Turtlespond a website of miscellanea belonging to Rick Miles

turtlespond.net

What's this all about?

When I was a kid there was a pond at the bottom of the hill at the end of our road. It was called "Turtlespond" by everyone young and old. This was where we played. We caught frogs, fish, snakes and turtles there. We hunted small game in the surrounding woodland. Our mothers gathered wild flowers and plants to bring home for their gardens. Our fathers came down with us to ice skate in the winter.

In the summer it was quiet and smelled of undisturbed life stretching back into time. In the winter there was laughter, shouting and the smell was of fresh fallen snow and wollen mittens drying over open fires.

Google Earth tells me that Turtlespond is now just a memory buried under modern development and here on the other side of the world I have to resort to things like fiddling around with this website to keep me out of trouble ......well almost.

Herein you will find my personal pages with some pictures, recipes and what not and you will find links to Linux and Slackware related pages further down this page.

I live and work on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, Australia, and if you are looking for my business website it is www.rickmiles.com.au. Drop by if you need someone for painting, carpentry, property maintenance or handywork.

I'm a tinkerer by nature. I like to take things apart to see how they were put together and to see how they work. This inclination has extended to electronics and computers. In 2000 I started playing around with the GNU/Linux operating system. I could run it on just about any PC I patched together and I could configure it to run exactly the way I wanted it to run both under the hood and on the screen.

Our home now runs exclusively on Slackware, the oldest surviving commercial distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system. We can do anything we want with Slackware, timeshift digital TV shows to watch when we want, homework, graphics, manage a business and network printers, a scanner and video. All this on a safe secure platform that will run well on older hardware unsuitable for the latest and greatest in proprietary operating systems.

Slackware is Open Source software that can be downloaded for free off the internet although its a nice idea to donate to the project. While not a developer I have tried over the years to give something back to the community by helping out Linux newbies when I can and putting some things which might be helpful to others up on this website.

Below I will provide a list of links that may be of interest to some among you who might have wandered this far down the page:

KDE-4.2 hints for Slackware; After upgrading to KDE-4.2 there were some rough edges that needed attention :^)

DVB-T with command line tools; This seems to be the most hit page on my website.

Passwordless SSH; This is the second most popular page.

List of all help pages; This includes the above plus notes on CUPS, installing a Slack workstation, my Slack server and some other things.

Bash Scripts; Here's a page with links to scripts I have written and used for time shifting digital TV, encoding and burning DVD's, capturing audio directly off the sound card, and a couple other things CLI or at system level.

Bash Scripting Tutorial; This is a talk I gave to the Melbourne Linux Users Group last year.

Well thanks for stopping by. There's no guest book here but if you have come this far and have a burning desire to contact me just use rickmiles at this domain (without the "www.", Linda!)

........Oh! and don't forget, if you live on the Morningtom Peninsula, I'd be happy to talk to you about your painting, carpentry, property maintenance and handyman needs.

There are contact numbers and a contact email form at www.rickmiles.com.au.

......And! If you're planning a trip to New Mexico don't miss your chance to stay at the best Bed and Bed and Breakfast in Albuquerque, Adobe Nido. My sister, Sarah, runs the place.

Cheers!