There are too many different Icelands to count. That is, you can drive around the UK for days and all you'll see is green hills, or green plains. Iceland is a relatively young country, however, and bits of it are far older than other bits. Here's the scene when we arrived in the Leifur Eiriksson Airport in Keflavik:

Flat and barren but with lumps of sharp rock sticking out everywhere- lava that cooled quickly and stuck in weird and dangerous shapes. You'd never be able to walk across this type of terrain for long without at least twisting your ankle.
It was also like this in Reykjavik, although that's on a bit of a hill, and obviously it's been flattened out to put roads and houses on. As soon as you leave the suburbs it's like this as far as the eye can see!

However, it's quite different on the North coast, where we went the day after we arrived:

As usual, click any of the images for a larger popup.
This is the campsite we lived in for a week. Notice the dramatic change in scenery! This area is as old as it gets in Iceland and so there are rolling hills and cliffs, and grasses, mosses and even trees have begun to grow up. There are no large (natural) trees anywhere in the country, as it simply isn't old enough to support them naturally. The Icelandic people have planted a lot, though.

It's interesting to note that it never gets any darker than this in the summer. If the mountains hadn't been in the way then the sun would never have set! Travel tip: If you're going to Iceland, take some kind of blindfold.

This isn't the only thing you can see in the North, though.

This is pretty much a desert. Driving at 40mph in a coach along this type of ground is rather bumpy! No, there wasn't a proper road, just a well-ridden track. It's still in the North, but away from the sea, where there's less water during the summer months. Eventually one day I guess this'll be green and full of plants and trees as well, but not yet.

This is near a place called Dettifoss, which is so far from anywhere it doesn't have electricity or water, and the only building is a little toilet shack that's only really a hole in the ground. It looks just like a lunar landscape - the desert would have looked like this now if it wasn't made of sandstone, which has crumbled away over the years.

There's still some signs of life even here, though, and here's a sneak peek at something I might cover later!

Finally we head back downwards right to the South coast, and the geothermal power station near Grindavik, and the famous Blue Lagoon. The water you can see is heated to about 38 degrees C by mother nature and provides power for half the South coast. Not wanting it to go to waste, the clever people have built a spa next door and you can have a very relaxing swim in the water, which is basically a giant vat of moisturising cream. It worked wonders on all the cuts and bruises I had after the jamboree!

With a distinct lack of blog posting during and after my holiday I thought I should post a catch-up. I did write a rather short post while I was away but the computer threw a wobbly and wouldn't post it, and after that I completely forgot about blogging. I couldn't possibly fit everything I've done into one post, so I'll probably make a couple of posts over the next week or two, with a specific event and a couple of pictures in each.

It was a fantastic holiday! We were graced by the warmest week ever recorded in Iceland, and we all made many new friends from around the world. It didn't start particularly well, being delayed in Stansted for two hours, and then landing in the pouring rain at Keflavik airport, but after the clouds cleared up all was fine. They have an unmanned monorail at Stansted that takes you to your gate, which is rather scary because there's noone driving, but also very very cool! When we came home we all filed out and stood on the platform, and the little train came chugging along, just like it knew exactly when we were going to turn up! They just need to paint a Thomas the Tank Engine face on it and it'd be perfect.

Anyway, the monorail wasn't the highlight of my holiday. Things I enjoyed:

• White-Water Rafting
• Coach tour of the North including mountains, deserts, lunar landscapes, waterfalls and dirt tracks
• Building a campsite out of telephone poles and wooden crates
• The spectacular views!
• The way everything was so organised and worked so well at the camp

When I got home I wasn't as tired as I was when I returned from Switzerland last year, as I'd had a good chance to sleep on the plane/bus on the way home. Being delayed for 10 hours in Keflavik airport helped that, too, but was pretty rubbish in other ways.
Since then I've looked high and low all over the country, quite literally, for Doctor Who Magazine 398, which has 4 collectors edition covers - I chose the one with Luke (Tommy Knight), Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) and K9 (John Leeson) because of pure awesomeness. Unfortunately, both WHSmiths in Arrivals at Stansted had sold out, as had the newsagent in Coventry coach station and the local newsagent at home. I finally managed to grab a copy yesterday at the WHSmith in town, which looked to have just stocked up on them, as the shelf was full but they were selling like hotcakes.

I also snagged the new Artemis Fowl book, which I know has only just come out, and the new Alex Rider book, although I hadn't heard about that one so it could've been out for ages. I'm reading Artemis Fowl - The Time Paradox now, as I'll have to read the previous Alex Rider book again before I read the new one to refresh my memory of it. It starts well!

Anyway, I have about 600 photos to rotate, organise, touch up and delete as nessecary over the next week, and then another 400 or so from my Scout leader when he sends his pictures over.

Considering I'd never been outside the UK until last summer, this is all going pretty quickly!

Most people reading this will know I'm off to Iceland in about four hours from now. Well, I'm off to the bus station in town, to catch a National Express bus to London Victoria, then another one to Stansted airport, to arrive at a nice 8am or something. After that we catch the Iceland Air flight to Kaflavic (I think that's the spelling) and two short hours later, land in the land of Sigur Rós and EVE Online developers CCP! Note that I'm probably not going to see either of those, as Sigur Rós are currently on tour somewhere and I have no idea where the CCP offices are in Reykjavik.

I'm going with 7 other people: two friends, four brothers and their parents! We have to take everything with us to survive for two weeks... including tents, cooking stuff, and all that kind of thing. According to the campsite map there are plenty of showers, but how good they are I won't know until I get there! The first night we're camping near the airport at a campsite called "Alex", which is funny because our youngest camper is also called Alex, which ensures a large amount of mix-ups and hilarity will ensue. The next morning we're packing up and taking a Scout bus a couple of hundred miles to Akureyri, on the North coast. There we'll be camping for a week, before taking a bus back to the Reykjavik area and loitering around there for a while. I doubt there'll be accessible|fast|reliable|cheap (choose any) internet at the campsite, but if by some miracle there is I'll be sure to blog up some brief descriptions of my activities!

We're heading back home to arrive in Chesterfield at 3am on the 1st of August, where I'll be sure to spend the whole of the following week relaxing and recovering. I'm pretty miffed that our camera's card only holds 60 photos, so if I spot a cheap 1GB card in an airport shop I'll have to snap it up. Anything's better than 128MB! On a completely unrelated note, my boss got a new camera and it's pretty awesome. It's the one from the TV advert with the Golden Gate bridge, and it's really small and cool. I'd have bought one if I'd seen it before Saturday afternoon, our 3.2MP 128MB camera is starting to look a little dated.

Anyway, I'd best be off, packs to check, clothes to wear, planes to catch and all that. If I never post again you'll know why - I'm going white-water rafting!

Fyrirgefðu, hvar er klósettið? Því miður, ég tala ekki íslensku.

Bless!

I'm pretty happy to have finally got somewhere with what's basically been a year-long project: turning an old PC I got given into a fully-fledged server and media centre. I knew I wanted to call it Pegasus because it's generally a cool name. I call my desktop Apollo and if I ever get a proper laptop I'll call it Deadalus, so maybe you'll see a running theme going on...

It's gone from a horrible beige case that I daren't take a picture of without stripping it down:

to a lovely, quiet, small black case I got for a bargain price of £27 from eBuyer. Being the techy person I am, I didn't think to take any pictures while I was installing the 1.4Ghz Duron motherboard, but here's one of the new silent fan I clipped on before the case arrived: (Click for larger)

It took a lot of fiddling, but eventually I managed to get it all nicely set up with Ubuntu Server, and all the usual apache/MySQL/PHP you have on a server. I then turned my attention towards mpd. It was easy to copy all my music to the internal RAID 0 array (Yes, don't kill me for using RAID0! It has an 80GB HD and a 40GB HD and this was the most useful way of using them.) and set up the mpd server so that I could pop to http://pegasus/music in any browser on my home network and make up a playlist, using the very nice RelaXXPlayer (http://relaxx.sourceforge.net/) The only problem was, running the sound through the TV was a little energy-wasting because there was no picture, but the LCD screen was still turned on. So I decided to utilise this and set up an X server with a visualisation!

About a week later, and after a lot of searching and deliberating, I gave up on the vis idea because a) all the programs with visualisations in need a keyboard/mouse to activate it, and b) The PC wasn't powerful enough for any particularly epic fullscreen visualisers anyway.
That was when I watched "The Stolen Earth" on TV, and had quite the brainwave! The BBC offer a free screensaver of the patterns that wiggle around Mr. Smith's screen in the Sarah Jane Adventures, and I think it looks über cool, so I decompiled the flash file and recoded the video to loop continuously while music was playing. Add in a web-controller VLC player and a load of TV programmes stored on disk, and it's my perfect idea of a media centre! (again, click to enlarge)

There's only a few little bits that need ironing out now:

• Videos don't smooth very well, because I had to use XVideo extension in VLC. They look a lot nicer with the OpenGL extension, but that runs really slowly due to the 16MB integrated graphics. If I use it a lot I might buy a dedicated AGP graphics card to quicken it up a bit.
• When it's starting up, it looks a tad unprofessional!
• I need to make a fancy script to automatically start the X server, VLC and the MPD OSD. Currently for some random reason I can't have VLC and the OSD in the same .xinitrc file, which is annoying.

Viva la technologie! Oh, and it's also a backup of anything I want, and it has a Firefly Streaming Media server to serve music anywhere in the world. I turned that off, though, because it was slowing everything else down. I don't leave it on 24/7 at the moment because the PSU gets rather warm, but that's another thing I'll look into replacing at the earliest opportunity. Then I can set every computer to share it's music library from there, which'll be awesome.

P.S. I tried to take a video of the Mr. Smith animation, but there's something wrong with my camera and it came out in a decidedly blue hue. :/ Anyway, all I did was sped it up to 200% to make it look more smooth (it was 12fps to start with).

Having all this time after school/exams have finished has made me realise that I've been missing some pretty good films.

In particular, I really want to go and see WALL-E - not only is it a Pixar film, which makes it an instant masterpiece, but according to Wikipedia, it's got almost universal praise from film critics, which has to be a good thing! I shall have to find someone to go with to see it ASAP!

I haven't been to see a normal comedy film at the cinema for ages, and when I saw the Hancock trailer at my last visit (to see Indiana Jones) I thought it'd be a good film to go and see too. I'll wait for a week or so, because although I don't like waiting when loads of other people have already seen it I also hate it when the cinema's really packed and you can hear people talking. Years ago I remember going to see a film that had something to do with catching rats at the cinema with my Mum - and we were the only people there. The security guard came in and watched the film!