Well since we have started to play around with Linux Terminal Server we have also discovered that they actually work quite well as Terminal Server Clients for that. All we needed to do was install a software update to the thin clients and there we go! They just worked, which was fantastic and totally unexpected.

The thin clients that we are using are NCD ThinSTAR 200s.  Although NCD went out of business a few years ago some of the employees are still running what looks like basically a consulting firm to support all the thin clients that are already out there.  On their site you can download the software and manuals that you need to upgrade the software on the thin client.  Because of the small amount of RAM in the ThinStar we had to only set it up with two clients, so we did the Windows Terminal Server client and the Linux X Connection client.  The upgrade was simple to the new configuration (It was actually so simple that I ended up accidentally upgrading ALL of our thin clients with it one day instead of just our two test ones when we had a power outage and they all reboot with the thin client manager PC running on the network.)

These thin clients are now configured to connect to our Windows Terminal Server as well as our Linux Terminal Server which is great.  We have still not started to use Linux Terminal Server as a production server since I don’t have the hardware to run it, but the potential is definately there.

I have seen more of these thin clients come up for sale on eBay and other used computer sites around the web.  I reckon that would be the way to go, especially if you can pick them up in pallet size orders as was one deal I saw in the UK.  With a dozen of these, a terminal server, a switch, a dozen LCD monitors and a satellite connection you would have a pretty neat little package to send to a remote location.  The LCDs and thin clients wouldn’t even use that much power so it wouldn’t be impossible to run the whole thing off of a portable generator.

Other Links:

• NCD
• Linux NCD mini-HOWTO

I came across a site that tells you all the telephone country codes that you need to make international phone calls from one nation to another. Since every nation is different, and every every nation has their own codes and numbers to dial, this is a very useful tool…

• Country Codes

It’s a great tool as it seems that every country has it’s own phone codes to call outside the country, and then of course you actually need to know the international country code for the nation that you are trying to dial.

At the time we were running a primarily Windows Terminal Server network, which has been working really well for us and has greatly assisted us in cutting back our maintenance because we only have to manage a few servers instead of a couple of dozen workstations. For most applications this works really well.

One of the challenges that we have being a non-profit organization is meeting our budgets, while still providing the tools that are needed to get our work done.  This is where the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) could greatly assist us in cutting costs.  We would be able to save about $300.00 per user by using LTSP with OpenOffice over the Microsoft Terminal Server and Microsoft Office alternative.  We have even been able to get LTSP to authenticate to our Windows Domain, which is a big step in moving over to this sort of archecture.

The official Linux Terminal Server Project site is here, http://www.ltsp.org/.

OverDrive Media will not transfer my audio books to the device.

I love getting audio books from our local library. For a very small yearly fee I have almost unlimited access to downloaded audio books and ebooks. Up until now the copy protection on the audiobooks has not been a problem. Unfortunately Apple’s update to their iOS has changed that.

The OverDrive Media Console software on my computer can not transfer audio books to my iOS device.

After updating my iOS device to version 5.0 of the software I have lost the ability to transfer audiobooks from my PC to my iOS device. It’s a real pain and has yet to be fixed. I have also updated iTunes to the latest version, also without success.

In it’s forums OverDrive has acknowledged the problem, but has yet to remedy it. They claim to be working on a new version of the application that will once again allow the transfer of copy protected audio books to Apple iOS devices, but so far I’m still waiting. The software version listed on their web-site is still the same version I have on my laptop.

Hopefully in the coming weeks they will come up with a fix, preferably before my current rental of “Crush It” by Gary Vaynerchuck expires and I go back in the queue waiting for it to become available again…

In rural Papua New Guinea one in seven women die in childbirth! Yep, that’s right, 1 in 7 women die in childbirth! That’s a shocking statistic to say the least. To give birth to a child a mother has a 15% chance of dying, can you imagine?

A friend of mine, Adriel Booker, in Australia works with YWAM Ships, a ministry that is currently working on delivering medical help into Papua New Guinea. She is a Mom, blogger and fellow YWAMer who has a strong passion for helping other mothers in need. To help expectant mothers in Papua New Guinea she has started a program called Bloggers for Birth Kits to help reduce maternal mortality in rural Papua New Guinea.

The way to help is so simple that anyone can do it…

For as little as a $2.00 donation you can purchase a Birth Kit. The Birth Kit is very simple, but according to the Birthing Kit Foundation can greatly help to reduce the incidence of infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. The kit includes:

• 1 plastic sheet to provide a clean birthing surface
• 1 bar of soap for clean hands during the birthing process and to clean the umbilical stump
• 1 pair of plastic gloves for clean hands
• 1 sterile scalpel blade to cut the umbilical cord
• 3 cords / pieces of strong string to tie the umbilical chord
• 5 gauze squares to clean the baby and mother

The kit is simple, yet effective. Adriel made up her own (which you can watch on the video at the bottom of this post), but I think the most effective way for us to help is to donate.

If you do want to help with this great project, and for only $2.00 who wouldn’t want to help, you can read more about it at Bloggers for Birth Kits.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog at Help Prospective Mothers in Papua New Guinea – Bill Hutchison

Most of my music on my iPod is Country Music. Unfortunately there is no default setting on the iPod Touch for country music, so I spent quite a bit of time experimenting with the EQ to find the best setting.

Country Music comes in many different flavours from traditional country, to rocking country to country pop. Depending on what style of country music you subscribe to will affect your choice of EQ setting. Most of music leans toward traditional country music and I found that the best EQ setting for me was accoustic.

Usually I find the best setting for country music to be rock, it was the case on my last MP3 player, an iRiver, but that setting on my iPod Touch was too muffled for my liking.

Your own preference may vary, but try the accoustic setting and see how you go, then let us know your own results below in the comments. I’m curious to know if my results are typical or not.

Here is one way that you can do that quite easily:

1. Get the address for your Facebook Status RSS feed. To do that you can click on this link, http://www.new.facebook.com/minifeed.php?filter=11, when you are logged into Facebook. Then scroll down the page and on the right side you will see “Subscribe to these Stories” with a link to “My Status” under it. Right click on “My Status” and copy the URL or Link. (UPDATE May 3, 2009) Facebook changed things on us, so check out here to find out how to get your RSS feed from your Facebook Updates. Then come back here to follow the rest of the tutorial.
2. Go to www.twitterfeed.com and set-up an account there.
3. Once you have set-up an account click on “go to my twitter feeds (or create a new one)
4. Click on “Create new feed”
5. Fill out your relevant Twitter account details and then paste the URL that you copied above into the “RSS Feed URL:” box.
6. Select the update frequency (depends on how much you update Facebook.
7. In the “Include” select the option “title only” and remove the check mark next to “Include item link” (unless you want people to link to your Facebook profile with every update, in which case you will want to leave it checked).
8. Leave the next option set to “pubDate”.
9. Select a Prefix like “FB Status: ” or something similar. Keep it short.
10. Leave the other options and click on the “Create” button.

Be aware that Twitter only allows updates that are 140 characters, including the prefix that you selected in step 9. This means that you will need to keep your FaceBook status updates short, or twitterfeed will cut the end off the update.

… do you think ifreames effect the indexing of other pages on the site?

While a bot is crawling the page will it see the iframe first and crawl to it rather then crawl the rest of the page? More over, won’t this be harmful on large scale sites while trying to index inner pages?

Please any one let us know your thoughts …

Although I have not had any experience with iFrames on a site containing real content (I have used iFrames to display advertisements, but that’s about it) I got busy doing a bit of research and found that iFrames may not be indexed and displayed in the Google Search Results.

You can read what Google says about here below:

IFrames are sometimes used to display content on web pages. Content displayed via iFrames may not be indexed and available to appear in Google’s search results. We recommend that you avoid the use of iFrames to display content. If you do include iFrames, make sure to provide additional text-based links to the content they display, so that Googlebot can crawl and index this content.

That content is part of the the free help that Google offers to webmasters at their Webmaster Help Centre. You can read that answer, and more about using rich media files on your web-site here.

It’s been taking much longer than I had originally planned to finally be in a place to get a new laptop. Recently though my wife’s Dell Inspiron 2650 finally died after over 5-years of service. This has left us in the undesirable situation of only having one computer (that sounds a bit greedy after reading it, but I need one for work and she needs one for communications and support raising).

I’ve been looking at what Dell was planning to replace the Inspiron 1420 with and it looks like the Dell Inspiron 13 is it.

I reckon that the Inspiron 13 looks like a handy little laptop, and the reviews of it seem to say that for the price it’s a good value.

For the last few weeks I have been waiting for the Dell web-site in Australia to update their pages with the Dell Inspiron 13. They have had a fixed model up since the global launch of the laptop, but I don’t want their standard configuration.

Unfortunately it looks like for some stupid reason Dell Australia will not be offering customisation of the Dell Inspiron 13! According to comment #34 on this forum post they will not be offering customization on the laptop in Australia.

I tried to get confirmation of this by talking to a Dell rep, but all I was told was that I can’t customize the laptop at this time. They didn’t know if it would be possible in the future.

So now it looks like I will be waiting another 4 – 6 months and I will purchase a new Dell laptop when I get to Canada. The thing that I like the most about the Dell laptops is the International Warranties that you get with them. Because of that warranty I can purchase the laptop in Canada and get it serviced pretty much anywhere.

Gametrainer.com provides training for anyone wanting to improve their gaming skills. They will work with anyone from first time “newbies”, to “professional” gamers. They provide training for these games:

• Battlefield: Bad Company
• Call of Duty 4
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Guitar Hero III
• Halo 2
• Halo 3
• Madden NFL 09
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
• Rock Band
• World of Warcraft

There are featured tips on the site, as well as on-line guides for the games. They even provide hourly lessons for the games by their “Gamertrainers”. There are trainers specialising in the above games, and there is even opportunity to apply to be a trainer yourself.

The pricing for the hourly lessons are quite reasonable at $30.00 per hour, $80.00 for 3-hours or $130.00 for 5-hours.

If, unlike me, you have time to play games, but are not all that brilliant at them, this might be a service to look into.

As for me, I’ll stick with my once a month game of SimCity 4 (also available for the Mac) …