Looks like I’ll be banned from Heathrow

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BAA, the operator of Heathrow Airport (and a number of other big UK airports) wants to get a court injunction against members of 15 organisations who are running Camp for Climate Change in August. The injunction would mean that members of the 15 organisations involved in the camp cannot go into the airport, use the Heathrow Express or its platforms at Paddington station, use parts of the Piccadilly Line on London Underground, or use any of the airport access roads, including parts of the M25 and M4. There’s more from Greenpeace here, link via BoingBoing.

The thing is, these 15 organisations aren’t all loony liberal hippy organisations. Yes, the likes of Greenpeace are there, along with single-issue groups opposed to airport expansion. But you’ve also get well established organisations like The National Trust, RSPB, The Woodland Trust and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The combined membership of these organisations is around 5 million people, and if the injunction is worded how Greenpeace say it is, then all 5 million of them will be banned from the airport. And as I’m a proud paid-up member of The National Trust, that includes me, and my parents.

Amusingly, it also includes The Queen, patron of the RSPB and CPRE, and Prince Charles, patron of the National Trust. And whole load of BAA’s own staff.

As it happens I have no real intention of being anywhere near Heathrow at that time, either as a protester or a passenger (although I know of a few friends wanting to do the former). But this injunction is so broad that’s almost amusing in a real head-against-wall way, if that makes any sense.

What would you do with a spare computer?

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With a bit of luck, Hari and I will be picking up the keys for our new place today – we’re well into packing stuff although there’s still lots to do. One of Hari’s current housemates is donating his old computer, which he no longer needs and doesn’t want to sell, mainly because it’s rather old and wouldn’t sell for much and hasn’t got a monitor or keyboard (and isn’t able to take it for recycling). So we’re taking it.

Except I don’t actually know what to do with it.

The computer has an 800Mhz processor, 30 GB hard drive and 32 MB graphics. It’s recent enough to have 2 USB ports and an internal modem, but not recent enough to have a network socket. It also comes with not one, not two, but three optical drives – a CD–ROM drive, a CD-RW drive and a DVD–ROM drive. I have no idea what operating system it has but I’d imagine it’ll be Windows 98.

The lack of a network socket means its usefulness is somewhat limited, but adding one isn’t going to be difficult. Even then, I’m unsure what it can be used for. Its hard drive is a bit too small for a network server, and to make it into a router would require adding 2 network cards and a Wifi card if we wanted that as well. Furthermore, if it was a router it would probably have to go in the living room and I’d prefer not to have a big beige box there if possible – I’d rather have my Mac Mini, given the choice, or preferably a dedicated router which we’ll probably need to buy. A dedicated router would also use up less electricity, seeing as it’ll be on 24/7 essentially.

I can get an old CRT monitor for it and I’m sure I can pick up a cheap keyboard from somewhere so it won’t cost much to make it into a decent computer system, but I can’t imagine there’d be much demand for a computer of that vintage if I were to sell it. Hari and I between us already have 3 computers – my MacBook and Mac Mini, and her XCcube – so we don’t need another system really. So what would you lot do?

Here’s what you could have bought…

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Apple has updated the MacBook range again, this being the third revision since they were launched last year. Mine is a first revision, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, had I waited 9 months I could have got (for the same price that I paid):

  • A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, instead of a 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo processor
  • 80 GB hard drive, instead of 60 GB
  • 802.11n Wi-fi, instead of 802.11g (108 Mbps instead of 54 Mbps)
  • Faster writing of CD-RW discs (16x instead of 10x)

But never mind. It’s had 9 months of very heavy use and yet doesn’t seem to be suffering – the battery is still at well over 90% of its original capacity and everyone else seems to work fine. I guess I’m just envious.

Create a Safely Remove Hardware shortcut

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A screenshot of a Safely Remove Hardware shortcut on Windows desktop.

Here’s a tip I gleamed from today’s Windows Secrets newsletter. You may well be familiar with the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon which appears in your notification area (or ‘system tray’ if you must) when you plug in a removable hard drive or camera (or whatever). You may also notice that the icon sometimes isn’t there – and this is a problem which my parents’ computer randomly suffers from – which means it’s difficult to safely disconnect removable devices. The answer: a desktop shortcut.

Right-click on the desktop, select ‘New’ and then ‘Shortcut’. For the item location, copy and paste the following:

RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL HotPlug.dll

Then click ‘Next’. Call the shortcut ‘Safely Remove Hardware’, and you should be done. If you want to make it look snazzier, right-click the icon, choose ‘Properties’ and then the ‘Shortcut’ tab, click on ‘Change Icon’ and in the ‘Look for icons’ box type:

%windir%\system32\HotPlug.dll

The first icon in this file matches the ‘Safely Remove Hardware’ icon so you’ll be able to recognise it more easily.

Now, if the normal notification icon doesn’t appear, all you need do is double-click your new desktop icon to safely remove any disks before unplugging them.

Update (November 2023): This was written back in April 2007, but it still seems to work in Windows 10.

Films I am intending to see this year

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  1. Hot Fuzz – no, I haven’t see it yet.
  2. 28 Weeks Later… – the sequel to 28 Days Later.
  3. Sunshine – another Danny Boyle film which Gia has been involved in.
  4. Spiderman 3 – coming out this summer, at last.
  5. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End – which is out around my birthday.
  6. Shrek the Third – enjoyed the first two and has some interesting cameo voices.
  7. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – because it’s Harry Potter. No David Tennant this time though.
  8. The Simpsons Movie – Not the biggest fan of The Simpsons (prefer Futurama/Family Guy) but should be good.

And next year we have The Chronic-what-cles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, which hopefully will be as good as the first one.

Side note: My British English spelling dictionary in Firefox does not recognise the word ‘movie’.

Hari’s new graphics card

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Hari’s new graphics card has arrived, and so I fitted it earlier today. We went with an Inno3D card based around an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS chipset, since it seemed to represent the best value for money for our budget and was compatible with Hari’s computer – it doesn’t have PCI Express so we needed an AGP card.

As performance goes, the card is an immense improvement. Using World of Warcraft as a benchmark, before, she was getting an average of between 10 and 12 frames per second with all the settings turned down for maximum performance (but low detail). With the new card, she gets a constant 50fps, with many of the enhancements enabled, such as texture detail, terrain distance and spell effects. It looks fantastic, and is very smooth.

This now means that Hari finally has the gaming performance that she’s been wanting for so long, and ends an upgrade process that has seen a new external hard drive, new memory and now a new graphics card. All in all, we’ve spent £220 on new hardware, but seeing as it’ll add value to the computer, and make it less obsolete in future, it should be worth it.

Or, at least, it ends for now. She now wants a new power supply so that her graphics card can run at maximum performance. I think we can pass on that.

Actually, I didn’t realise that the card needs to have a direct connection to the power supply as well as being connected to the motherboard through the AGP socket. I’ll get it sorted soon.

Graphics card recommendations

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It now looks like Hari needs a new graphics card. The extra memory arrived yesterday, as expected, and has made something of a difference to the computer. Switching between World of Warcraft and any other program is instantaneous, whereas it used to take several seconds and result in considerable hard disk noise (presumably Windows swapping data between physical and virtual memory). Plus, aspects of Warcraft, such as navigating around cities and instances is noticeably smoother. But there’s no real improvement to the number of frames per second it can manage during general play. Which was one of the main aims of the upgrade – the other being preparation for the eventual installation of Windows Vista.

Having looked at the recommended requirements of World of Warcraft, it looks like it’s Hari’s graphics card which is to blame. She has a card based around the nVidia GeForce 5200 FX chipset, with 128 MB of graphic memory. It’s not a bad card, but it’s likely to be missing some of the advanced features which more modern cards have, which in turn puts more pressure on the CPU and slows the whole computer down.

Overall, her computer spec is as follows:

  • 2.80 GHz Pentium 4 processor
  • 80 GB hard drive, with an additional 80 GB external hard disk
  • 2 GB of Corsair memory
  • 128 MB nVidia GeForce FX 5200 graphics card
  • Windows XP Home Edition SP2

(plus all of the usual gubbins like a DVD rewriter and Ethernet)

The processor should be fine – World of Warcraft only requires a good 800MHz processor and recommends 1.5 GHz. Furthermore, CPU usage is relatively good – we ran Task Manager last night while she was playing and it rarely went over 80%, averaging about 50% – if it was close to 100% a lot then I’d be more worried. We can’t fit any more RAM as 2 GB is the maximum it can take, but judging by our experiences with the new RAM so far adding even more wouldn’t have made much difference. The internal hard disk should also be fine as it has plenty of free space (though it may need defragmenting, I can’t see it making a huge difference).

Software-wise I have done almost all I can. Though Hari is not a computing student, she is very computer literate and knows the risks of viruses and spyware and so she has AVG and Windows Defender running (as well as Spybot and Ad-Aware). There’s very few background applications running, and even if they were, they’d be using RAM and CPU which we know aren’t issues.

Which leads me to the conclusion that the graphics card is the weakest link. I’ve upgraded it to the latest Forceware drivers, but I honestly don’t think it has made a difference to performance. If we’re going to get decent Warcraft performance, it will probably need to be replaced.

Whatever the replacement is, the main limitations will be that it has to be AGP – the motherboard does not support PCI Express – and that it only takes up one slot as the computer has a small form factor case. Though there is space for a card which takes up the equivalent of two slots, it would render the only PCI slot useless – admittedly it is empty now but it could be used for something in the future.

You may wonder why we’re spending all this money on an old machine – after all, we could probably get a new one for the money spent so far (about £150). But there’s not much fundamentally wrong with the core components, and a few upgrades should make it very powerful. I also doubt that the money would get a computer designed for the uses it would get, i.e. gaming.

It’s unlikely that we will buying a new graphics card just yet – it’s likely to be later in the yeah when Hari has some more money. But I’d like to know if you all think I’m right with diagnosing the problem, and if you have any recommendations for good graphics cards, preferably ones under £75.

Memory upgrade question

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Here’s a question for all you memory techie nerd people out there:

Given the choice, would you go for Crucial memory, or Corsair Value Select memory?

The reason why I am asking is that I’m finally getting around to upgrading Hari’s computer, now that memory prices have fallen far enough for it be a little over £100 for a full 2 GB of RAM. Crucial have the memory she needs at £108, but they’re currently out of stock and there’s no indication as to when they’ll get stock back in. Scan, on the other hand, has Corsair Value Select memory available now for £107 including delivery.

Obviously the two cost the same so price isn’t an issue, but should I wait and buy Crucial memory, or get Corsair memory now? The fact that it is ‘value select’ seems to imply that it might not be as good as Crucial’s memory but I have no idea whether this is actually the case; all I know is that Crucial and Corsair are good brands.

Obviously it would be nice if she could afford high quality gaming memory but this is about the best we can do for now. Any thoughts are welcome.

Lowdown on London

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So, London. We caught a late train out of Bradford (one of the direct Bradford-London trains) and got into the capital about 10pm on the Friday night. The great thing about London is that the public transport systems don’t stop at about 7pm, like they do in most other places. So, after meeting a friend in a pub near Euston, and leaving at closing time, we could still get to our hotel. The hotel was near Canning Town and is a good half hour away by tube/DLR.

We had intended to do some sightseeing over the weekend, but when we mentioned to various of our friends that we’d be in London, they were all keen to meet up with us. So, we ended up spending the afternoon socialising. We went to the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, again near Euston, which is an awesome place. It’s a pub which does nice food and decent beer, but also has a 10-pin bowling alley and karaoke booths, as well as retro arcade machines. Very easy to kill a lot of time there.

Saturday evening was the main reason for going to London – to see a musical in the West End, which is something neither of us have done before. We’ve seen musicals at theatres before – we both went to see Jerry Springer: The Opera when it came to Bradford in May last year – but there’s something special about seeing it in the West End (which for those unfamiliar with London is a bit like Broadway).

The musical we went to see was Avenue Q – I bought the soundtrack late in 2005 as the songs are hilarious, but it was only last year that it came to our shores. You may remember a song called “The Internet Is For Porn” being passed around the internet a lot some time ago – that’s taken from the musical and is quite a good example of what you can expect from it. If you’re easily offended then you’ll hate it; if you’re not then you’ll be rolling in the aisles laughing. Even though I knew most of the songs off by heart, to see it live was an awesome experience.

We went to the matinée performance, which had the benefit of being quite a bit cheaper than the later Saturday showing. We didn’t buy the cheapest seats since they were right on the balcony, and didn’t have a good view, but the ones we did buy were quite good for the price that we paid.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner – we had to walk around quite a bit before we found a restaurant which was in our price range, but we settled for a nice Italian restaurant just off one of the main streets which was actually very reasonable. We then had another late night tube journey – it’s surprising just how busy the Jubilee line is at 11:30pm on a Saturday night.

Sunday was also supposed to be a sightseeing day but we didn’t really do any – instead, we had lunch at Yo! Sushi (which I’d promised Hari as she has taken a real liking to sushi) and perusing the food court at Selfridges, which is the only bit of the shop we can actually afford. We came away with a big box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Oreo cookies – believe it or not, these are considered premium brands here and are hard to get hold of, with a standard packet of Oreos costing up to £3 (which is about US$5.50). They’re expensive, but sooooooo nice.

The journey back was okay, bar the fact that the train was 20 minutes late leaving London. All in all we had a really good weekend and although we did spend a lot of money it was worth it.

Unfortunately we’ve both been ill with colds since getting back 🙁 .