greatbear analogue and digital media» GNU / Linux archives – greatbear analogue and digital media – bristol – UK

luxury bed and breakfast on Skye – thespoonsonskye.com

greatbear — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:17:28 +0000

A beautiful guesthouse and a beautiful site!

In conjuntion with Bremner Design, we’ve created another simple but powerful WordPress based site that is easy to use and can grow as their business grows. Developed and hosted by us on GNU / Linux systems.

www.rockblastingservices.com goes live

greatbear — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:04:39 +0000

www.rockblastingservices.com

Rock Blasting Services ,a new site for an African based Blasting, Road cutting and Drilling company. This site is hosted by us and uses the WordPress Content Management System, bringing an appropriate combination of simplicity and flexibility to the project.

Focusrite Saffire LE SPDIF problems

greatbear — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:19:25 +0000

Focusrite Saffire LE

I’ve owned one of these Saffire LE firewire interfaces for a few years now and it’s very useful as a backup to my RME interfaces especially when I need to record and transfer audio at another location as it’s small, light and portable. It’s a very good sounding interface and it even is reported to work under Linux which I’ve tried but unfortunately not with Audacity as this that doesn’t use the Jack server.

I’ve had an ongoing issue with the SPDIF inputs though. Under Windows XP and MacOS X it refuses to record more than a few mninutes if locked to another digital unit such as DAT machine and the Saffire software reports the firewire interface has lost it’s connection. This has rendered all SPDIF transfers impossible to do correctly.

The support at Focusrite is very good, you can actually speak to someone! We tried using an external power supply unit (PSU), different firewire cables, checking the type of firewire interface in the Windows machine and upgrading the firmware under MacOS X but all to no avail. This is a repeatable issue under several different computers and OS’s.

www.healthdesigns.org.uk goes live

greatbear — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 16:29:50 +0000

Health Designs, a local business offering:

… a supportive and down to earth approach to health and wellbeing which can be applied to individuals, therapists, organisations and schools.

is finally live, proudly designed and hosted by us.

This is a standards compliant site powered by the open source content management system, Drupal.

A lot of hard work went into the theme design that’s based on the blank canvas Zen theme. I think we’re all happy with it now, I hope..

Advent 7055 laptop overheating repair

greatbear — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:33:23 +0000

Just recently I’d been asked to repair what seems to be a common problem with PC type laptops over a couple of years old. Dust gets trapped in the copper fins and the fan of the CPU heatsink and reduces the efficiency of the cooling resulting in regular power off’s by the laptop as it gets over it’s upper temperature setting.

The fix is relatively easy, remove the heatsink unit, blow it clean with compressed air, clean the old CPU heatsink paste off with isopropyl alcohol (IPA) and spread a thin but even film of good quality heatsink paste on the CPU. Put it all back together, keep your fingers crossed and it should be fine!

This has fixed several laptops permanently and with this Advent I could go ahead and wipe the old Windows XP Home from it and install Ubuntu 8.04 that’s fantastic and installs perfectly without any ‘geeking around’ necessary. My only problem is the fan control from linux, but that’s another story……