… make sure you’ve got a friend.

If only someone had told me! The IP camera up the lighthouse plugs into a WiFi Access Point configured as a range extender, which through an external antenna connects to another Access Point with external antenna a mile away on my roof and into my home network giving internet connectivity to upload a picture every ten minutes.

But any tiny change I make to my home network (like changing subnet ranges ) seems to break the link, and to fix it means lugging a laptop up the 112 steps of the lighthouse. And if you’ve missed something vital at the other end (like turning something on) it’s a long walk down, back home, back to the lighthouse, and all the way up to the top to try again.

I spent a whole afternoon trying to get things running again after (stupidly) trying to upgrade encryption from WEP to WPA. It doesn’t make sense that you can’t configure the wireless side of these these over a wireless connection!

So, yes, it would be so much easier if there was someone else (or another me?) at the other end with walky talky. 10-4?

http://xkcd.com/456/

That’s why I never made the leap to a Linux Desktop!

I’ve a minor gripe about Ubuntu - only ‘cos it’s caught me out a couple of times.

My local dev server is runnung Unbuntu Gutsy, and I do run apt-get upgrade etc. every now and then to keep things current.

I tend to keep most of the sites I’m working on checked out out of the repository somewhere that Apache can get to them so I can see the rendered output easily, and to make life easier I also access the server’s webroot over an SMB share from my laptop.

Life was great until I upgraded my laptop’s TortoiseSVN to 1.5.0-something-or-other as it keeps nagging to do - but if I’m careless enough to do an update on a remote working copy using Tortoise, it upgrades it to the new 1.5 format, which means it can’t be used by subversion on the boxes own command line as the Gutsy Subversion package is not up to 1.5 yet.

Twice now I’ve had to check out a fresh working copy to overcome this problem, and to save any future accidents, I’m downgrading my Tortoise to a pre-1.5 version - I looked at trying to get an ‘experimental’ Debian package installed but it looked far too risky.