I’ve been fighting a sinus infection for a few weeks now and the long, holiday weekend meant that I had a chance to hide away and recuperate for a few days. My family often accuse me of hiding inside my technology and, it’s true – especially when I feel yuckky. Anyway, here are a few of the things that I accomplished while I was living inside my geekery.

• I upgraded the eee PC by adding a 2GB memory stick. Although the stock standard installation of Xandros only recognises the first gigabite of that memory, I think it was a worthwhile upgrade in anticipation of further “upgrades” to come. I have been able to simultaneously open a couple of documents in Open Office, several tabs in a couple of Firefox windows and play some MP3s without too much difficultly. I’m interested in going further though and looking at putting Ubuntu on the machine to have a look at how it handles things.

• I applied Vista SP1 to my laptop (HP 6710). I have 4GB of ram in there and finally it all shows up in the Syem Properties. Whether it’s being used is a different matter of course! This is the best installation of Vista that I have done (out of about 25) and I was a bit aprehensive about applying all of the “updates” but in the end it has all worked out OK. And yes, again I did backup first.

• Last night I gave in and upgraded this site to WordPress 2.5 RC1. I backed up first – I have an automatic backup of all the sites that I look after happen every weekend – and uploaded the files. The upgrade was smooth and, so far, everything appears to be cooperating. I like the look of the new dashboard, and am particularly happy with the new addition of the full screen button – less clutter! I am looking forward to testing the new “Add Media” component of the “Write” page. More about that at the end of this post.

• This afternoon I got a tad side-tracked by the latest fad. Muxtape is a 21st century way of sharing your favourite music with your friends aka the old fashioned mixtape. It’s super simple – upload 12 MP3s, sort out the order and share the URL. My Muxtape is here – today it’s a mellow late afternoon playlist taken from the first twelve songs from my favourite iPod playlist. I could change things tomorrow by uploading some different songs. It’s simplicity is its strength – although I’d love to see a few stats. Who else likes Cordova from the Indigo Girls? And how many other people have played my Muxtape? I’m sure it will all come. Of interest I can’t play any Muxtapes in Firefox on either my laptop (Vista) or the eee PC. I think it might be something to do with the extensions that I have installed. I need to rouse myself and troubleshoot it further.

• The other job that I’ve been doing over the last few days is putting together a P4 2.8GHz machine for my daughter and her family. Their old Celery is dreadfully slow so I have put together some old parts and got a nice machine for them to use. It’s a nice solid P4, 1.5GB ram, DVD RW and has 180GB of hard drive space for them to collect photos of my grandchildren. It’s running Xp but after that I loaded Open Office and a whole lot of other free and open source programmes. Hopefully it will suit them for a little while.

And so to “Add Media”. Firstly an image:

Easy. The options are really clear and easy to follow. And, incidentally, checkout a whole gallery of Last Supper pictures (I know – Easter is over …).

And a link to a YouTube (make sure that you have your headphones on):

The Virtual Barber

or via the embed media button in the advanced options:

Which may or may not be something that Artichoke mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago? It’s definitely worth the five minutes it takes to watch / listen / think about.

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