Well, I decieded to try Google hosted services today. I really like the way Gmail looks and works, so by doing this, Google will host my mail from chriscraig.net. This means I use Gmail with my own email address. The Google Calendar also works the same way.

It was a breeze to set up. All I had to do is change the MX record for my domain, and I was up and running in a couple of minutes. It sure beats any webmail script I’ve been able to download over the last couple of years, and I’ve done a lot of research trying to find a good one.

Well, it was a lot of work, but with Geoff’s help, I finally got Linux installed on my server. I now have all my drives consolidated under one logical volume, so effectively, I have one drive with over 600GB of space .

Unfortunately though, I couldn’t get my gigabit ethernet card to work. After hours of trying and endless research, I found that nobody can get this particular card to work with any recent kernel. I’ll have to live with 100Mb ethernet for a while.

I did manage to compile Apache, PHP, and MySQL myself though. Now I have a web-based torrent client installed, so I can manage my torrents from anywhere. It’s quite quirky, but it’s the best thing out there that fits my needs at the moment.

Overall, I’m very happy with how things are working right now.

I’ve been holding off putting linux on my laptop for quite a while because it was difficult to get WPA encryption working. There was never any native support for it, and I didn’t want to use WEP because it doesn’t provide any security.

Recently though, a package was released that handled WPA properly, and it’s a breeze to set up. So, Friday night I installed Ubuntu linux and I’m up and running with no problems. For anybody who’s interested, there’s a great guide to customizing Ubuntu at ubunutguide.org

Now I just have to work on my server, and I’ll be finished with Windows at home.

I’ve been saying that I wanted an XBox for a couple of years now. Well, I finally got one. It has no controllers, but I have no intention of using it to play games. It’s strictly for use as a media center, so the remote control that came with it will do just fine.

Friends of mine have been doing this for quite some time now, but I always kept holding off for some reason. I’ve tried other solutions like the DVD player I bought a while back that was supposed to play DivX movies. It does, but not very well.

Anyway, now I have the XBox on my network, so it has access to hundreds of video files I have on my server. No more burning stuff to disc for me

Every weekday morning on CBC Radio 1, on a program called Information Morning, there is a segment called “The Good Question”. On August 29th, my good question was picked to be answered on the air.

I wanted to know why Fredericton had the nickname “Freddy Beach”. Steven Webb, the host, read my question on the air, and an expert give the account of it.

Here’s why Fredericton is called Freddy Beach.