London

Tuesday, February 16, 2010
8:00pm – 11:00pm
The Lyceum, 354, Strand, London, UK
Google Map
Pub Website
Facebook Events Page

Sheffield

Wednesday, February 17,2010
8:00pm – 11:00pm
The Benjamin Huntsman, 12-18 Cambridge Street, Sheffield, UK
Google Map
Pub Website
Facebook Events Page

Manchester

Thursday, February 18, 2010
8:00pm – 11:00pm
Lammars, Fourways House, 57 Hilton Street, Manchester, UK
Google Map
Pub Website
Facebook Events Page

Dublin

Friday, February 19, 2010
8:00pm – 11:00pm
Cassidy’s Bar, 27 Westmoreland Street, Dublin, Ireland
Google Map
Pub Website
Facebook Events Page

If you’re not doing the Facebook thing just RSVP with a comment here.

I’ll keep this post updated with all the latest details. I’ll also need locals help figuring out Hak5 meetup venues and scenic motorbike travel routes. I’d like to stay off the motorways as much as possible

Day1 (Tues, Feb16): London. Arrive in Heathrow 11:00, pickup a hired Honda CBF500 motorbike, meetup in the city that night. Venue The Lyceum. Host: Joe B. – Facebook Events Page

Day2 (Wed, Feb17): Sheffield. Motorbike up from London to Sheffield in the morning. Meetup that night. Venue The Benjamin Huntsman. Host: Robin W. – Facebok Events Page

Day3 (Thurs, Feb18): Manchester. A short motorbike ride over to Manchester. Meetup that night. Venue Lammars. Host: Tann S. – Facebook Events Page

Day4 & 5 (Fri & Sat, Feb19-20): Dublin. A morning motorbike ride out to Holyhead to catch a ferry to Ireland for two nights in Dublin. Venue: Cassidy’s Bar. Host: Robb D. – Facebook Events Page

Day 6 (Sun, Feb 21): London. An early morning ferry back to Holyhead followed by a long motorbike ride down through Wales, hopefully arriving in London before dusk. I have a feeling the A5 and M40 will be involved. Final venue TBD. Host: Joe B.

Day 7 (Mon, Feb 22): London. Just enough time for tea and return the motorbike to the hire before heading to Heathrow — flight departs 16:00.

So, am I headed to your city? Are you interested in meeting up? Have two wheels of your own and want to join me for a ride? Have an idea for a venue or motorbike route? Please, leave a comment

Here’s an open Google map wiki of my journey that you’re free to edit — add a push-pin.

View Darren’s UK Adventure February 2010 in a larger map

I’ll be arriving at London Heathrow Intl. on the morning of Tuesday, February 16. I’ll be in town, as it were, until the following Monday afternoon, February 22.

There will of course be a Hak5 meetup (or several) as I journey across the UK and possibly Ireland or parts of Europe. So far the plan is wide open. Your input (or generosity) will greatly influence the adventure.

I’ll be arriving in London on Tuesday morning. I’ve rented a motorcycle for the week so I’ll take the tube across town and pick it up. From there I’ve got wheels and can go pretty much anywhere. You guys drive on the left, right? I mean, correct?

I’m open to the idea of crossing the channel and heading up through France, Belgium and into Germany. I’ve always wanted to see Germany, especially since I speak the language (badly), but I’m afraid the western side of Germany is as far as I could get before having to turn back. My max riding distance per day is about 650 kilometers. Decrease that greatly when throwing in foreignness.

Alternatively I could make a big clockwise circle across to Dublin (Rkiver has offered a couch, thanks for the kindness), up to Belfast, and over to Sheffield (Robin Wood aka Digininja has offered to put me up there which is a blessing) and back down to London for my return flight.

I’ll of course be recording an episode of Hak5 along the way!

Anyone else wanna lend a couch? I’m offering to do chores around the house, defrag your hard drive, steal your neighbors wireless.

I’d like to see the UK / Ireland / parts of Europe via motorbike and newfound friends. I’m not that interested in Westminster Abbey, London Bridge, Big Ben, etc. Just show me the local pub, the match and the menu.

Here’s my second attempt. It’s the returning champion from Ireland Rkiver vs the new challenger from the USA, GCS8.

Beta 2 had better production values over Beta 1, but the power-ups resulted in epic fail on my part hosing. Next time we’ll nix the weapons and simply keep the life-lines. Ask IRC, 15 seconds to Google, and probably phone a friend.

I’ll also be putting an odd number of questions into each category as to give each contestant an alternating chance to choose a category. We may also go with a losers-choice approach.

It’s difficult to come up with something fair and engaging while not relying on a “buzzer” considering Internet lag.

Also I think I rambled too much in the start of the show. Next time there will likely be a warm up round to set the stage before we even meet the contestants to introduce the life-lines.

Looking forward to suggestions and critiques but keep in mind I’m not taking this too seriously, this is just for fun.

Hak5meetup03, originally uploaded by Paul Henman.

Had a blast! Thanks everyone for coming out

Don’t let the form-factor fool you, this isn’t your run of the mill netbook. In fact I believe Nokia has dubbed it an Ultra-Portable. While some characteristics like the Atom Z530, 10.1″ display, webcam, sd card reader and 1 GB RAM are common amongst netbooks (or “tonka toys” as Matt so eloquently puts it), it has some true gems that set it far apart from the rest of the pack.

Here’s a slashgear unboxing of the Nokia Booklet 3G if you’re into that sorta thing.

How the Nokia Booklet 3G tickled my technolust

* 3G connectivity
* 12 hour battery life*
* Aluminum unibody construction
* 1280×720 display
* 2.76 Lbs & 0.78″ thin
* Bluetooth
* HDMI output
* Quiet passive cooling
* Heavenly macbook-esque keyboard
* Innovative power button placement. No, seriously

Personal experience with the battery

I’m getting about 8 hours in Linux without even trying. I might be able to get a little more out of it tweaking the WiFi radio, turning off bluetooth, lowering the screen brightness or powering down the HDD more often. What’s funny is that when the low battery notification comes on I’ll check and it says “2 hours remaining”. That makes me grin. 2 hours is low. Ha! On my previous netbook 2 hours was nearly fully charged.

What’s not to love?

Comes with the crippled Windows 7 Starter. That’ll be an $80 anytime-upgrade to change your wallpaper, and even more to join a domain. Did I mention it doesn’t have the fancy-pants new taskbar? Not a knock on the hardware but it would have been nice to have Home Basic at least. But then again when it runs Ubuntu so well, why would you want to boot back into Windows anyway?

Supposedly the 1 GB RAM that comes stock on this machine isn’t user upgradeable. I haven’t seen confirmation on this either way but the reports I’ve read so far don’t leave me feeling cheery.

4300 RPM hard drive. Yuck. Sure, I understand the need for a slower drive when trying to squeeze every last ounce of battery life from this machine, but couldn’t a faster 5400 RPM drive with some power saving firmware have done the trick?

No Ethernet port. Thanks for starting the trend Macbook Air. No matter, a Trendnet TU-ET100C USB Ethernet adapter will only set you back $15 and it works flawlessly in Linux right out of the box.

Enough with the review, let’s get into the good stuff…

Tweaks for flawless Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet 3G

After getting Ubuntu 9.10 dual-booting on the Nokia Booklet 3G I was surprised at how responsive the system was. This may have had to do with the limiting power profile that ships with it in Windows. Bluetooth, WiFi, and 3G connectivity all worked right out of the box.

Graphics The GMA500 graphics and sound didn’t. Easy fix though, simply run this command:

wget http://gma500re.altervista.org/scripts/poulsbo.sh && sh ./poulsbo.sh

You’ll also need to be mindful of these instructions for future kernel updates. They’re really easy.

Just a simple reboot later and you’ll have full 1280×720 desktop glory.

Audio

Sound might not work right off the bat. My issue was interesting in that I would hear the catchy Ubuntu login sound, but no sounds after that. Here’s the simple result of my googling that fixed the problem.

Replace the line Option “AccelMethod” “EXA” with Option “AccelMethod” “UXA” in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Here’s a copy of my xorg.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "GMA500"
        Option "AccelMethod" "UXA"
        Option "DRI" "on"
        Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
        Option "IgnoreACPI" "yes"
        Driver "psb"
EndSection

Section "DRI"
    Mode    0666
EndSection

HDMI Output

I futzed with System > Preferences > Display for way too long until I just went over to the trusty xrandr command. This command has saved my butt a few times on the show when trying to do a Linux demo. While I haven’t bothered integrating this into my xorg.conf as I’ll seldom use the HDMI output, it is invaluable when I need to do a demo with screen capturing and live to tape camera switching.

Here’s my hdmiout.sh script:

#!/bin/bash
xrandr --newmode  1280x720R   63.75  1280 1328 1360 1440  720 723 728 741 +hsync -vsync
xrandr --addmode TMDS-1 1280x720R
xrandr --output TMDS-1 --mode 1280x720R

Of course that’s assuming you’re outputting to a 720p display that’s happy with those refresh rates and what not. If you’re looking to output to something different I’ll point to this excellent resource.

Going forward

I’ll be putting this tough little machine to the test very shortly. I’m experimenting with HD video editing in Linux and have already successfully tested AVCHD editing and encoding. I’ll have another writeup on that adventure as I’m jumping in the deep end here shortly. I’ll be taking a trip to Toronto over the holidays and will need to produce, record, edit and deliver an episode of Hak5 while on the road. I intend to do it all on this machine, and our trusty Panasonic AG-HMC40. Wish me luck!

Read the full article.