Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

The granny squares bag is finished! I’ve solved the purple yarn shortage by unraveling the purple half of the bag strap and then using that to replace the brown enclosure (added a nice big crystal button too). I used the rest of the purple yarn (with some pink crochet thread) to make a small drawstring purse which is also suitable as a mobile phone case.

The bag has a shorter strap but I think it now looks a whole lot better. Below is a photo of my finished crocheted squares bag and the little drawstring purse.

Of course I’ve started a new crochet project, a small lacey purse and a zip bag, using yarn and finer crochet thread. I’ve been doing a lot of crocheting with yarn using simple combinations and have missed crocheting with finer thread using more complex combinations of stitches. It’s quite interesting, the difference.

At the moment I am using the fine crochet thread to embellish the top part of the bag since the softer thread does not hold well for a bag. This is where thicker material such as yarn is more suitable.

Soon I will need lots of paper to create the crochet patterns!

In the meantime, Trevor and I visited the computer shops again to look or a Linux laptop computer. Amazingly enough, we found a machine with Linux (Ubuntu) installed - a Neo laptop brand, which unfortunately, according to some people who own a unit, has problems with overheating - although some of the new models are supposed to have solved this problem already.

We looked at the Acer laptops and found that they had Linux Linpus (a commercial Taiwan distribution based on Fedora) installed in some of them. There is hope - I thought - that the modems in those machines would work with Linux. While most salespeople in computer shops are rather lazy when customers ask to look more closely at a unit (i.e. boot it up), we met someone in a shop who was kind enough to “show off” one Linux Linpus machine (an Acer), boot it and ask if we had the CD of the Knoppix distro I was telling him about. I told him that we’d come back with the CD.

At least someone seemed genuinely interested in what was inside the machines and not just interested in selling them!

With the Knoppix Live-CD, we should be able to see if the machine’s modem works with Linux.

And then  - as if there wasn’t enough to do :-p - I just got rid of a nasty virus in my old notebook computer. Nasty but it was fun removing it, the folder.exe virus which also invaded the smartcard of my digital camera (I just reformatted it). In the process of manually removing the virus, I saw quite a lot of garbage in the Windows Registry.

Anyway, I used Knoppix to disable a .dll file in order to keep the virus from running (at least temporarily), to view other viral hidden files and remove them. Back to Windows, I used the unhookexec.inf from Symantec to unlock the Registry editor.

Hopefully, I’d soon finally get a Linux laptop with a working modem so I can completely wipe out MS Windows from this machine!

EMail This Post This entry was posted by Fats on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 2:14 am and is filed under Fats, Vitamins & Minerals > Needleworks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.