If you avoided buying the AIEK C6 in the last mini review, you might have spotted the Lingwin N1 at around the same price range.

It’s this thing: http://lingwin.hk/en/product/n1

So here’s another mini review for another mini phone.

The essentials:
Does it work? Yes! It’s 2G only, so make sure your provider has 2G. This one has 2 sim slots for any people who have a need for 2 sim slots, and a micro SD slot. It doesn’t look like a micro SD slot. It looks a bit like a third sim slot, but it will take and use a micro SD.

The good:
A useable screen size, with fairly easy to navigate menus and options. It’s not a stellar battery life, but it will definitely last longer than a smart phone. The keypad is back lit and easy to read even in bad light. It’s light and small. You can actually flip between upper and lower case, so text entry is possible, although again it lacks any kind of T9 or...

You might have seen these tiny credit card sized “feature” phones on eBay or Amazon. Very cheap, very small.

Made by these people: http://aiek.cn/products/product.php?lang=en&class1=77 and looks a bit like the M5.

So here’s a mini review for a mini phone.

The essentials:
Does it work? Yes! If you have a 2G compatible sim and provider, then it seems to do a pretty good job of finding a signal.

The good:
It’s a tiny screen, but it’s clear, readable and manages to get a lot of information across. It’s surprisingly easy to read txt messages.
Because it’s a tiny LCD screen, the battery life is also very good. It should last for a few days, maybe a week before it needs charging again. Not bad for a tiny phone.

The bad:
The keypad isn’t back lit, and because of it’s size, you need good light and good eyesight to use it.
None of the useful shortcuts are documented. There’s no documented...

Recently an online game called Guild Wars 2 released an expansion. Somehow it managed to cause a fair bit of anger and dismay for some, while for others it was all perfectly fine and normal.

Why?

To set the scene, GuildWars2 (GW2), an online multiplayer game was due for an expansion to be released. As you’d expect a fair bit of hype and interest was generated by the game company Anet. However when it was released, it was released as an all in one package with the original game which was of absolutely no use to anyone who already had the game.

The initial reaction can best be summed up by the very first response to the expansion release on the GW2 Forums: “But I already have the game”.

It was a feeling shared by many and it’s very logical. A gamer has owned and been playing this game for months or possibly years. They’ve seen the build up for the coming expansion and been looking...

Mounting Part II

A couple more notes on USB mounting in a minimal environment (no polkit etc).

What I’ve ended up with is even more simple than the previous post described. A friend came round with a USB stick to copy some data off. Of course, my settings didn’t recognise his UUID, so a few lines of good old terminal typing was required to safely mount / unmount it. Hmmm. Not very elegant. So…

In the end I’ve gone for just pmount on it’s own. I keep just the UUID entry for my mp3player in fstab because that keeps Clementine happy. If I stick a USB device in, I’ve set up desktop hotkeys to summon pmount-gui. A stupidly simple mounting widget.

So for me now it’s Ctrl+Alt+m to call up pmount-gui in mount mode, and the highly original Ctrl+Alt+u to call up pmount-gui in unmount mode. A vastly more elegant solution. As fate would have it. I’ve not had to mount a single USB device ever...

(or how I learned to kill the kits and love autofs)

Yes. It’s that hot potato topic. Recent developments in the systemd world… Need I go on? I’m not impressed. It seems to me that Systemd is being called for as a replacement (in part) for ConsoleKit and PolKit, which are products of the same school of bodge-it job coding and bugger all documentation.

So! As a result of. I decided to see how easy it would be to live without the various mangled and largely undocumented bits of spaghetti code. Note I’m doing this on Gentoo. Trying to untangle the dependency hell in other distro’s may be much more of a pain in the …. anyway … here’s what I learnt…

Pulseaudio

One of Poettering’s earlier works. Uninstalls blissfully easily. Thankfully it leeches off alsa so just about everything under the sun will still run happily with plain alsa instead. I’ve had no problems at all. I’ve not even had to...

Portage, package management, flags and related notes.

(Also July 2014)

Some of my opinions on how to go about building up your Gentoo system. There are probably other views, but these hints should keep you relatively sane.

DON’T - Start off by trying to emerge things with massive dependency trees. Start off small with the shell utilities you’re going to need later. You’ll get manageable USE flag options this way, and should be in a much better place to take on the larger installs later once you have your basic flags set up.

ALWAYS always always use –ask (or -a) with emerge. Take your time to check the flags you’re using. Cancel the emerge, go read up on them, set the ones you want and try again.

Grab this early on:

ufed - A very handy tool for flipping use flags on and off rather than editing the make.conf file by hand. It neatly sorts them alphabetically, leaves the rest of your...

July 2014

(Because I hate it when I find an article and I can’t tell how out of date it is)

Some tips for anyone insane enough to install Gentoo :)

When you’ve first booted it up from the install CD, run “ifconfig”. Assuming it found and got your network card working, instead of eth0 suggested later in the setup documentation, you’ll need to enter what your card actually appears as.

In my case : “enp3s0”

This may save you a lot of hair removal when you reboot and think it should all be working.

For some reason, the Gentoo maintainers seem to hate ReiserFS. I’m not sure why yet. It seems to work fine, but your mileage may vary. Be warned though, that if you went for reiser at partitioning stage, when you get to kernel compile time, you get a big unfriendly warning message if you try to use “genkernel”.

While we’re near the kernel compile stage, unless you’re blessed with a...

Yeah. It should say free, but I keep seeing photos on social media with captions like “I had cheerios and freedom for breakfast”, and there’s a picture of a bowl of cereal and a gun.

So .. it’s an impression America manages to give out. Quite a lot. Fairly often. Ok so virtually every day that passes.

Freedom = A gun

Well that’s one of those round circle debates. American’s who go with that sort of language call it ‘Freedom’ because of constitutional rights. So logically, it’s freedom to carry a gun under US law. It’s hard to argue with that.

I would point out though that other bits of the constitution seem to get ignored by vast chunks of the USA, including by the NSA, a branch of government itself. Sooooo… From the outside looking in, it looks like a strange bit of “cherry” picking.

The other crunch here is to do with history, logic and the fact other bits of the...

The History Bit:

I’ve had a cat or cats around me for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories was being in a high chair watching the family cat play with a mouse. I loved them all.
Until now.

The Cats:

A brother and sister. Now 6 years old, reared since kittens with easy catflap access to acres of wide open spaces. Living the cat dream. What a nice owner I am.

Sadly the cat dream involves playing with, and / or killing just about anything that moves in a several mile radius.
Even more sadly, it involves bringing home at least some of the wildlife toy box to show to Dad. That’s me.

The Maths:

Say 5 years of a 6 year life catching and killing.

Peak catch and kill rate (that make it home) = 7 per day.

Average catch and kill is around 2 per day.

365 x 5 x 2 = 3,650 things that made it home. So far… Live, dead, half dead. Mice, shrews, voles, snakes, lizards, birds, rabbits...