New Hardware: I got a call from a friend whilst in work telling me that Lidl (Supermarket chain) had Nokia data cables in their bargain bin. This meant a diversion on the route home to pick one up for 10ukp which is 20ukp cheaper than a phone shop. I also got a smart card reader given to me which will be fun to play with when I get spare time.

Old Hardware: Was woken up on Saturday by a loud noise coming from the Gnome2 box 5 metres from my bed Leapt out of bed fearing dead hard disk. Immediate shutdown, removal to a kitchen work surface (to the absolute delight of my parents) and diagnosis revealed faulty PSU fan. Disection of PSU and removal of dust resulted in fully restored and working PSU/Fan. Reinstallation of box in bedroom and power up resulted in different loud noise, this time it was the 30gb hard disk (sigh). An e2fsck -cp resulted in a booting system but I no longer trust the disk.

Hacking: Spent Sunday playing with a gnome Bubblemon applet and trying to port it to Gnome2 untill I found a version http://g2as.sourceforge.net/ that already works on gnome2. It is however different and the person that I was doing the other port for still wants it done so time was not wasted.

Debian Mirror Leant a 17" monitor to a friend for a week on Sunday evening and picked up 10 cds whilst round his place. The cds contained 2 day old Debian Sid (unstable) debs and I'm using them to build a local debian mirror as my connection is too slow to download them all. I haven't had this much fun disk swapping since the old days of 15 disk Amiga adventure games, I think I'm being spoilt by using an OS that can be fully installed over a network.