I've mentioned before about the SATA ports being oddly laid out on the Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H motherboard. This causes problems with the fan case of the Silverstone Sugo SG-01 and SG-02 cases. The SATA ports are horizontal and face out from the edge of the board. This forces the SATA cables into the fan case. With no modification you can just about use 2 of the ports.

I've successfully upgraded to Drupal 6.1.

The upgrade to Drupal 6.0 went fine, although I missed out the step about disabling contributed modules before the upgrade. So I had about an extra 30 minutes going through sorting out the results of my mistake.

This site is now running Drupal 6. The upgrade wasn't entirely painless (partly my own fault), but it's running smoothly now. There are some contributed modules that haven't yet been upgraded to Drupal 6, so I expect some features to be missing at the moment.

This site is running Drupal 5.x. Great as that version of Drupal is, there are a few items in Drupal 6 I've been looking forward to. Mainly some of the functionality provided by contributed modules for Drupal 5.x has been brought into the core of Drupal 6.

This site is currently a test-site for my main site at Award Sounds. As such any upgrades will be performed here first and then on that site when I'm happy with the results.

In a previous article, I discussed looking for a desktop blogging tool. I tried Ecto until the end of the trial period. I liked it, I found that it did help me post (but I actually posted more on this site's sister site). I found some issues, generally quirky formatting every so often but nothing that was too troublesome. It was still better than using Drupal's own interface. Tags and images were slightly odd as well.

I'm making more of an effort to improve my bass playing. After reading a few articles about Jaco Pastorius, it's dawned on me how much I want to learn. I don't intend to get anywhere near his level. But I do want to improve and not necessarily in that style either.

I've found a few decent bass lessons on line. All of them should be free. I've yet to find any lessons that I'd pay for online. I'd much rather use the money to buy a recommended DVD or pay a tutor and learn in person.

Spinneyhead Presents has published Venn.tv.

You can go there to see the current episode.

For further information on the music and audio side, there's more detail over at
Episode 0

I'm noticing some strange behaviour to do with connecting a USB drive to the HTPC. Mainly, the front USB ports stop responding when I try to format it using GParted. At least, I think it's just the front ports. Currently I've got a USB keyboard and the USB harddrive in two separate front sockets and a USB wireless mouse receiver in the rear, but unfortunately I'm now stuck in an application that will only respond to keyboard.....and the keyboard and HTPC have stopped talking to each other.

ATI have released some newer drivers, namely the AMD Catalyst 8.01 Linux Driver, but we're still without XV support for x1250 integrated graphics.

Also interesting is possible 3D support for the RS690 chipset which I think use the X1250 IGP. In this particular case, I'll happily admit to losing track of which chipset is which.