I have been using Linux on and off since I was at college (10 or so years ago now) with a guy called Adam. We used to debate the merits of Mandrake (which has since become Mandriva) and Red Hat. This was back in the day when you had to compile your own graphics drivers and the Linux desktop world was pretty horrible. Fast forward a few years to when I was at university.

I’d like to take a few of your precious moments to talk to you about an experience, or rather collection of experiences, I’ve had over the past few months with respect to collaborating with friends.

We took a trip to Jamaica, it was hot!

I was stood in the centre of Bristol a few days ago, waiting to meet Kayleigh. Looking around, watching Bristol pass me by I glanced toward the sky. It was a beautiful sky and a plane was over head, leaving a sunset-lit trail. My first thought was “I wish I could get a decent picture of this to capture this moment.” It hit me that I was actually spending my time thinking about the type of camera/lens I would need to get a good picture, where I’d share it, what people would think etc.

I don’t know whether I should blame my parents, or if it’s just ‘one of those things’, but I can’t stand coffee. I have tried multiples times in the past to drink the stuff, all to no avail. However, I am trying again, all because of Twiglets.

I received a call at 6:20 this morning telling me that one of the websites I work on was down and had been since 01:49. As irritating as this was, it doesn’t happen very often (this is the first time I’ve been woken by a work call) and was down to Windows Update automatically rebooting the server, and the SQL Server service failing to reboot. This is all by-the-by as this post is not really about that.

I don’t really write personal blogs any more, not about my life, I tend to leave all that to Facebook (I don’t use Facebook), Google+ (Google graveyard)or Twitter. I want to write more, so here I am with a look back and a glance into the future. Last year was a pretty huge year for me a lot of things happened, mostly all good! It has ended up with me living in Bristol with my girlfriend Kayleigh and feeling pretty happy with life.

I have been mulling over writing a post on this topic for most of this year, only now whilst I’m sat in my car waiting for a parking space to become available do I seem angry enough to make a start. Like most of the western world, I watch a lot of television. Only the way I do this is perhaps not exactly typical. I download TV shows using torrents, serve them on a Linux server in a closet and then stream them to my TVs using Raspberry PIs.

Do you use IIS 7 URL Rewrite? It’s a relatively new thing for me to be using and today I stumbled upon an issue that is extremely easy to fix but somewhat difficult to diagnose. This is the second time I’ve had this problem so I figured it’s time to write something about it, to hopefully help anyone else who comes across this. This really stems from a 500 - Internal Server error from IIS.

When my second Raspberry Pi turned up, I decided that I could set them up based on the one I already had working and running the excellent raspbmc. To do this, I would install raspbmc, then copy the settings files from the old SD card to the new one. Since I wanted to run the 2 exactly the same, I didn’t see a problem with doing this. All seemed well, the Pi booted, things looked the same as they did on the first Pi, the library was working fine, I could see all of my movies & TV shows listed as they should be.