s a child, my father got me into building my first crystal set.  I don't fully recall the details, but I seem to recall it was a kitset and I was in Nelson when I built it - If I remember I'll ask him.  What I do remember is building a few of them, including one that fitted inside a tic-tac container and another that had no tuning cap, just an icecream stick with a screw through the end that scratched through to vary the coil windings in use.

Well, I love the new release of Ubuntu...  but I really hate the new layout... which is fine, its Linux - I can change it... can't I?...

...yes, but not how you might think.  I tried swapping themes, I looked in all the options... but I just couldn't find the simple, yet missing, option to swap the minimise maximise and close buttons back to where I want them (on the right)... until I did some searching on the net... and found I wasn't alone. 

Recently my Firefox browser started asking for permission to make changes to my computer every time I started it... which was getting a mite annoying... So a little bit of digging around led me to check the permissions of the Firefox executeable program on my machine.

I'm learning Python at the moment... and as part of that I've been looking at creating platform-independent applications.

The first step, I figured, was to get a basic window operating cross-platform.  I did this, no problem.  I did some reading on tkinter, which seems pretty straight forward (apart from being Tkinter in Python 2.x and tkinter in Python 3.x - note the case change - pretty annoying for converting apps from the old version).  So that was all good anyway.

As part of my C programming course recently I needed a Linux environment to work in, so decided to give Sun VirtualBox a try as a way to run Ubuntu 9.10 on my Laptop (running Windows 7).  It works well, but required a little tweaking to get going properly.

First, you need to install guest additions - to do this you need to choose it from the devices menu at the top of the VirtualBox window... this mounts them as a virtual CD ROM drive in your Linux install.