No, I still use Evolution to read my mail, but people come to me with problems they can't solve themselves. Earlier this evening a neighbour asked me for help. Outlook kept crashing and displayed a strange dialog in which it wanted to send info to Microsoft. The usual "This morning it worked, and I didn't change anything(tm) and now it crashes...

My provider decided it wanted more customers using their XS4All-Only service. With XS4All-only you get an ADSL-connection with the option to cancel the normal phone subscription. I'm already using XS4All-only for more than a year now, and have already canceled my normal phone subscription.
But this time, to promote their XS4All-only service, my provider did not offer an even better modem and stuff like installation support. This time they (in my case) doubled the up- and download speeds. So now I have a 4096/1024 kBit line. The upload of 1024 is not reached though. The DSLAM is in the neighboring village so the line is too long. Removing the splitter did bring a bit more upload. Probably should redo the in-home wires to get some more result. Upload is 736 kbit now. Always better than the 512 kbit I used to have. But looking at the line, I probably need something different that ADSL if I want a bigger pipe for my server.

After the breakdown of my old iMac, I got two replacements. The iMac is just perfect for some surfing and emailing and sits quite nicely in the corner of our living room. The first replacement I bought was exactly the same iMac as my original and I just replaced the hard disk to get the living room computer up and running again. But another iMac I had placed a bid on was available as well. These old iMac don't cost that much so I bought this one as well. The problem with the power supply might be occurring to these iMacs as well, so a spare one was not that bad.

The second one had a 500Mhz PowerPC CPU and should be a little bit faster than the replacement iMac. Another big advantage was the hard disk. It was much quieter than my old hard disk. So I really wanted to get this 500Mhz iMac in the living room. Only one problem exists. I installed my favorite Debian OS. I configured it to my wishes and put the computer in the living room. Then I discovered that the CRT screen was configured in such a way that it was really dark...

Using MacOS 9 there is a utility to configure the CRT, but this is not available under Linux. So I probably have to install MacOS 9 to adjust my CRT. But I really do not want to reconfigure the partitions on the hard disk to just adjust my CRT.

Another possibility is to use Mac-On-Linux to install MacOS in a disk-image on my computer. But this has two other problems. First the CDROM drive is broken on the iMac I need to adjust, so installing from CD is a problem. Second problem is that trying to start Mac-On-Linux on the other iMac I use for testing stuff resulted in a system hangup.

I'll probably try to go to debian/testing on my other iMac to see if a upgrade is stable on the moment and to see if Mac-on-Linux is functioning on this machine. I could try to install MacOS 9 in a drive-image I can later use on the living room iMac so I can finally adjust the CRT.

It almost seems the old iMac is about just as bad as the new iBrick (iPhone) regarding to other uses than the one path Apple sees fit for its hardware.

Finally got some time to upgrade Drupal. Problem was the lack of Drupal in Etch. I had to download the version from testing and convert my databases. Still need to get some "modules" working on the Belhamel site.

I'm now an offical Joost Beta-tester. But testing is a bit hard without client software for Linux...

The idea of waching TV over the internet is not bad. Just one big internet pipe for all your communications. But i guess it will take some time before I can disconnect the Cable-TV.

Last week my ISDN-line was terminated. The main telephone number has been ported to VoIP and I was using ISDN just for the incomming calls. All outgoing calls were routed over VoIP already. This means I have one bill less to pay each month. My ADSL connection is idle most of the time and there is plenty of bandwidth for a few VoIP calls ;-)

We have an iMac in our livingroom. It's small and has no fans which makes it ideal for this kind of use. I was mostly running Debian on the iMac and it was used a lot. Normally my wife would startup this small computer in the corner of our living room and use it for mail, surfing, wordprocessing and a few gnome games. The kids used it for gcompris and I used it often to check mail and connect to other machines. I would shut it down late in the evening so it would get some rest too. Now the good old machine shuts itself down. It also showed some problems with the display. Last sunday a took it apart to see that a few condensators inside were really swollen. I haven't studied electronics, but I've seen it before. It usally means that a computer turns into a paperweight. Now its almost a week later and we really miss the little machine in the corner. Better try to get another iMac for our livingroom. Perhaps a chance to upgrade to etch.

I no longer have a ADSL-Connection by the big green telecom provider. Not that they are really concerned with the environment, but because its their company color. Today I switched to black and yellow. My provider now offers ADSL themselve. So I no longer have to pay two bills for my connection, but only one. Not that there is a difference in costs. I still pay the same. Main difference is the speed. I now have doubled my upload and a bit more download capacity. But don't worry. My server is still behind a relatively slow ADSL connection and slashdotted easely.

Long time since I added an entry to my blog. Not that I haven't been busy on my home network. One of the new gadgets is a fonera router. which has been active for about a month now. I don't have a notebook or so with wireless-lan but the thought of being part of a global network of people sharing some of their bandwidth for other members is something which I like. So now I'm a linus. Join the community and you can use my router as well. It's free when you have a router as well. But for people just wanting to use the network for a day there is an option to buy day-passes.

Today I finally managed to change the cpu-fan on my server. Not that the cpu was running hot, but the noise was alarming. My server is just an old intel P3 450 on a slot 1 board. Main problem replacing the fan was a piece of plastic keeping the old fan in place. But with some brute force the now redundant plastic cover was removed and a new fan is in place. The server rebootet without problems and on the internal net every thing work just fine. But the adsl link was not working. I had disconnected the power from my adsl-modem as well. Upon reconnecting the server I just checked the status lights on the modem which indicated that everything was ok... I just power-cycled the modem again and my connection is up again. Maybe I should be looking for another modem as things are starting to fail a lot on my homenetwork.