I'm away from home, on a training course, so time to take a metaphorical step back. And time for an update on the "tiny" computers I have scattered around the house.

I now have my raditator cover - 45 quid off ebay - in place. It's shiny, and sturdy. What more can you ask for.

I'm thinking of combining my new one & the original holed Kawasaki one, for extra-paranoid protection. In these times of heightened security...

This is what I did to get OpenWRT doing what I want on my Asus WL-HDD.

This is a description of what I did, it is not instructions. I make no claim that this will work for you - I'm not even sure it works for me.

A new radiator for a Kawasaki ER-5 will set you (or more accurately me) back an eye-watering £372 & pennies.

How many goats can you get for that kind of cash?

But I'll have the bike back on Friday, and I will be getting a radiator cover. Should be about £40, making it about a tenth of a radiator. Good investment!

So I've successfully downloaded Mandriva 2007 Beta, but before I burn it, I need to put all my DVD images in a safe place.

Yesterday an Asus WL HDD arrived from Scan. Perfect.

On the way into work this morning, I noticed plumes of smoke coming off the back of the bike. Best course of action being to get off the motorway, & the best way to get off the motorway was to follow my usual route to work.

Highways agency traffic officers (directing traffic at the M4 / M32 junction - lights out of action) didn't point anything out to me, Ducati rider at M32 / A4174 junction didn't say a word, no other drivers hooted, flashed, waved or anything.

Mandriva have released the iso's of their 2007 operating system. I'm downloading the install DVD, & will be trying it out as soon as I can!

You must have a look at this: Red mercury story at the Reg. A great example of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story. And another example of people being arrested for "being in possession of a foreign sounding name".

Daily Mail readers can now rest safely in their beds, knowing that these people have been prevented from making anything out of something that dosen't exist.

Had great difficulty getting the bike started this morning. Well, not starting, but getting going...

Ignition on, press the starter, bit of throttle, engine ticking over. Into gear, bit of throttle, let out the clutch, stall. Into neutral, start again.

I've finally got Mandriva printing through my Netgear PS110 print server. The PS110 (bought 3 years ago for about a fiver off ebay) is a great little print server - 2 parallel ports & 1 ethernet connection, in a quality metal box. It just sits there & prints. Perfect. Except Mandriva wouldn't talk to it.

After much frustration, & googling, the solution turns out to be a combination of Mandriva "GUI configuration" & classic Linux conf file editing.