Author Archives: Dale Nunns

About Dale Nunns

I live in Cape Town, South Africa with my awesome wife and cute cat Domino. I'm a software developer, hardware hacker, some time cook, wannabe writer, chief bottle washer and tamer of dust bunnies.

Help – Photo’s

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I’m hoping to use the power of the blogosphere (that’s assuming this little site is in it) to find something.

I’m looking for a photo graph of New York at night or in Black & White. Would be really awesome if you can see the twin towers in it still, which means its pre-9/11.? I want to get it printed and give it to someone as a present, but I can’t find any really good ones so far. (I’m busy scouring flickr as I type this.) Because its going to be printed it needs to be a high resolution image. If you know of any of London taken at night or black & white those would be awesome too.

I did see one in a shop over the weekend that would be perfect, it was rather expensive though (R 5000) and it was huge. (1.8m x 1.8m) I’m looking for something just bigger than a A4 page.

A.S.S.

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Acronym’s are Seriously Stupid

I’ve been dealing with a bunch of project managers, directors and marketing people lately and they all seem to speak in this foreign language that ever so slightly resembles English.

UAT, ERP, EPM, EBQ? Is there a massive shortage of letters all of a sudden?

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Idea: Small Tablet PC

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This morning while making notes in my paper notebook, I started day dreaming… wouldn’t it be cool if I could replace this notebook with a Tablet PC? I do currently own a Tablet PC, an ageing LG LT20 Tablet PC, but its too big for what I want.

I want a Tablet PC the size of a A5 piece of paper about 2cm thick that’s got the processing power of an EeePC or a MSI Wind, it has to have instant on though and have a good battery life.

(In the famous words of the Top Gear Hosts) How hard could it be?

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IBM PC turns 27 today.

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IBM PC (model 5150) - From Wikipedia

The original IBM PC turns 27 today… That’s older than me !!!

While I wasn’t around when this computer came out, I spent plenty of time in my later years (around age 13-15) taking them apart and making them work again. You could get these machines for free or really cheap then and they were fun to modify and hack. Friends and I over clocked one, expanded the RAM and put in a huge 200MB drive. I even learnt assembly on one of the later clones.

These machines were solidly built and were practically indestructable, we always joked if we ever need armour plating for anything the cases used on these old IBM PC’s would be perfect.

Wired Magazine’s Birthday Article
Old Computer Museum’s IBM PC Entry
IBM PC Wikipedia Entry

Friday 13th and BIOS Updates

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I did a BIOS upgrade this morning for my ASUS P5N32-SLI motherboard, normally I don’t do them unless they are absolutely necessary, this one supposedly fixes something with the network cards that should make them work properly in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) [I think if what I read on the forums is correct]. I downloaded the update file (BIOS version 1404) from ASUS.com stuck it on a memory stick, booted the machine lauched the EZ Flash bios update tool (built into the bios) and went to make a cup of tea.

I came back to a black screen, fans and LED’s running but nothing else. Switched off and on… same thing, hit the reset button, same thing. At this point I start hyperventilation as I realise that this is an extremely expensive motherboard and that life is seriously going to suck if I have to replace this thing, that I probably end up single because the money that I was going to spend on my girlfriends birthday present would have to pay for the replacement board.

To cut along story short, I fiddled for a while, even tried to use the “Asus CrashFree” feature but nothing worked. Did a lot of searching and then came across this post on the Asus Forums. In it some guy suggest pulling the cmos battery out waiting a bit and putting it in, I had already tried the “reset cmos jumper”. Low and behold it fixed it 🙂

After all this I took a look at todays date… Friday 13th.

So here the important details for Google to index and hopefully help someone else out:

Asus P5N32-SLI Motherboard
Problem: Flashed BIOS to 1404 version, computer wouldn’t boot no POST nothing.
Solution: Switch off, take out cmos battery wait a minute, put back in switch on, reconfigure BIOS.

Web-based Timesheet

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Anyone know a good web-based open source timesheet application?
Before I re-invent the wheel, I thought I would ask the Internet about this one. I tried asking Google but I couldn’t find much there.

I’m trying to find a good, easy to use, open source web based time sheet application. I don’t need all the fancy stuff of the project management applications out there. I just want to be able to select a Customer and Project, put in a date, start time, end time and a description. At the end of the day/week/month I would like to be able to get a report with a list of everything that was done.

Extra points if I can put in KM’s for travel and have one or two other fields. It should be able to easily export this info to various file formats (CSV, XML, XLS or something) and look nice and pretty. It should preferably have a database backend and support multiple users. Would be really nice if its interface had a bit of AJAX behind it to make it nice and snappy and an integrated task list would be cool too. The web interface should at least run in Firefox and IE (not as important) and perhaps Safari, would be awesome if I could use Opera Mobile from my phone to access it too.

If you know of anything leave a comment, Thanks.

Lenses for my Brother.

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My brother is trying to find any of the following lenses:

Canon FD 15mm f2.8 (full-frame fisheye)
Canon FD 14mm f2.8L
Canon FD 24mm f1.4L
Canon FD 24mm f2
Canon FD 28mm f2
Canon FD 35mm f2
Canon FD?50mm f1.2L
Canon FD 50mm f1.2
Canon FD 55mm f1.2
Canon FD 50mm f1.4
Canon FD 85mm f1.2L
Canon FD 85mm f1.8
Canon FD 135mm f2

The one’s in red are the one’s he’s really interested in.

If you have any of these lenses and are interested in selling them and live in South Africa, could you leave a comment with contact details. My brother is more than willing to pay a good price for the lenses.

It’s been a while…

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It’s been a while since I last posted anything on this site, guess I’ve been a little busy.

So I’m going to give you a quick run down of what happened in the last 9 Months or so…

  • I met someone, fell madly in love and now have a girlfriend 🙂 her name is Claire.
  • I got my drivers license (finally) and bought my self a car, 2nd VW Polo.
  • I moved into a flat on my own 🙂
  • And a bunch of other things that aren’t really all that important.

So I guess I’m progressing with my “master plan” of trying to get a life. Admittedly it would probably have been a good idea to try and document the whole process online for the world, well those with internet… I have a very small world, could comment on it and share in my joy, pain and excitement.

Anyway I’m now going to try write stuff again… lets see how this goes.