My third time at the LUG and 7 or 8 or us there. This month's features included a new homebuilt PC that won't start up, a hardware prototype of a radical new keyboard and a demo of a DIY media PC running GeexBox.

The latter was interesting as I intend to build something like that one day. The control system looked good as it was more like a DVD player than a PC to use. It was running on a humble 800MHz C3, which is not much by modern standards, but allows it to run cool and quiet. When I get around to it I'll be looking for the ability to play DVD, CD, various video file formats, MP3/OGG etc as well as recording TV from digital terrestrial. Another option in this field is MythTV.

Apart from my digital video success my other Linux find this week was that you can use a URL like fish://user@server in some browsers to get secure file transfer. It works in Konqueror, but I've not been able to find much documentation on it apart from some forum/mailing list comments. It seemes to be related to the command line scp, but allows you to drag and drop. I know I'm losing geek points by now using the command line, but I sometimes like a GUI. This goes back to my early days of using the wonderful Norton Commander on DOS. I ought to try out the Linux clones.

One of the computing jobs that I mean to get around to is transferring our limited home videos to DVD. It's mostly stuff of the kids. I did some on Windows using Pinnacle Studio DV. This did pretty good job, but at the time I only had a CD writer so ended up creating a S-VCD. Good enough quality for home movies.

Now I'm moving to Linux I want to do some more editing/DVD creation. Actually I need to put together a better PC first with lots of disk space and a DVD burner. Both are relatively cheap these days. Meanwhile I wanted to get some footage off the camera of a bird in our garden.

I installed Kino and gave it a go. Didn't work at first, but after some false starts and some help via Google, I got it to work! Only runs as root for now, but I'm still impressed.

Recently our Kodak digital camera went wrong. First the battery door fell off. I did a temporary fix on this, but then it kept saying the battery was low, even with new ones. It's only a couple of years old, so it's annoying if it's essentially junk. It's a basic, 2 megapixel model, but still cost around £200 at the time. That's the second camera that's died in the last four or five years. It's an expensive hobby.

So I'm on the search for a new camera. Obviously things have moved on and now 3 or 4 megapixels is the minimum to consider. I'd also prefer an optical zoom and some sort of movie capture with sound would be nice for capturing the kids when we don't have the video camera with us. I've standardised on SD memory as the Palm uses it too. I don't really want to pay over £200 all in in case it doesn't last. Extended warranties may be considered if not too expensive.

The problem is that the choice is enormous. There must be a hundred cameras in our price range. There's the Canon A400, which looks very good for the price. Today I looked at a nice Olympus that has actually been designed to resist dust and moisture (uses XD cards, but I could live with that).

I'll be buying in the next week or so when I get some vouchers from the credit card. I just need to decide what the money goes on.

Going home last night took nearly two hours. It started with a broken down car on the NCR, then the usual roadworks with added snow for interest.

This morning I heard on the radio that the M25 was shut and traffic was diverting via the A1, so decided to avoid the area and use the M1. That ended up taking 1.5 hours.

Why do all the roadworks have to be done at once?

I'm amazed I got the office at all today. Recently there seems to be more and more roadworks on my route. There are long-term works under the M25 to re-surface the road. This involves a long contraflow. Then there are some overnight works at Stevenage that still seemed to affect the morning traffic sometimes. There's another contraflow at the Brent Cross flyover due to a burst water main. All that is bad enough, but this morning there was an accident in the Hatfield tunnel and new roadworks at Fiveways.

Add to all that the general bad weather conditions, it's getting ridiculous. I suppose it's a price I pay for commuting into London for work, but this is beyond a joke. I could come by train, but it takes longer and costs more (to me, not the environment). I'll have to try and get some days working at home. Luckily I can do all I really need to from there, but need to come to the office some of the time.

BTW This post is being done via the Pico editor in an SSH session on the server. There's still some problems with secure FTP, so this was easier.