese - which is silly because that is what I had for breakfast!)

I had Ruth and her boyfriend over for boxing along with their mother and James and a fairly pleasant time was had by all. Unfortunately Debbie and James had to head home before Ruth and Chris left which was a shame. But the munchkin seemed to like the presents he had from us and Charis's remote control cyberman went down very well indeed. The trouble and at the same time the wonderful thing about Chrimbo is that days flow gently into one another and all seem the same long long period of relaxation.

Linux Mint 4 Daryna

I was pretty pleased with myself to get my upgraded rig (Core 2 Duo CPU and 775 motherboard) running without loud bangs or other mishaps, but after the reinstall Ubuntu was a little flakey and things which had worked well before now either didn't work well or didn't work at all. In particular my media player of choice VLC seemed to have decided not to play any sounds no matter how much I tinkered. So turning a frown upside down, I decided an install of Linux Mint 4 was the order of the day.

The live CD impressed me, picking up the wireless network first time and playing my collection of avi's, wmv's and ra files with no problems whatsoever.

I can't say it was a completely hassle few experience; the CD stalled the first couple of times I tried to load it but three goes and a second burn and I was in. Trying to install on free space on the HDD resulted in a Grub error, but an install using all the space seemed to do the job.

The install also partitioned my external hard drive, which is a nuisance because I will have delete the partition and probably copy file back to the drive. The partition appears on the desktop as an additional drive.

Visually I like Mint4 although the black desktop background that installed as default was less than inspiring for a first time use. Firefox, Thunderbird and the GIMP all appeared as part of the install. No sign of Konqueror which is a shame.

Linux Mint doesn't have any games installed which was a bit of a disappointment and I am not sure if I can get them from the repositories.

James and Victoria at play!

Lunch with Bill and Rita followed by Hastings Bonfire Society Procession.

Various images from our lunch with Nan and Granddad Thomas and our subsequent trip to the Hastings Bonfire Night ceremony - Saturday 13th October 2007

Protect Your PC - How to avoid those computer nasties

My Piece for Ebb and Flow Magazine - A Community Magazine for Hastings.

In an ideal world surfing the internet and using your PC would be a problem free experience; login, surf the net, read your email and download, and that's that! Alas that is not the case. And what is more, one of problems with the internet is that many people do just that, but more of that later on...

The unfortunate fact is that the internet is not a safe environment, the virtual world is full of virtual nasties only too eager to burrow their way into your machine and cause all sorts of problems. Viruses, Trojans, Keyloggers, Browser Exploits, Rootkits and other assorted uglies all damage your PC or worse still allow it to broadcast spam email and even private information to outsiders!

OK so that's the bad news, the good news is that there are lots of things you can do to ensure that your machine stays safe and sound while online. There isn't room in this article to do more than touch on the various methods of protection, but if you follow the precautions mentioned here you will insulate yourself against the vast majority of the nasties out there.

For those of your with children the likelihood of a something unpleasant finding its way onto your machine is even greater, downloading MP3 music or films from Peer to Peer (P2P) networks, like Kazza and Napster and Bit Torrent sites greatly increases the chance of something unwanted coming along for the ride. Its also worth bearing in mind that many sites that offer downloaded music and video are doing so illegally and while its unlikely that the police will come knocking on your door, you may want to take the view you are taking the bread from the starving mouths of various international music artists and that that's a bad thing.

I am going to start by assuming that you are connected to Broadband rather than still using a dial up connection and if that is the case than your first line of defence is a broadband router (see image on right of this page). This handy little device not only enables you to share your internet connection with multiple machines, but many come with wireless capabilities as well. Some Internet Service Providers try to fob off their customers with USB broadband modems – these are generally unreliable; require you to install their custom software on your machine and because they need the power of your computer's motherboard to work take up resources you may need for other programmes of your PC. A router not only comes with its own firewall, but will usually have controls such a MAC addressing and encryption which enable you to specify which machines can be used on my network, both useful tools in the fight against PC nastiness.

Your next line of defence is a software firewall and anti virus programme. The firewall is a back up for the one on your router or is your first line of defence if you are using dial up or a USB modem. Once installed it will ask you what programmes you want to allow access to the internet. This is always useful since an unknown programme trying to access the net could be your first sign that your machine has been compromised. Added to those I would always recommend a spyware detector and some kind of application to scan your PC''s registry all of which need to be run and updated regularly. Note: beware of online virus scans, especially those which claim to scan your PC's entire hard drive in a couple of seconds and then claim you have several hundred infections which only the scanner's owner can cure.

In addition if you are using MS Windows you will need to make sure you get the regular updates to your operating system, these come out sometimes weekly. Users of Windows XP and Windows 2000 will not be surprised to learn that the operating system has more holes than an old string vest and updating is essential. Make sure you have either set your system to automatically update or visit the update at least one a month. Users of olders systems such as Windows 98, and Windows ME will find that Microsoft no longer support their Operating System I am afraid. Consider updating to a more modern version or even dumping Microsoft entirely, see below.

Assuming your system is up to date, it is entirely possible to protect yourself for little or no cost. There are many good anti virus programmes which can be downloaded for free, amongst them Avast, AVG and Clamwin, all of which will stop viruses on your machine. However a router will set you back about £50 and paid for AV solutions can cost between £20 and £100. If this seems expensive consider the cost of replacing even the cheapest of PC or the cost of a repair which could be as much as £60 an hour. In addition failure to protect your machine could mean you become one of the several million 'zombie' computers out there unknowingly spewing out spam and porn emails to millions. Your only clue could be your machine grinding slowly to a stop.

As I said early, Microsoft products are more vulnerable than most to exploitation, so you may want to consider downloading an alternative internet browser something like Firefox or Opera for your day to day browsing needs. Similarly Outlook and Outlook Express have some weaknesses and Thunderbird is considered by many to be a better email client. You can find both at http://www.mozilla.org/

For those who want a completely secure internet experience I would suggest having a look at the various Linux Operating Systems, these are fully featured computer operating systems and the vast majority are http://free. www.linux.org

The above only scratches the surface of the problem and the possible solutions, readers who would like more information about how to avoid viruses and some of the handy tools out there can email me info@wanderjahre.co.uk

Happy (and safe) browsing folks

Ron Cook

About the author: Ron Cook is a self taught computer 'non-expert' who builds PC for a hobby. He has no practical qualifications in computer science but ten years of interest and practical experience, which he considers to be much better. On those rare occasions when his head is not inside a PC he can be found either reading, writing or walking.

And now ...the gallery

Linux and the Robert the Bruce approach.

Bit of a success out of failure tale here folks. Having made the move from Windows to Linux,I wanted to see what I could install a decent Linux distribution on.


Early attempts on a 486 did not fare well, although some helpful suggestions as to usage did come out of the discussion, so there something else for a rainy day.

I burnt a copy of PClinusOX for an install on a PIII with 512mb RAM and an old 20gb HDD along with a CD ROM and started the install, but something went wrong and the install stalled during format. I stupidly, as it turned out, killed the install process and tried again. This time nothing happened I concluded that I had broke the HDD in some fashion.

I piled the bits up in the corner and went for a coffee. Clearly I needed to reformat the disk, OK thinks I, lets see if Windows can help wit this one. Get my copy of XP and use it to format the disk, at worst I figure it will mean a dual XP and Linux boot and I can live with that.

Get XP running and it starts a reformat to NTFS. Six and a half hours later and 51% formatted it announces that it can't do that! I suppress a scream and think again. I still have an option to format to FAT on the XP disk, this has to be worth a shot and I recall from mm posts that Linux can read FAT, so out with the XP disk again and this time try FAT, lo and behold it works and really fast too.

I then tried to install Xandros, if this seems an odd choice I have had good experience of installing this distro when others have not wanted to know, Xandros installed withn no problems and I found to my delight that I had a working Linux distro. I played around with Xandros for a little while and liked the similarity with Windows but not enough to hang onto it for any time and it soon came off in favour of Ubuntu with KDE, my PClinuxOS CD could not be persuaded to install - another time maybe. Ubuntu installed on my newly regenerated disk with no problems.

The point (and there is one believe it or not) is that when I first tried Linux I would have stamped my foot at this and declared Linux a pile of cow poo and huffed my way back to Windows - which bizzarely is no less complicated. But some experience and a bit of luck 'n' work means that sitting in the living right now is a old machine perfectly capable of doing internet browsing and email and probably a fair bit more besides, I using it for this post.

Since it was built out of left overs it cost me nowt. I may add a DVD burner which I think is in the spares box and maybe an £11 wireless card if needed, could make a server with the addition of some more storage or just a back up machine if my main rig goes wrong. All good nothing bad and smiles all round.

Beginners Guide to Buying a Computer

Computers are part and parcel of our daily lives and many households have one or more in the house.

Children regard the PC as an integral element of school work and will certainly want to be be part of social networking tools like FaceBook and Myspace, chat to their friends using MSN and Yahoo, download music and videos. A PC can be both an educational tool and an entertainment centre. An inexpensive PC can often pay for itself by reducing the cost of landline and mobile phone bills.

But the cost of a new PC can often be disincentive for cash strapped parents or people on a fixed incomes. The good news is that buying a PC does not have to be a wallet draining experience for those concerned provided the buyer follows a few simple guidelines.
The first thing to do when buying a PC is to sit down and work out what you need it to do?

Most people buying a computer come at it from the opposite direction- buying a PCand then working out what they can do with it or are convinced by some over zealous salesman that the only route to successful internet browsing is by buying a quad-processor monster with 4 gigabytes of RAM and a £200 graphics card along with sufficient storage to keep every picture, song and video you could ever think of owning.

Actually the comment about storage is probably not far from the truth, but will come to that later and plenty of RAM will make your PC operate faster. But knowing in advance what you want your PC to do is part of a successful computer buying strategy.

If you are an 'average' user your reasons for owning a PC will be something like
browsing the Internet;
sending and receiving email;

• writing letters and other documents using a word processor;
• using a 'chat client' like MSN or Yahoo! to talk to friends and family;
• storing photographs, music and other media downloaded to your machine;
• and the facility to play back music and video.

The PC will also be capable of playing CD and DVDs and probably of recording information to the same device to enable you back up your vital data. That's quite a reasonable list of capabilities.

That list of capabilities can be accomplished by a machine which a long way down the evolutionary scale from the quad core behemoth that that salesperson will try to persuade you to buy. More powerful machines will be capable of editing video and dealing with image manipulation of very high resolution photographs from digital cameras.

Here's a a guide to the various elements and what to look for.
Processor: The processor or CPU (central processing unit) controls the computing elements of the PC. The faster the processor the better the machine. Modern processors will often have multiple cores, ffectively two or even four processors working in one unit.

However bear in mind that for our relatively simple task list a low powered processor will do the job just as well as its top of the line brother. In fact unless you are prepared to pay top dollar for all your components, a powerful CPU alone may not result in significantly faster machine as other components could limit performance.

Key words to look for here are Pentium, Intel, Sempron and Opteron, for a faster machine look out for Core Two Duo and AMD2. In the Pentium range look out for P2 and P3 as a minimum requirement for your machine.

RAM: Random Access Memory; memory used by the computer to perform various actions. In general the more you have the better. Measured in megabytes (mb) time was when 256mb was considered a powerful system and 512mb a specialist machine.

The current Microsoft Operating System (OS) Vista requires 1gigabyte (1024mb) of RAM to work and 2gb (2056mb) is recommended. The amount of RAM you will need will be dictated by your OS but in general the more the better. RAM is easy to replace and currently not too inexpensive, so consider adding more if the budget permits it.

Motherboard: The motherboard (mobo in PC speak) links all the components of the computer, it provides a home for the CPU and is where the RAM is homed. Graphic cards and other devices which plug into the PC can also be found here. It may be straying into the world of the PC builder but its worth asking some key questions about the 'mobo' on your proposed machine.

Keywords to look out for here are PCI-Express sometimes abbreviated to PCI-E, this is a connection between the motherboard and devices like graphics cards and sound cards. It is are faster then its predecessors , PCI and AGP. In a fast machine look out for SATA connections to the hard disk drive (HDD) and DVD/CD drive again improving speed.

Hard Disk Drive (HDD): The bigger the better is the rule here, you cannot have too much storage. You may think that 80gb disk will last you, but photos and video can use up space faster than you might believe. 250gb is not usual and in some households over a terrabyte (1024gb) of storage is commonplace. If you are planning to store pictures and video, make that disk large however if your intention to write occasional emails and browse the internet you may get away with less.

Most computers will allow for the fitting of more than one disk so if cash is an issue, a smaller storage resource could be a compromise until you can afford more. Disks can be linked together in something called RAID (Random Array of Independent Disk) to either improve access speed by splitting the data across the disks or provide an automatic back up for data from one disk to another.

Graphics Card: In an expensive machine this could be the single most expensive component, the latest model retailing that more than £300. The card provids a dedicated graphic display for playing computer games and for advanced 3 dimensional representations on the monitor. On budget machines this function will be handled by the motherboard, again if all you need is our list of moderate usage then integrated or onboard graphics will do nicely.

Power Supply Unit: Probably not an issue for the average user but for a more powerful computer its important to have a decent power supply provided regulated power with no spike or surges in the supply. For an average machine a power supply of 350 – 500 watts should be more than suffient, however more powerful machines often need more wattage and 600-800 watts is not uncommon.

Monitors: There are two options here, TFT or flat screen monitors and the older CRT or TV style monitor. The TFT models are smaller lighter and take up much less space but command a higher price .CRT monitors are not much cheaper new, but if you are looking for a second hand system older CRT monitors can be had for £20-30.

If you are in the market for a flat screen look for 17 – 19 inches (measured across the screen from upper left to lower right) and expect to pay around £100 for the smaller model although high performance version can be much more.

Once you have all your component parts sorted out the next thing to consider is what operating system you will use. You may be lucky and have the OS come with the machine, but its worth bearing in mind that if at any time you need to reinstall your operating system you will need a CD or DVD with the software on it. Operating Systems such as XP and Vista need to be registered to work and legally the code can only be used on one machine at a time.

Operating Systems: The market leader here is Microsoft Windows, with Windows Vista as the latest offering, replacing Windows XP.

A list showing the evolution of the Windows Operating System is included below.

• Windows 3.1 and variants - probably the earliest offering from Microsoft likely to be found on old machines. This OS has very limited usability and no support for external USB devices and I include it here for completeness only

• Windows 95 - this system is probably about as far down the evolutionary line as you could reach without losing much of a PC's functionality. I would also not recommend it for any machine since it does not have USB support (See box out – USB for me...)

• Windows 98 – still used by many fans and widely regarded as one of the most stable versions of the Windows sotfware produced, includes full support for USB devices. Not as graphically 'pretty' as its successors but then it doesn't need all the graphics processing power either.

• Windows ME (Millennium Edition) – most repair people and computer builders regard ME as a truly abhorrent piece of software, slow and bug ridden it was avoided by many users myself included who held out for the arrival of Windows 2000. If you find it on your machine install another OS as quick as possible.

• Windows 2000 (Home and Pro Editions) – a solid and reliable operating system with decent support for networking in the Pro edition.

• Windows XP (Home and Pro Editions) initially regarded as a bit of a white elephant successive patches from Microsoft have improved this system to the point where it is widely regarded as one of the best OS's every produced.

• Windows Vista – the new player in the field. Vista appeared on the market a few months ago and although initially poorly supported by makers of peripheral devices like graphics cards and various pieces of software, this situation is improving. Although seemingly a good OS it needs a modern computer with plenty of RAM and good graphics capability to make the most of its features.

Expect to pay around £100 for Vista, around £50 for XP and £15 for Windows 2000. Bear in mind that Vista comes in several different types and if you want to see some improvement over XP you will need to be buy the Premier edition. If buying a new machine you could reasonably expect to get Premium included with your system, I would not recommend the Home Edition because it lacks all the features that Microsoft have touted as part of their Vista publicity campaign.

Other Operating Systems: although not as well known and in some cases requiring a steeper learning curve there are onther operating systems out there in particular Linux, an operating system based on programming orginally written for UNIX computing back in the early days of PCs. Linux used to be regarded as the geek operating system but recent improvements have put it within the reach of the average user. Linux variants (or distros) as they are known in the Linux community such as Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS and Fedora are easy to set up and use.

Linux is Open Source and copies of the operating system can be downloaded from the internet for free. Linux stores its programs in a responsitory, currently 22000 of them are availabe entirely for free. All you need is storage space on your computer. Most Linux distros will include software like word processing, spreadsheets, chat clients, CD/DVD players along with calendar and email functions. Its a good option for the cash strapped or as a second PC. If you have a network Linux and Windows can talk to one another through an application called 'smb'.

There we have it, a brief toe dip into the waters of computer buying. Some knowledge will definitely save you money and knowing what you want will give you an advantage when buying. In my next article I show you how to get a computer up and running on the internet for less than £100 pound including all the software.

Ron Cook
info@wanderjahre.co.uk

The shape of my heart...

Triffids and Samurai

Took C and her friend S to Kew Gardens for a look at the Japanese Gardens. I have included some nice pictures here. It was a chance to get some pictures of my youngest daughter who is normally more sensitive around a camera than a pop star on a drug trial.

I am not sure the pictures do the garden justice. The pagoda and the japanese gardens were magnificent and perhaps the only issue for me was the enormous cost of the trip out. I spent something in the order of £150 to go little more than wander around Kew and then head over to the British Museum and have a sarnie lunch on the go.

We also visited the Trocedero although by that stage I was too tired to even consider taking pictures.

Here I am and here I stay?

The Belated by requisite note of familial explanation:
I have quite simply adopted my two daughters who wanted to stay in my ambit when their mother and I split. We were were together for some five years and during that time the girls came to call me Dad (and Daddy if they wanted something). They theory was they needed some stability in their lives. Their previous step-father when my ex was with him was not big on looking after her children seemingly preferring his own over them. I worked hard to get the girls on side and I am not prepared to hand them over without a fight and when I want to I can fight very hard idned

We spent some time in the arcade and then som crazy golf. It was all quite fun. Ruth did not want to visit her mum's new home, which I can understand, I think her mum was disappointed though. I am doing my best to get R to come back fairly soon but she will be very busy doing some serious work.

Been quite a new weekend for me for a change. Although making a list of all the things I need to do has been a salutary lesson. The house has got dirty, the cupboards are in need of a clean and a bit of a reorganisation is called for. Lots to do.

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