Croeso

Gob smacked

John Peel died last night, gee he was the champion for almost all of the great and good in British Music , from Led Zeppelin to The Undertones and the Fall. My MP3 jukebox is stuffed full of 'his' discoveries.

I've spent the afternoon glued to the radio with a tear in my eye. I really do fear for the future of all those 'unpopular' bands in the UK who are all rough diamonds just needing someone to air them.

I spent many a teenage hour under the duvet listening to my old ITT radio with a single ear piece enthralled by John Peel. Until yesterday the world service and the Internet served me with those gems

How sad.

Skype

Being prompted by the planning of a trip to visit Siemens in Switzerland to discuss Dynamic Capability work of Cetim (Siemens do Voice over IP) I've just loaded up Skype and made my first call to the only person I could find - Lilia.

The sound quality is amazing - mind you I have a 512K line.

So if you'd like to call me - click here

Wireless networking

Well after a number of frustrating attempts to build a peer to peer wireless network at home, I've now managed it with a lot of help from Jaap my local computer guy.

I first tried, prior to SP2 for XP. to hook one PC directly to another - very possible according to all the literature, but we were frustrated all the way.

Now we abandoned the idea of a peer to peer network and built a routed network (what ever that is called) so I forked out a whole 99€ on a ADSL Modem Router from SMC, and hey presto we managed it within an hour. I can even VPN through the router and log onto the work network at high speed, a real real bonus I must admit.

Now all I need to do it to figure out how to be nice and open up my Internet connection to anyone in the neighbourhood, without compromising my security. ???

Having said that without Jaap I think I still would have failed on the configuring the modem router to get data from my ISP, the wireless connections to the router was a doddle.

Now maybe I can wifi my PDA to my home network - now that will be great. Hmm

The others

A walk in the woods

Amazing what you can find not but 150 meters from the house, we have discovered so many different types of mushrooms/ toadstools - we've had to order The Collins Guidebook so we can name them.

It's finds like this that makes me wonder why I spend so much time away from the village where we live?