In the early days of home PCs, back in the days of the 386 CPU, the machines ran almost completely noiselessly. The processor itself required no fan, and there was no call for case fans. The only fan would be found in the power supply, where it cooled the large step-down transformers.

Not so any more. Start up your home PC and you might as well be transported to the deck of an aircraft carrier. You have a CPU cooling fan, often another fan on your graphics card, and more and more frequently case fans are needed too. A typical PC can easily make enough noise to drown out low volume dialogue in movies and to mask the subtler nuances of the music you listen to.

But there is an alternative - a low spec processor that is able to run without a fan and only a heatsink, something like the VIA C7. It is fully x86 compatible, and can operate at 800 to 1500 MHz. The systems draw very little power in operation - typically around 20W, which is comparable to a modern low-energy lightbulb. ... ...

With all these GPX recordings of routes I'm collecting, I wanted to view and compare details of past routes in a more user-friendly manner than poring through reams of XML output. The Google Maps API would be great to incorporate somehow, and it is freely available for JavaScript use. However I decided to be awkward and write a desktop application in Java. I'm figuring that I'll find some way around the problem of getting graphical map imagery later.

So far I have a small Java Swing/AWT application which reads an XML file of GPS points from a recording of a cycle ride and displays the route in a JPanel within a JFrame:

For the last few years, my 1981 Honda CX Custom has been sitting unused in my garage. It developed a fault with the transmission, which meant that although the engine was still running fine, no power was getting to the back wheel. Fortunately, I was only a few hundred yards from home, so I was able to push it back fairly easily. It was then left in my garden under a tarpaulin, as I had no garage at the time, and when the time came to move it, the front brakes had seized forcing me to disconnect ... ...

The Garmin Edge (image stolen from www.tramsoft.ch) is a pretty cool little bicycle gadget. It is basically a cycle-mounted GPS receiver. It has no maps - you can't use it to plot a route along the public roads like you can with a car sat nav.

You can however program it with a route which you've planned elsewhere ... ...

There's a lot of articles on the web explaining how to move a Linux home folder (containing all the user accounts) from the system partition onto its own partition.

I wanted to do the reverse procedure, and move my separate home partition to a regular home folder on the system partition. The only problem is that home can contain a variety of files and symlinks that wouldn't all get copied correctly with the mv command. The cpio archiving utility, available on a default Linux ... ...

There are two essential files: one the XML descriptor, and two the PHP code. Both filenames begin mod_, then are followed by the name of the module, and the appropriate file extension of course.

So, to make a new featured items module (or really a special offers module) is fairly straightforward. The problem is how to mark products for display in this module. It would require some new field in the database, say an extra column in the #__{vm}_product table. A way to mark products, ... ...

I now want to look into how terrain can be modelled in a 3D game. My feeling is that the terrain model must support a couple of functions, as a minimum. These are elevation(x,y,z), which returns the height of terrain below the co-ordinates passed in, and slope(x,y,z), which returns the slope of the terrain at the specified point.

If we consider a simple single-level terrain, then we can say y = elevation(x,z). In other words the elevation function returns the ... ...

Replace the existing entry for your mouse in /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the following and restart X:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier   "Configured Mouse"
   Driver      "mouse"
   Option      "CorePointer"
   Option      "Device"   "/dev/input/mice"
   Option      "Protocol"   "ExplorerPS/2"
   Option      "Emulate3Buttons"   "false"
   Option      "Buttons"   "7"
   Option      "ZAxisMapping"   "4 5"
   Option      "ButtonMapping"   "1 2 3 6 ... ...

The first thing to do is install Freespace 2 under WINE (you will need WINE already installed and configured for this step). If you have the retail CDs, insert the first disk, browse to it in nautilus and double click the setup.exe file. As a Windows executable, it should start up using WINE. If you don't own the retail disks, read up on the open freespace wiki and forums for other methods of getting hold of the necessary data files for the game.

Proceed through the setup as if on ... ...

Quarter finals now. Germany against Argentina - Germany won all their Group games, and won 2-0 against Sweden. Should win surely? Odds on them are 2.76, pretty good. 3.05 for a draw. I could see Germany doing it 2-1 or 1-0.

Also up are Italy vs Ukraine. From the odds, Italy are the clear favourites. 1.63 on them to win, 7.6 on Ukraine to win. 3.75 for a draw.

Brazil vs France - Brazil favourites, 1.94 and 4.8 on France. Draw 3.5

England are playing Portugal. ... ...