The new comments system has already attracted a few posts from friends. Some have even been kind enough to test my anti-spam measures with some witty texts. Unfortunately they do not seem to be blocked, so maybe I need more set-up. This has also revealed a small problem. I don't have rights to delete comments as they are written to files whose owner is apache. It would seem that what I need is a password-protected web page that allows me to select comments for deletion as that should have the same rights. I shall look into how that could work. Pyblosxom doesn't really have any web interface for controlling it. You have to make use of SSH and FTP to update files. I could also do with something to allow me to monitor comments as they come in. There is email notification that I ought to try.

I gained a new toy today. It's an ancient (1999?) Toshiba T8100 laptop with a screaming PIII/600 CPU and a massive 128MB of memory. Hey, it was free. I have plans to use it as a media player on my network for streaming radio and possibly video. It's got Windows 2000 on it that I may keep for now as it would do for my Windows-only jobs of programming the home automation and the multi-remote. I'll still be trying out an Ubuntu live CD on it to see how it handles it. I suspect that something lighter, like Xubuntu may be more suited.

My Logitech Harmony 655 multi-remote is a great gadget. It allows us to get away with using a single remote most of the time. To set it up you have to log into their web site and configure everything, then the site downloads a file which is transferred via USB to the device using an application installed on the PC. Unfortunately this application is not available for Linux so I have to make use of a Windows machine.

I was trying to set it up for my new DVD player yesterday when I found that I couldn't get into the screen that lets me re-program the buttons. I sent them a bug report. Later that afternoon I had a reply to say it was fixed. This was on a Sunday! They had fixed it, but something else had gone awry and I had lost some other settings somehow. I've reported that too. I also inquired about whether there will ever be a Linux version of the software.

The most serious problem I have had with this device is that the up/down buttons for changing volume and channel have become very intermittent. This would seem to be a hardware issue that I may be able to resolve by opening it up, but for now I have just added those functions to the programmable buttons alongside the screen.