I have been interested to note a certain level of bias in our news.  Now, I know politically-minded critics will say that no media is totally unbiased, but some are more likely to express opinions than others.  For instance, I am not at all surprised when Channel 4 or even ITV shows a report that is clearly in favour of one candidate over the other, but I was more surprised when the mighty BBC fell into the same trap.  I’m not at all interested in politics, and yet the media reports were such that I know plenty about Obama and next to nothing about McCain.  It’s as if this country has been told that Obama was the right person to win, and we’ve all just accepted it without realising it.  Everyone’s really pleased that Obama won, implying that we wouldn’t have been quite so overjoyed with the alternative outcome.

But what has intrigued me most is the different approach the Americans have in their elections. They vote for people, not parties.  Personality over policy.  Sure, there are those who take an interest and pay attention to what the politicians are promising, but we all know that there are only so many ways to run a country effectively.  Things have to be done in the right way, regardless of what you promise in your manifesto.  And to make this point a little clearer, I’m going to compare it to our own system of government and the way we vote (or not, as the case may be) for our Prime Minister.

And that’s just it - we don’t vote for our PM.  We vote for a party, who elects people to vote for our PM on our behalf.  I certainly don’t remember voting in Gordon Whatsisname.  Brown.  That’s the one.  The country as ruled by the Labour party hasn’t really been noticeably different from when the Conservatives were in power.  Sure, they’ve done things differently, but the country has still ticked over and kept running, just as it had been before.  All the problems Tony Blair had to contend with would have been exactly the same problems anyone else would have had to contend with.  And most would have overcome the problems in much the same way, I suspect.

Take the war with Iraq as an example.  I’m pretty sure ‘going to war with Iraq’ wasn’t on the Labour manifesto when Tony was voted in.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that Tony as a person would have been against the idea right from the start.  But the fact of the matter is that something had to be done, and we trusted our government to take action on our behalf.  And we trusted the government because we trusted Tony.  Tony was, after all, one of us.  He smiled, he had a family, he enjoyed watching football, he came up from the gutters like the rest of us.  When we voted him in it was largely because we knew this was someone who knew what the country needed, not just how to listen to advisers and make pompous speeches.  In that sense, it’s much the same with the American elections - Barack is one of us, while John is just another old man.

While Tony B was in the hotseat everyone knew where they stood.  Even while going to war and going through trouble after trouble, Tony was still there, smiling to reassure us.  Gordon can’t do that.  If Gordon Brown had told us that we were going to war with a country we’d hardly heard of for a cause none of us really knew existed, we probably wouldn’t quite so readily get behind him.  He’s not a motivational speaker, after all.  He’s not one of us.  He’s not ‘my friend in Downing Street’.  He’s just another man.  In fact, so unimpressive is Gordon that the media still has to refer to him as ‘Prime Minister Gordon Brown’, just to remind us of who he is.  And for that reason, Brits are less likely to vote him back in.

But what to put in his place?  That was the problem last time round when we ended up voting Tony back in - there was no alternative.  The other candidates were less impressive than what we already had.  So unimpressive in fact that John McCain would have wiped the floor with them.

But, as I stated right at the beginning, part of the problem we have is that we don’t vote for people, we vote for their party.  We supposedly vote for our government based on their policies and their promises, and how they’re going to make the country better.  In practise, however, only a small percentage of any party’s manifesto makes it into reality, because of the nature of governing a country.  Everything has to be done in the right way at the right time at the right pace.  The Monster Raving Loony Party had some fantastic policies in the past, but if they’d actually got into power the country would have collapsed.  In fits of laughter perhaps, but collapsed nonetheless.

While America has similar issues of having to deal with the everyday running of the country, they have voted in a leader, someone to take the initiative and take action.  In that sense it doesn’t matter quite so much what the party as a whole stands for, because they trust that Obama will push through the important stuff and make things happen.  If change is what that country needs, they don’t want a leader who takes action by forming sub-committees.  That’s the sort of thing I would expect from Gordon Brown.  Barack Obama strikes me as the sort of person who, if a national crisis took hold on a Hollywood movie scale, would be out there with the people, rallying support, giving powerful speeches to motivate people to action.  McCain strikes me as the sort who would sit in his office writing letters to people asking them to sort everything out.  It’s not their policies that make the difference, it’s the way they make things happen.

And possibly for that reason alone, the Americans got out there and voted.  Regardless of who they voted for, they voted.  They were passionate and fired up, excited about the future of their country.  They were voting for a person, a real person with real values and real emotions.  They were both, in their way, people to get excited about.  Here in England, passion and politics only go hand in hand where a bottle of sherry and oak-panelled walls are the background for a group of old men wishing they could smoke indoors again like they used to.  Brits don’t vote because there doesn’t seem much to vote for.  What’s one old man got that another old man hasn’t?  If we vote for one party instead of another, will it actually make any difference?  That’s the mindset of the people, and if we carry on voting for abstract concepts instead of tangible people I doubt that’s going to change.

After a few e-mails and phone calls to the publishers, Cornerstone Vision, I ended up sending them a small advert, and I’m pleased to report that it’s in this month’s Month!  The newspaper will be delivered to churches in Essex and East London soon, so you’ll be able to pick up a copy free from any Anglican church in the area, or of course you can download it to view on your computer.  And my advert appears on page 3!  How cool is that?!  I’ve got another two ads lined up for further issues too, so hopefully I’ll see some return on that.

So far my business has been going quite well without the need for advertising.  Most of my clients have heard about me through word of mouth or through links from web sites I’ve designed.  I did send a load of e-mails out to churches last January, and got a couple of new clients that way, but this is actually the first time I’ve actually put any money into advertising properly.  I did debate whether paying for additional coverage on Yell.com would be of benefit, but it turned out to be rather expensive and not necessarily targetting the sort of people who would be interested in my services.

Advertising in The Month should in theory be a much better approach for me.  Since I specialise in providing web sites for churches and Christian organisations, it makes sense to advertise in places where those people might look.  And it turns out to be fairly affordable too - for three ads in non-consecutive issues it came to somewhere in the region of £170.  So as long as I get at least one client from it, I’ll make my money back!  That’s not bad.  I wait with baited breath…

And, as if that wasn’t enough, I’ll soon be able to boost my business slightly by being able to offer web hosting packages too.  I’m still putting the details together and making sure I know exactly what I’m doing (after all, there’s no point providing hosting solutions if I can’t offer quality), but it’s gonna happen fairly soon.  I’ve transferred my business web site to the new server, and I’ll be transferring my existing clients there soon too, and once that’s done I’ll be able to start offering a range of packages to everyone else too.  With a 20% discount for churches, naturally.  It’s all quite fun actually, putting all the packages together, and should make my web design services all the more attractive, being able to provide a full package.  Of course, whether anyone actually takes me up on these offers is another matter, but only time will tell.

To my surprise, I found it was a clever invention that was recently on BBC’s Dragons’ Den, and which looked to be an amazing piece of brilliance.  The Standby-Saver looks much like an ordinary multi-way extension block, with six sockets and a white plastic case.  What wasn’t quite so familiar was the infra-red receiver and its claim to be ‘green’.  So I bought it, and installed it, and set it up, and found myself unable to contain my delight, hence this post.

The principle of the Standby-Saver is this: using your existing remote controls it can physically turn off up to six devices that would ordinarily be on standby, with the option of having two of those six on permanently instead.  So, to take our example, we have the TV, aerial, VCR and DVD player plugged into the Standby-Saver.  All but the TV would ordinarily stay on standby because they don’t have physical off buttons, so unless you pull the TV out and go fumbling around amongst the mass of cables to try to unplug them they all stay on standby, their little red LEDs lighting up the corner of the room at night.  I have programmed the Standby-Saver to respond to the power button on the TV’s remote.  When I press that button, the TV goes on standby, as you’d expect, but the signal is also picked up by the Standby-Saver, and a few seconds later it turns off everything plugged into it.  Press it again, and everything powers back on again.  Genius.

I wouldn’t call myself a green-freak, but I do my bit where I can, and this has been something that’s been bugging me for ages.  Leaving all those devices on standby every night is a shameful waste of electricity, and now the Standby-Saver has solved my problem by making it quick and easy to turn them off completely.  I think it’s a fantastic idea, well executed, great value for money (currently £20 at Tesco), and an enormous weight off my mind.

And no, I’m not being paid by Standby-Saver to say all this.  I just think it’s a marvellous invention, the creator needs a medal, and you should all go out and buy one.  Or two.  Or several.

To add to my frustration, my business e-mails aren’t working at the moment.  I’ve sent a query to the company running the server, so hopefully they’re looking into it, but it’s quite crippling because I rely on my e-mails on a daily basis.  Personal e-mails are unaffected, but anything to do with the business is eerily quiet.  And I have no idea if the e-mails are ever going to reappear - they’re not bouncing back, but neither are they appearing in my inbox, they’re just floating off into another dimension or something.

Nothing else to report really, just expressing my frustration at things not working perfectly.  Technology may have come on a long way in the last 50 years, but it’s still got a long way to go before it’s all completely user-friendly.

For those not in-the-know, VNC is basically a screen sharing protocol.  When I was ChapAss I would load up my VNC program, tap in the IP address of my computer at home, and VNC would show me my own desktop and allow me to use the computer as if I was physically sat in front of it.  The benefit for me at that point was that I could use all the programs I was familiar with (which were far better than the ones the uni computers provided) and keep all my files in one place.  It worked really well, apart from when my computer crashed - then it meant phoning the house to see if anyone was in who could restart the computer.

Now, working from home, I have no need of VNC in quite the same way.  However, I do have two computers and only one monitor, so it still comes in handy sometimes.  My Mac is my main computer, on which I do pretty much everything.  But I also have a PC dual-booting XP and Ubuntu, mainly for testing purposes - it’s good to know that my web sites work on ‘normal’ computers too.  And Linux.  So rather than connecting a keyboard, mouse and monitor to my PC, taking up valuable space on my desktop, I VNC into the machine when I want to use it, using both computers from one monitor and set of controls.

Of course, there is one small problem that needs to be overcome for this to work properly, and the root of that problem is that traditionally Mac mice have only one button.  With only one mouse button, how do you right click on an operating system that depends on it?

So far I’ve been using JollysFastVNC, which is a pretty good VNC client for the Mac.  Right-clicking on the Mac operating system is usually accomplished by holding down the CTRL key and clicking, and JollysFastVNC translates that to a right-click nicely.  So all is well.  Until, just recently, an update to JFV meant that I couldn’t hibernate Windows any more.

I use hibernation quite a lot on XP, and I have to admit I miss that on the Mac.  To hibernate, one holds down shift while pressing the Sleep button in the shutdown box.  That worked fine until recently, when the Shift key stopped being sent from JFV.  Not good.  Right-clicks still worked, but shift was just being ignored.

Thankfully, Leopard actually provides its own VNC client in the form of its Screen Sharing accessory.  I say accessory because it’s not in the main Applications folder, but hidden away somewhere that’s not exactly easy to come by.  The idea is that you initiate Screen Sharing from the Finder, and Leopard goes off and finds the Screen Sharing app for you.  But of course that only works if the PC in question is showing up on the network.  Which mine isn’t.  Silly PC.  Thankfully I can enter the IP address of the computer and go in directly, though that does require me to remember the IP address.  And I can choose to keep the Screen Sharing app in the dock so I don’t have to go looking for it each time.

In actual fact the Screen Sharing app is pretty decent.  It’s faster than JFV, the mouse is more responsive, and the screen refreshes more intelligently.  All in all, a fantastic piece of kit, and one that is set to replace JollysFastVNC outright.  Except for one small niggle.  Screen Sharing doesn’t know what to do with right-clicks.  Holding down CTRL and clicking sends a CTRL-left-click to the other computer, which isn’t exactly what I want.  Solution?  Plug a two-button mouse into my Mac.

Now, to Mac purists, this is undoubtedly blasphemy.  Macs have always had single button mice.  It’s what’s always set them apart.  After all, why have two or three mouse buttons when you can do everything with one?  Still, Apple developers appreciated that not everyone was a purist, so has kindly provided support for pretty much any USB mouse, regardless of the number of buttons.  So, out came my PC’s mouse, with two buttons and a scroll wheel (that’s one thing I have missed).  Firing up Screen Sharing showed that the right click was being correctly sent via VNC as a right-click, as you’d expect.  And right-clicks in Leopard are interpretted as right-clicks, or what would have been produced by CTRL-clicking before.  My only problem now is getting used to having two buttons - I’m finding myself right-clicking by accident, because I’m so used to pressing the whole front of the mouse down.

So, it looks like I’m going to have to retrain my hand to use a two-button mouse again.  It still feels wrong, somehow, like trying to ride a motorcycle with 6 wheels.  I may have to look into getting a MightyMouse, maybe that will feel more appropriate.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time recently investigating all the hosting options available to me.  And there are lots.  Buying individual hosting packages from companies isn’t really an option, as there is so little markup that it’s just not worth considering.  A reseller package is far more suitable, allowing me to set up hosting packages for people without having to worry about the server itself, which is completely managed by the hosting company.  A step up from that and you’ve got Virtual Private Servers (VPS), which gives you a lot more control and room for expansion.  Above that is a Dedicated Server, which is a VPS without the Virtual bit.  I’ll go into more detail on that in a bit.

Reseller accounts

There are a lot of companies selling reseller packages, each with varying limits imposed.  There doesn’t seem to be any sort of benchmark or standard package, everyone is offering different amounts of storage and bandwidth at completely different prices.  That all makes it rather hard to make sense of it all.  One company will be offering 4GB of storage and 60GB monthly bandwidth for around £300, while another will be promising 7GB of storage and 40GB bandwidth for less than £120.  Go figure.

Combined with the specs and prices you’ve also got to think about the company itself and how reputable it is.  I’ve spent a lot of time reading posts on the Web Design Forum, where (amongst other things) people praise and demonise hosting companies.  You see, a reseller package still relies on the hosting company for the technical side of keeping the server running and secure and up to date.  A hosting company can be offering unlimited everything at a budget price, but if their servers are offline on a regular basis it’s hardly worth it.  By the same token, a hosting company with an excellent reputation, such as Clook, can afford to bump their prices up.

Reseller accounts are essentially aimed at people who want to sell web space without the hassle of knowing anything about servers or hosting.  It’s all done through a web-based control panel such as Plesk or cPanel, and at the click of a few buttons they can create web hosting packages with no fuss and no technical knowledge.  Of course, it does mean that if the customer does have any problems with the server then they come to me, and I have to go back to the original hosting company rather than being able to do anything myself.

So, reseller accounts are good, but can be expensive if you’re planning on hosting lots of web sites.  And for reference, my list of existing clients with hosting provided by me comes to 22.  Not loads, but enough that a cheap reseller account probably won’t be big enough.

VPS

A VPS can be thought of as a bridge between a Reseller account and a Dedicated server.  It gives you a lot more scope for expansion and control than a reseller package, but without all the hassle of running a dedicated server.  A dedicated server, incidentally, is like owning your own server, except that someone else physically looks after the computer bit; you have to make sure the software is up to date and correctly set up to be secure and efficient, and are responsible if anything goes wrong with it.  A VPS, especially a managed VPS, takes some of that responsibility away, because the hosting company will set up all the software for you and take care of providing upgrades and so forth, leaving you free to get on with using it without having to worry about too much technical stuff.

Of course, it’s not going to be completely hands-off, because you do have root access and are expected to at least have a go at sorting yourself out if there are any problems.  Limits on storage space and bandwidth are a lot higher than a comparative reseller package though.  So as long as I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then, a VPS could work out a lot more efficient and a lot cheaper than a reseller scheme; it would just mean I’d have to make sure I know what I’m doing with the server so I don’t annoy the hosting company with questions all the time!  Technically the VPS packages I’ve been looking at are nicely managed, so the day-to-day maintenance will be taken care of for me, but if I’ve got access to everything it would make sense for me to at least have a rough idea of how it all works.

So there we go.  Lots of stuff about hosting.  I have to admit, part of the reason for this post has been to solidify it all in my own mind.  Those who know me will know that making decisions has never been one of my strong points!  Writing it all down here kind of forces me to bring it all to some sort of conclusion, which is good because it means there is a chance I might make a decision.  With that in mind, my conclusion is that as long as there are no glaring ommissions in my calculations, a VPS will be the way to go.  I can transfer all my existing clients to the VPS and have complete control over it all, and have plenty of room to start offering hosting packages to the general public.

At least, that’s the conclusion I would like to make.  It does mean I’m making a decision, which isn’t easy, as I also then have to act on that decision.  So feel free to comment (please comment!!!) to give your opinion one way or the other.  If you have any experience using a VPS or even a dedicated server and can shed any light on what is involved beyond a reseller package, it would be much appreciated.

Unfortunately, having a Ford Escort as well now as my daily runner, the Mini has been left neglected in the garage.  Now, normally this would be a good thing; the garage is dry and safe, so in that sense it’s the best place for it.  What I forgot to do was disconnect the battery.  As a result, the month and a half it’s been sat stationary has drained the battery almost to its limits, the consequence being that the car won’t start.  Ordinarily, not the end of the world.  But it was supposed to be going in for its MOT today, so that’s had to be postponed until I can get the car running again.

Thankfully the garage round the corner has been very helpful, and has offered to charge the battery overnight to give it a full dose of energy.  They’ll then be able to test it to make sure it’s still working, and if it is I’ll be able to pop it back in the Mini and get it MOTed tomorrow.  If the battery is dead, I can always pop into town and buy a new battery, and still get the car MOTed tomorrow.  So it’s not the end of the world.

It’s just rather frustrating that my own negligence caused the problem in the first place.  I have to admit, I had just sort of forgotten that I had a Mini in the garage.  I did manage to get the car started briefly yesterday by bump-starting it, and had a quick drive around to make sure everything else was still working.  At first the brakes were stuck on a bit, but they soon loosened up.  What surprised me most was how fun it was - I had forgotten just how much like a go-kart the Mini is!  Of course I’ve always known this, but having been driving a ‘normal’ car for the last month and a half I had got used to its refinement and quietness.  Neddy roared and bumped along the road, loving being out on the road again.  It certainly brought a smile to my face!  And a gut-wrenching shame in putting the car up for sale.

There is a ray of hope though for Neddy’s future.  I did have someone get in touch with me the other day enquiring about the Mini, so they should be coming round on Sunday to have a look.  I’m just hoping it will have passed the MOT by then so it’ll be road-worthy, because I’m going to struggle to sell the car if they can’t take it for a test drive!

In other car news, I have also discovered a problem with the Escort.  Actually, to tell the truth, I discovered the problem a while back, but only today found the cause.  I noticed soon after buying the car that it was low on power steering fluid, so topped it up.  I did note at the time that there appeared to be some leakage around the reservoir, but couldn’t see where the leak might be.  Today I found it.  There is a pipe plugged into the top of the reservoir which, I presume, is for bringing the fluid back to the reservoir after it’s been round the system.  The clip holding the rubber pipe on clearly isn’t quite tight enough to make a good seal, and it’s leaking ever so slightly from there.  It’s not a massive problem, as it’s not exactly spurting out all over the place, but I don’t really want to be topping the fluid up every month if I can help it.  So I just need to replace the clip with something a little more adequate, and hopefully that will put that problem to rest.

I suppose it all just goes to show, all cars have problems, not just the old ones.

It all stemmed from a problem I was having, and searching the net hadn’t provided an answer, so I felt asking some actual people might prove more effective.  And so I found myself wandering around the Web Designer Forum, a UK-based community (well, the web site is based in the UK, the members could be from anywhere I suppose) specifically for web designers like me.  I was able to introduce myself, ask my first question, get some responses, and answer some questions other people had, all within a couple of days of discovering the site.  They seem like a genuinely nice bunch of people, so I’m expecting to hang around this site for some time!

A knock-on effect of this is that it also counts as advertising for my business web site, the URL for which is slipped into my signature.  Incidentally, my site recently had a major upgrade, so if you haven’t had a look recently then I encourage you to take a peek.  It’s got a revised look and feel, a proper company logo (at last), and some set packages for web sites rather than doing it all on an hourly rate.  Obviously each project will need to be taken on individually, and even if people request a package I may advise them differently if what they want and what that package offers differs wildly, but it should help people see just how much - or indeed, how little - web sites can cost.

Sorry, shameless plug over!

Anyway, the main point I was trying to share is that I’m enjoying being part of a community again.  Now that I’m selling my Mini, my involvement with the Colchester Mini Club has diminished, much to my disappointment, and I’m missing contact with the outside world.  Okay, so an internet forum isn’t quite the same as meeting with real people, but it’s better than nothing!  And it is something else I’m genuinely interested in.  I’ve also been able to answer several people’s questions so far too, which is encouraging because it suggests I may be better at this whole web design thing than I often give myself credit for.  Humility and business rarely walk hand-in-hand when you’re trying to sell your services!

Anyway, a byproduct of that temporary glitch was that I started looking into getting Linux working again.  I say again, it wasn’t actually broken before.  I had installed Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy on the PC over a year ago and never really used it because I couldn’t get it to recognise the wireless dongle I had.  However, having got Windows back online with a CAT5 cable I decided to see if I could persuade Ubuntu to go online too.  And that’s proved to be a mammoth operation, and I’ve got little work done today so far.

The first hurdle was to get Ubuntu to use the ethernet connection to access the internet.  Now, I wouldn’t call myself a hard-core geek.  Maybe a soft-core geek.  Whichever, I have never really played with Linux much before, and it’s all still rather foreign to me.  Last time I tried to get it online I spent ages looking through forums randomly typing commands into the terminal to try to get it to do things, and had no idea what any of the commands were.  I have a feeling that probably contributed to the difficulty I had today trying to reverse whatever it was I did last time, which I’ve completely forgotten.

In the end I think I managed to completely remove the wireless driver and all reference to there being a way onto the net via a wireless network.  I think.  A little more tweaking and gentle prodding finally yielded some positive results - Firefox jumped into life and started showing web pages!  Hoorah!!

Of course, that wasn’t quite enough.  6.10 Edgy is actually quite old now, and I needed to upgrade to the latest distribution.  Now, on most other operating systems this means buying the install CDs and either wiping your hard disk and starting afresh or upgrading your old system to the new one.  But because Linux is open-source it’s all free to download.  It’s like upgrading from Windows XP to Vista over the internet, or even Mac OS X Tiger to Leopard.  It’s a pretty hefty operation.  And it wasn’t working.

Ubuntu has a clever little system for installing software.  Rather than going to the provider’s web site and downloading an install program, all the available software is available from a central list, and you just click it to install it.  Ubuntu takes care of giving you the most up to date list of programs, downloading all the files needed for the software and installing it for you.  Nice.  Except that for that to work it needs to know where to look to find all these programs, and that’s what wasn’t working for me.  Neither could it upgrade the main Ubuntu installation, because none of the upgrade files appeared to exist online for it to refer to.  I would type in ’sudo apt-get upgrade’ and it would complain that all the files it was looking for were not there - all of them gave a 404 error.  A quick check in Firefox showed that it wasn’t lying - the files really weren’t in the place it was looking.

After a lot of searching on various forums I found that the Edgy files had been taken off the servers because it was old and not supported any more.  That makes sense I suppose.  And after all, I didn’t want to upgrade to Edgy, because that’s what I already had.  I wanted to upgrade to Feisty, which is the latest release at the moment.  Finally I found someone telling me that to upgrade to Feisty I needed to change the locations in /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Feisty instead of Edgy.  Sounds simple?  Yeah, I thought that too.  I did manage to find someone’s blog post that went through it step by step though, giving the process of updating the sources.list file, so I did that.

Thankfully at that point it all started to work.  Or at the very least appear to work.  The apt-get update command found all the files it was looking for, and going back into the System Updates screen showed a whole list of updates that weren’t being shown before.  To begin with it tried to persuade me that I needed to upgrade to 6.10 Edgy, which was actually what I already had, so I cancelled that and went back and told it to upgrade to 7.04 Feisty.  Right now it’s downloading all the files, which is all very positive.  It hasn’t complained so far, it’s found all the source files it needs, and it’s connected to the internet.  Good stuff.  Whether it finishes the installation without any problem is another matter, but since the whole process could take a couple of hours I’ve got time to spare.

This all begs the question - “why do I need Linux?”  Am I turning into a geek?  Well, not really, because I was already almost a geek.  Almost.  I still wouldn’t call myself a geek really, not in the truly geeky sense.  I still have no idea what most of the commands are that I’ve been typing in, nor what their effect has been.  And it’s not like Ubuntu is going to become my primary operating system either, because it’s on the wrong computer.  If I installed it on my Mac it might be a different matter, but then I wouldn’t be using my Mac.  I like my Mac.  It’s fun.  In all honesty Ubuntu (if it works) will probably only get used for testing purposes so I can check that web sites look all right on Linux machines.  The plan will be to set up a VNC server on it so I can remote desktop into it from my Mac.

There is one quirky little thing about Linux I just find hilarious though, and that’s the command ’sudo’.  I’ve no idea what it’s meant to mean, but as far as I can tell its main function is to override various security measures.  For instance, if I wanted to edit a system file it wouldn’t let me, unless I sudo it.  It’s like the following conversation between me and Ubuntu:

“Do something.”

“Hah, no chance.”

“Sudo do something.”

“Oh, all right then.”

I have also been taking plenty of photos, partly for my own reference and geekiness, and partly because I got a lot of comments on YouTube of people asking me how it all worked, and since I’ve not seen anyone else do anything like this on anywhere near the same level of technical accuracy I felt it might be useful to someone!  I’ll try to include some photos in this post, but I’ll be putting them up on a central gallery too, so take a look there if you’re interested.

Day One

My initial plan to put motors in has fallen through, unfortunately.  The first day of the rebuild comprised mostly of experimenting to try to get a reliable working rear axle, in such a way as to get an electric motor driving the wheels (via a differential), and have some sort of suspension at the same time.  As it turned out (despite all the mind-numbing research I had done previously) this wasn’t possible.  Lego is good, but it’s not that good.  At least not with the parts I’ve got and at the scale I’m trying to build.  So in the end I had to give up on the idea of being able to reproduce it all like that, and focus on just rebuilding the existing model in a better, more professional way.

I started off by looking at the steering mechanism.  In my original model I used a transverse rack and pinion system on each arm to convert the rotational action to a backwards-forwards motion, which in turn was linked to the custom axle to turn the wheel on its pivot.  All sounds rather technical, and in the original design it looked excessively complicated and messy, so my first job was to try to simplify it or at least make the mechanism more elegant.

The solution turned out to be a combination of my rack and pinion setup and a pivot bar as used by other models.  I used the same method of getting the action into the bar, by using a universal joint centred on the pivot point of the arm; this ensures that the steering isn’t affected by the angle of the arm in any way, which is a more reliable way of steering and avoids bump-steering.  You’ll see from the photos how it all works in practice, and how tidy it all is too.

Day Two

With one working proof-of-concept front arm sorted, creating a mirrored version for the other side was no problem, and soon I was on to making a subframe to mount the arms on.  That led on to linking the steering mechanisms each side together.  I’m using my usual approach of sending the steering to the back of the vehicle so I can steer and push at the same time, rather than what official Lego models tend to do and put the steering wheel on the top of the vehicle.  Just personal preference really.  And means one less set of cogs between controller and wheels.

Having concluded that a live axle wasn’t going to work, I fell back on the independent suspension setup I had used on the original model, modifying it slightly to take into account that the new model was looking like it was going to be slightly smaller.  I also took the opportunity to put in two suspension coils on each wheel rather than just one, which should make the suspension stiffer and more able to cope with the weight of the vehicle.  It may turn out to be overkill, but it’s easier to take one set out than to try to squeeze one in later.  If nothing else, it looks fun.

A quick play around back at the front of the vehicle gave me some basic suspension on the front arms.  It’s nowhere near strong enough to take the weight of the car yet, but it did allow me to take it for a quick test drive around the lounge to make sure everything was working nicely.  Unfortunately, not everything was.  It soon became apparent that there was just far too much ‘give’ in the steering mechanism, which meant that once the vehicle was pushed forward the front wheels tried to turn outwards.  I tried adjusting the central link to make them point in, but the excess movement just made them turn in on themselves instead.  Not good.

It looks like the problem is in the excessive use of cog wheels, the fault being in the older style wheels.  The newer style ones are much better and give a tighter connection.  Thankfully I happen to have just enough newer style cogs to replace the old ones, but it will mean changing stuff on the front arms to take the different size cogs.  Hopefully that will solve the problem; there may still be a little excess movement in the bar connecting to the axle via a ball joint, but my observations so far have shown the vast majority of the movement to be confined to the cogs, so I’m hoping my next evening’s attempts will bring the steering to an acceptable standard.

That just leaves refining the front suspension, doing some heavy-duty testing on the whole setup, and building some bodywork on the frame to make it look a bit more realistic.