h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My laptop battery didn't arrive today, so I won't be taking the laptop to the hospital tomorrow. But my replacement desktop light did arrive.

Except, in my attempts to buy the cheapest possible, I discovered this one only had a battery fitting but no USB power lead. There was a hole for a cable to go througth in the back, but nowhere to attach a USB lead. However...

The lamp it was replacing was buggered. (Technical term) One third of the LEDs had failed, and the other two thirds were just various shades of "dim". So I clipped off the lead, stripped and tinned it, unscrewed the base of the new lamp and soldered the cable inside. And it worked first time.

So now the new desk lamp, which cost half the price of the previous one, is twice as bright. I taped on a diffuser made from a layer of white polythene bag, and it lights my keyboard perfectly.

Things didn't work out too well on the software front. After hours of getting the OSX installer moved over onto the laptop, when I tried to install it I got an error message that the virtual machine needed extra virtualisation hardware for this OS, and it quit.

I found a patch that would remove the requirement for hardware virtualisation, but it only runs on a Windows installation.

So, now I'm trying to run the Windows varsion of the virtualisation software in Linux under WINE...

I'll let you know how it goes...

I watched "Bang Goes the Theory" and "8 out of 10 Cats".

Now, I'm just charging up the tablet to take out tomorrow...

Windows version of software under WINE... you're crazy, Peet.

But the feeling of accomplishment when you bodge something cheap to get a good performance out of it, yeah, nothing like it. Well done.

Hope your day isn't too boring today. As I said, at least it gets you out of the flat. I'm sure the exercise will be doing you good, even if it isn't very pleasant. Well I hope so anyway.

Cheers.

Strange.. I've never got WINE to work. It's never worked for me. I don't know why not; I've done everything correctly, but I've only ever gotten error messages.

Try installing PlayOnLinux - it's a front-end for WINE that does all the background tweaking for you.

I'm not having much luck. It's had a blank pop-up and a "Processing" progress bar on-screen all night, with no visible progress. I might as well leave it trying for the rest of today, as there's nothing else productive that I can do with it at the moment.

I was hoping the new battery would arrive yesterday. This morning I got an email from the company saying the status of my order had changed to "processing". Bum.