pthane.co.uk

I can’t program, triage bugs or design GUIs but I can write, so when I can find the time I plan to do some free journo stuff for KDE News. It’s my way of giving a bit back to the FOSS community on which I depend for all my software.  Sample here.

Yet another outlet for my work, Net Resources International. They publish (online) a series of industry newsletters for a wide range of trades. I’ve written pieces for Railway-technology.com and Foodprocessing-technology.com, not as disparate as you might think, both were on IT related matters.

Now I have commissions for medicaldevice-network.com, power-technology.com and another railway-technology.com piece. Once again there’s a computer angle to each.

Started writing Commentary pages for Renewable Energy Monitor, published online by Newsbase

Just signed another book contract, this time with The Good Life Press for a book about building and gardening in discouraging circumstances. Like steep hills, no usable soil, too much rock, no workshop and not a lot of cash. Tommy Walsh I’m not! Provisional title is “Build It with Wood, Brick and Stone” but suggestions welcome.

Finally built myself a new desktop PC. The idea came about when I reviewed Mac4Lin, such a cool looking operating system really doesn’t belong on a beige box and CRT screen. So here it is…

Mac4Linintosh

Unfortunately the BenQ V2400 eco monitor is only a review model on loan, it’s going back tomorrow.

Got the stove running in my office, it’s warmer than the house…

Looks bleak, but it's cosy inside

I moved into my office weeks ago and have finally added the last few pages

Forth is an Irish news blog/website/magazine run by Jason Walsh. I met Jason (in the online sense) via Micro Mart and he’s just commissioned a short piece from me supporting engineering as a worthy profession. Read it here.

“I seriously believe that the people who brought us sub-prime loans all moved to promoting cloud computing.”

No, not me some bod on TechRepublic.

The thing no-one seems bothered to address is, bandwidth. I’ve tried Googledocs and Aviary (graphics apps online) and neither work sensibly here especially in the evenings or weekends. The web is great for file transfer and backup, Dropbox, UbuntuOne etc, but do I want to be writing a 2000 word piece on it when the screen display lags about 5 words behind my feeble typing speed? And then stop altogether when Llan’s teen population get home and fire up MySpace, Bebo, Facebook. and bring the network down to a crawl?

I’ve just started writing pieces for Suite 101. It’s a Canadian web magazine that pays a share of the Google ads income generated by a page to the writer of that page. Some people seem to make a fair bit of cash out of it. We’ll see.

First piece is here.