Occupy Southend - getting much publicity but the message just is not getting through.

Occupy Southend are getting badly misrepresented by the media (should we have been surprised?). Labels like 'anti-captialist' (sounds a bit worrying - like they are all SWP malcontents) and 'opposing social injustice' - a bit bland, it would be hard to find someone to disagree with that as being a noble aim but as social injustice has always been with us the natural reaction of most people is why is it worth disrupting everyone with it right now?

However the very first item on the Occupy LSX Initial Statement:

The current system is unsustainable. It is undemocratic and unjust. We need alternatives; this is where we work towards them.

Occupy Southend has adopted the same statement terms with a few local variations. The fact that it starts with "The current system is unsustainable" is what groups like Transition Towns have been warning about for years. Serious problems caused by us trying to live an exponentially increasing lifestyle on a finite planet are no longer some problem for our grandchildren to solve by waving some magic wand of 'science', it is a doom we are ACCELERATING towards even though it is already in sight. 

This is a global emergency, we only have a very few years, maybe just months, to turn things around now. I am not just talking about global warming, although that will add its own problems to the mix. 

Is it that our leaders do not want widespread panic? Understandable but maybe a bit of genuine panic is what we need just now!

I do not have the solutions, as anyone with half a brain knows that there is no magic bullet for this. Turning round a global economy to be sustainable is going to take a massive effort of will and of self control.

I must admit though that it is driving me crazy that I can at least see the road we have to go down to find any chance of survival.

1. Get world leaders to come clean to their people that living on a finite world that is near running on empty for some resources is a genuine predicament.

2. Get a 'wartime spirit' of co-operation to find solutions to this, but WITHOUT finding someone to go to War against (like Iran) - we all live on this earth together, we are all in this together. A resource consuming war is what will seal our doom in double quick time!

3. Recognise that vested interests that stand in the way of this - within the '1%' need to be stripped of their power. We cannot have the salvation of the human race conducted as a 'for profit' activity. It is too urgent for all the attendant bickering.

I for one think the survival of the human race justifies slightly inconveniencing a few churchgoers!

Don't fancy this road? Ok, the most likely alternative is a series of ever more desperate wars as the increasing population fights to survive. As blowing stuff up and then building more of it at great expense will divert resources away from e.g. massive scale solar power deployment it spells DOOM for almost all of us.

Not interested in these? Want things to stay as they are, come on don't fool yourself you know things are just not going to go back to the way they were 10 years ago. Self delusion is very dangerous.

Anon Flags For Sale

After the great reception the Anonymous flags that I imported from the states had at the recent Stop the War and Stop ACTA demonstrations I have decided to make it easier for other people in the UK and EU to get hold of these by setting up as a reseller.

I was very pleased to find that the anonflag.com and anonflag.co.uk domain names were available so they are now in service letting people buy the flags that will look so good at your protest.

Current flags are available in Hand waving size 15" by 12", Standard (5ft by 3ft) and Huge (8ft by 5ft). They come without poles (as these are easier to find locally then get through the post!).

My Love/Hate relationship with a Lenovo Ideapad S205

This was a bit of an impulse buy. I was out shopping and noticed in
Dixons, beside the usual netbooks with their crippled Windows 7
'Starter' edition and deliberately crippling measly 1GB of memory was
this slightly larger machine physically but with a much better spec.
AMD Vision APU, 4GB memory instead of just 1 and a 320GB disk.
Promised battery life was over 5 hours. All this for only an extra £30
over the netbook price thanks to a 'Huge' sale discount.

I have been after another netbook for a while as I lent my trusty Dell
Inspiron 910 to my daughter. I wanted something with the processing
power and disk storage to let me do Livestreaming as has been
popularised by the Occupy movement. My big laptop with a barley 3
hours battery life at best would have been a bit bulky for this.

I got the Ideapad just a couple of days before the 11th Feb Stop ACTA
so there was no time to replace Windows with Linux for that. With the
help of the Occupy LSX tech team I managed to get livestreaming set up
under Windows. By the time it was working however I realised that
running an external USB camera and a 3G dongle also soaks up battery
life! I was down to 45mins of power before the march had even started!

I thought I had a solution to this in that I had noticed in the local
Maplins to St. Pauls that they have a rather natty 12v lead battery
and 200w mains inverter package for under £50. About the size and
shape as a yellow plastic lunch box but MUCH heavier!

The power pack seemed to have some charge in it so I loaded it into my backpack and started off the march from St. Pauls to Trafalgar Square with operational (and watched) livestream feed.

The problem was that the initial charge in the power pack was not that great so by the time I reached the square the power had drained. I then found from the instructions that a full initial charge is about 26 hours.

It will come in handy for next time. There are lighter and higher capacity solutions for just powering phones and netbooks for extended periods. The key Livestreamers in the states use them, but the disadvantage is that they are very expensive. The simple lead acid battery can power your laptop for another 3 hours or so which should be enough. If you are a glutton for weight carrying it is possible to attach a bigger external battery to the inverter too.

Although it was a novelty to use Windows (this is my first Win7 machine) I did not want it to be the ONLY OS on there.

320GB disk! I thought there would be plenty of space to put several choices of Linux distro on there. However when I booted Linux from a USB disk to do some initial compatibility testing I found that the partition table had been laid out with NO spare space!

sda1 is win boot partition 200M 29M used NTFS
sda2 is win main partition 22G used 233G free NTFS
sda3 is an extended partition containing sda5
sda5 is LENOVO 29G 1.3G used 28G free NTFS
sda4 is LENOVO_PART 15G 8.3G used 6.4G free NTFS - looks like recovery
copy of Windows OS, compressed.

85% wasted space on boot partition
95% wasted space on a whole partition just used for Lenovo specific
drivers and other gunk.

The sda4 partition is a special recovery one. If a special recessed button on the Ideapad keyboard is pressed this is the means by which a trashed copy of Windows can be rebuilt.

Looks like Windows was doing the equivalent of stretching out all over the couch to stop someone else sitting down.

As I was already running Linux from a nice big USB disk my first task was to save compressed images of these partitions so that I could reset things if things did not go to plan.

I used dd piped to gzip for each one with 4k block size onto usb  external disk. This took quite a while but left me reasonably confident that I could get thing back again if my experiments with Linux caused data loss.

The next thing I tried was a Fedora Core 16 install. I attempted to shrink the main windows partition but doing this gave a runtime error, not good. What was worse was that booting Windows again pronounced the installation unfixable. If I had not taken those initial backups I would have been one unhappy bunny at this point!

As there was nothing left to loose I did a whole disk install if FC16. This worked well, much nicer than Windows but with a couple of issues. I could not get the WiFi  working! This was a bit of a shock for a  Lenovo product as I am used to the Thinkpad range generally being rock solid, no hassles, performers with Linux. The Ideapad Wifi is one of those 'it nearly works' issues for which there is more than one solution offered on the web. I tried them all but never actually got a
working connection. The other thing not working at all is the SD card slot. For this I could not even find any solutions! This is a great  shame as on my previous two netbooks I have been used to the luxury of being able to install the OS to SD cards and thus return to the care-free time of the floppy disk by being able to swap between whole personalities just by swapping out a small piece of plastic!

The issues were bugging me so much I decided to use my backups and return the machine to the servitude of running Windows. For some reason a direct byte for byte recopying of the boot and main partitions did not give me a bootable system. I can only imagine I had missed some small but vital bit of copy protection. Luckily the restored recovery partition worked as the handbook said it did.

Pressing the special button with a pen enabled me to get back to the state of the system as delivered.

Hardly ideal, because of being bogged down with Anti Virus vigilance  needs, but I then tried the Windows version of the VirtualBox VM system that is standard on Ubuntu. It is an easy download for Windows and I soon had a virtual box version of FC16 running under Windows 7. There were a couple of problems though. Firstly I was stuck with a 1024x768 sized screen and secondly the video performance was dire. The FC16 virtual machine could not even play Youtube videos without staggering. I have the same VirtualBox software running on my Linux desktop and client systems there have no problem playing Youtube movies.

At the moment I am concluding that this is all due to the runtime weight of having to run Anti Virus.

I do need to keep some Windows capability for occasional use but I still need to find a way of shrinking the main partition reliably. The default scheme Lenovo has chosen for this machine is very wasteful.

I called this a love/hate relationship.

On the plus side I think the machine is good value for £280. It is light with a great keyboard and reasonable battery life.

On the minus side Lenovo REALLY SHOULD make sure that all their range work properly with Linux, otherwise they are throwing away all the years of good name of years of the IBM then Lenovo Thinkpad.

This was an impulse buy on the strength of the brand name. I have learned to always do research into a particular machine I am buying.

Every PC buyer should insist 100% on proper Linux compatibility. Otherwise you are just getting an appliance, not a true general purpose computer.


The usb external disk with PC LinuxOS on it that I used to do the backups seems to boot faster than Win7 too! So installing Linuxes to usb and running them there is always an option, just not as tidy. Just a shame about that SD card not being standard. A 32GB SD card for main OS work and the big disk spun up only for playing media etc would be ideal.

The bigger battle - the war on general computation.

I think ACTA is just a small part of something bigger. The Internet was developed not as a money making exercise by a mega corporation, but by lots of academics and small companies who saw the value in easy instant communication and sharing of knowledge. The general purpose computer is at the heart of this and over the life of the Internet has gone from something that cost as much as a house, to being affordable by just about everyone.

The thing about a computer as opposed to a toaster or a games console is that you the owner can decide what it does. This power is under threat. Microsoft wants the next generation of computers and tablets to run Windows 8 to be designed to make it impossible to run anything else (all in the name of security of course)! This makes your computer just a different sort of 'XBox' and you are only allowed to run what the corporate masters approve on it, unless you commit a criminal act and crack it of course.

This is another thing that the public needs to rise up and say NO WAY to.

Keep your right to a general purpose computer where you can run the software, including the most fundamental level, the Operating System. There are many different variants of Linux that you can choose, all have been developed by people like you who care about freedom. Find one that suits you and move off Windows now. Find a local Linux User Group and join it. Join FLOSSUK - the organisation that promotes Free, Libre and Open Source Software at the national level. http://www.flossuk.org/

Here is a video by Cory Doctorow that explains the attack on general purpose computing in more detail.

The fight is not over even if we send ACTA packing.