I’ve decided to start writing again, hopefully this time with renewed enthusiasm. I’ve had quite a lot going on that until now I have been unable to write publicly about without upsetting people/companies, since I’m no longer involved with these people/companies I can freely once again say what I have been up to, without worrying about judgement and consequence.

I know a few people will be totally astounded that anything has appeared on here at all, it really has been that long, but in that time I have become involved in more projects, have more interests, and as people who know me well, lots more opinions, all of which will most likely come out here at some point.

At the minute I have around 20 or so draft posts to catch up on, some are so old they might never be finished.

If like me you installed Skype by downloading it straight from their website and found that you couldn’t get it to work properly, mostly with audio problems, there was a workaround that meant if you started it in a terminal with sudo skype then it was ok.

Firstly remove the version you already have installed, then to solve the problem permanently add the following line to your sources.list file.

deb http://download.skype.com/linux/repos/debian/ stable non-free

:~$ sudo apt-get update

:~$ sudo apt-get install skype

**UPDATE**
It seems that this only works until you you reboot and Skype is started automatically next time you log in, skype seems to be starting with the wrong permissions, so that’s where you should focus your attention.

For a bit a of a change I decided we’d go to the Great Yorkshire Bike Show today, just to get out of the house, getting sick of DIY all the time, it was pretty good, we saw RobotX - Titan, The Purple Helmets, and the usual trade stands, then I spotted Nick Sanders, I remember this guy from TV, he was stood right next to me, then I looked up and he had a stand selling books, DVD’s and the likes, after a quick chat with Nick we went for a stoll around the stalls and then headed back up to grab some books and a couple of DVD’s.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Nick Sanders is the guy that years ago set the record for the fastest man around the world on a pushbike twice, then twice on a motorbike, he’s a legend, I think in total he’s been around the world something like 6 or 7 times up to press.

I have some video footage of RobotX, I’ll get that up soon, it really is amazing.

I’ve been playing around a little bit this evening and finally taken a huge step in the right direction with regards to the webcam and the way I wanted it to work, for now it’s just streaming live video from two cameras, essentially pointing at the same view, there’s a massive difference in quality between them.

Next job is to get them recording and then finally position them over the back of the house looking over bradford.

Take a look here.

Suzuki GSX-R 600 K3

View more details

SOLD.

I’ll get round to writing a little more about it later, but here are some pictures for now.

Thanks to oneredpaperclip’s Kyle for pointing this out, 40 Greatest Internet Stars.

I would have like to vote for Kyle, but he didn’t like my T-shirt design, so I decided to vote for Jeong-Hyun Lim for his take on JerryC’s arrangement titled Canon Rock, loosely based on Johann Pachelbel Canon in D.

What first attracted me to this was the guys technique, I’ve been playing guitar for over 17 years now and have started to get a little lazy, I thought I’d try some of the techniques (just for fun) and found that yes some are quite challenging, but also quite satisfying when you get them right. Lim has seemingly mastered sweep picking, quite astonishing for someone of his age, although I’m sure he didn’t start playing last week.

If you are interested in learning this then the Tab is available here, and the backing track here

Anyway, have a look, reminisce, and have a good laugh, someones got to get Number 1

While looking over some snaps a friend took on various pilgramges to MotoGP at Donnington Park I found one that I thought looked quite stunning.

It says a lot about camping out and the MotoGP crowd.

This is what you wake up to, right before breakfast.

Sometime you stumble on simething a little different, I found this guy while randomly searchin for nothin in particular.

He’s called Erik Mongrain, check out his videos, I must admit that I was suitably impressed with AirTap

I had been working on my theme over the xmas holiday, everything was going well, I have some new ideas I’d like to implement but wanted to clean things up a little first. As I often do, I was downloading various torrents at the same time and wasn’t having any problems, time cracked on and when it got late I headed off to bed satisfied that I had achieved something with my blog.

I woke the next morning to find that I had [Got error 28 from table handler], not good, I couldn’t view any posts, I couldn’t even log into the torrent server, trying not to panic I used the first tool I could think of: Google, not too long afterwards I realised that since I had been downloading torrents I’d not actually made sure if the files would fit into the available space left on the server dedicated to them.

Quickly realising I was upto 100% usage on said drive I moved a few bits around and suddenly it all started working again, phew!

Later on I was suddenly faced with a message like [Can’t open file: ‘wp_comments.MYI’. (errno: 144)] I thought I’d got real problems, but I knew that I hadn’t changed anything for ages that might affect it in the slightest, a quick google later I found the solution.

Log into phpMyAdmin, select the wordpress database, goto SQL tab, type: REPAIR TABLE wp_comments, and hit GO.

That’s it problem fixed, crisis averted.

Lessons learned:

• Don’t run out of space, things break.
• Remember to try and repair the database before deleting it.
• The place to find solutions for wordpress problems is here.