Having built the HTPC, I now needed to install the operating system. I am a Windows person, so I needed to get my Windows 7 DVD onto a USB key so that I could install it on the HTPC, which had no DVD drive. The only USB key big enough currently had a multiple partition setup going with an Ubuntu install (so I could boot up with my email etc. on most computers). Turns out, that was the first problem.
A while ago, I wrote about WinFossil, a Fossil GUI for Windows. Personally, I didn’t mind a command line interface (I generally use cygwin), but if I wanted to use Fossil at my lab instead of SVN, the other users would need to have some form of nice clickable windowed goodness to use. WinFossil is just such a GUI, and it works well! I’m really impressed by it, and wanted to give users a flavor for it.
Recently I set about building a cheap HTPC to replace a WD Live Hub that my wife and I had been using for half a year. Although I really like the idea of the Live Hub, and generally things worked well, the filtering & music selection (when you’ve got 30 GB of music) was a little annoying. After looking for some deals on craigslist and outlet stores for cheap HTPC’s, I realized that really, the cheapest and most upgradeable way was going to be to build my own. I’d never done this before!
The default Fossil style is, to me, a bit old-school, and not in the good way. You can see an example of it at this repository. While there are several options for skins available, and the best of these is the one used by the main Fossil page, I was looking for something a little more modern.
After a trusty round trip to Google, I found that another user, Dmitry @ Coding Robots that had created a style based on Google. Perfect! He was even kind enough to send me his settings as he uses them in Fossil. Thanks Dmitry!
Changes
You can see a full history of changes by going to the repository. Download here.
Short version: while I can understand that a complicated website might not work perfectly on all browsers, at least warn the damn user that it isn’t working.
I’ve now been using Fossil for little more than two weeks, and I definitely like it. I am even more excited about the recent discussions surrounding a WinFossil application and SharpFossil library (repository here). I’m looking forward to a slow day when I can download and play around with that version, and see if I can help out with debugging at all. In the mean time, if you’re using Fossil on windows, check it out and give some feedback to the developer!
I have been trying to get myself to run more (you know, to be “healthy”), but since I’m a scientist, wanted to know how much I’d been running recently. Bing maps had used to have a distance calculation tool, but now doesn’t, so I had to find a new one. Luckily, Google is your friend, and I came across this: Advanced Google Maps Distance Calculator. Awesome!
The other week, I was dealing with a virus/trojan on my desktop. Never fun. These days, the desktop is used mostly for recording TV shows through Windows Media Center and encoding them as mp4’s. However, it is also used for our finances. All the financial information is stored on a TrueCrypt encrypted mountable drive, so I wasn’t worried about having my info all over the net. But it is a record of all our bills. I wasn’t even too worried that the trojan had apparently deleted my user folder (it had in fact just hidden it): I had a backup, and more to the point, the TrueCrypt file was synced to my laptop, so I had a second backup there…or so I thought.
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