I’ve been pretty much Window-free on my personal computer for about three months now. I started a new blog to document my foray into the world of Linux.

That is all.

Ugly Firefox 2.0 buttons originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

I don’t know how many people are like me and absolutely can’t stand the buttons in Firefox 2.0. I cringe every time I open the browser. I actually had to wrestle with myself to upgrade it simply because the buttons were an eyesore. When I started playing with the various operating systems in the last few weeks I had to suck it up because they all came preloaded with 2.0.

I finally got unlazy tonight and decided to look for a kindred spirit who might have made a theme to rid the new browser of the ugly buttons. I found Winestripe!Thank you Florian Schmitz! I actually feel more at peace when I see those old familiar buttons on my browser now.


Beautiful Firefox 1.5 buttons originally uploaded by mrwilloby.

technorati tags: firefox, themes, buttons

I still have a draft post sitting in WordPress where I was going to chronicle my previous Windows reinstall last May or something. I never got around to finishing it.

This time around I didn’t want to reinstall Windows. It is always a hassle, but my computer was acting up too much. Now I feel a bit foolish for doing that after everything I went through. I would get the vague error DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL in the middle of installing every time.

After trying many possible solutions I finally began to take the step of unplugging everything except the essentials from the motherboard. At this point I noticed that there was a significant amount of dust caked between the CPU fan blades and the top of the heatsink on the processor. There was probably little to no air being blown through to cool the CPU. All at once I began to realize this was the main problem with my computer. It explained the reboots when I was encoding FLAC files (a processor intensive task) and it might also explain the font corruption that I would experience at times that was annoying me the most. But at this point it was too late. I had formatted the partition already.

This whole ordeal was pushing two weeks. In the meantime I had been getting by running a live CD of Puppy Linux. I’d been using this distribution for about 6 months on my old 400 MHz AMD K6-III in San Jose since it makes it seem really fast. The great thing about Puppy is that the entire OS runs in RAM from a multi-session CD that settings and files can be saved back to and loaded upon the next boot. Apparently it is not very hard on the processor either.

After Windows wasn’t installing I also made an attempt to install Ubuntu and the computer would lock up during that process too. Now that the computer is under control I have a functioning Ubuntu partition also.

Since I was on a role with the various Linux distributions I decided to try openSUSE since it is the number two download on DistroWatch.com. I am composing this blog from within it right now. I must say that I’m impressed.

Playing around with these different operating systems and seriously thinking about my attachment to Windows over these past few weeks, I’ve come to realize that I don’t need it all that much. Although I consider myself a pretty adept computer user, most of what I do with my PC is fairly basic and software in Linux can accommodate me mostly.

I have re-evaluated my need to boot into Windows primarily. The only things I’ve actually installed on it are the Flock browser, a driver to read ext3 partitions (this is a crucial issue in my acceptance of not being locked into Windows), AVG Free Anti-Virus, and Quicken. My only problem is that I cannot get Quicken Basic 2007 to install under Wine. I really enjoy using Quicken and the last time I tried GnuCash I didn’t find it a good enough replacement. Maybe I’ll give it another spin.

One other thing I decided to do was rely heavily on the PortableApps Suite for the programs I will probably use in Windows. I got a 4GB USB key for Christmas and I’ll be putting it to use. I’ve got Firefox Portable, Thunderbird Portable, OpenOffice.org Portable, Gaim Portable, and VLC Media Player Portable. There are probably a few more applications that I use in Windows that I will need to make sure I can find a way to replace or use. EAC for ripping CDs is essential I know, and I really like Picasa.

I plan on giving some more extensive reviews of my experiences with these various operating systems and my new way of computing over the next few days.

technorati tags: linux, puppylinux, ubuntu, opensuse, portableapps

I’m not quite sure what it says about me when I become enthralled by a webapp that isn’t even out yet. It’s probably because I’ve been looking for an online calendar and task list for months and months now that will do what I want. I think this Scrybe thing might do it.

technorati tags:calendar, web, todolist, scrybe

Blogged with Flock

On Saturday I attended the first ever WordCamp. Based on the notification emails going out about it, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Only 15 hours before it was slated to start, Matt sent out a message saying that more than a dozen sessions still needed discussion leaders. It made me wonder what we were in for.

The event actually turned out fairly well I thought. I mostly stayed in the Main Hall for the sessions in there. The Second Room seemed to be discussions for more advanced users.

My only criticism about WordCamp would be the organization of the sessions. It would have been nice to let us know as users which ones were geared towards different experience levels. I heard people say that too much of the technology-speak was over their heads. Next time an effort should be made to distinguish different types of users. Have more sessions for the people who know only the basics–and clearly tell us which sessions are for whom.

Anyway, here is very short synopsis of what I got out of the sessions that I sat in on:

Widgets Showcase, Andy Skelton - Widgets are cool. They make your sidebar easy to configure.

Blog Promotion and Writing a Compelling Blog, Prince Campbell - Write about other people so they will want to come read your blog. People care about themselves the most; play to that.

State of the Word, Matt Mullenweg - WordPress needs help with support. Work on it is constant and enthusiastic.

Blog Architecture, Aaron Brazell - I didn’t get anything out of this session, but it wasn’t necessarily Aaron’s fault. The conversation became dominated by nonsensical audience members’ questions.

WordPress as CMS, Mark Jaquith - This session showed me the potential WordPress has in making all kinds of great sites that are not blogs. I really hadn’t thought about it before.

Blogs and Journalism, Om Malik - He basically said bloggers aren’t journalists unless they put in the effort to do fact-checking and follow-up phone calls. They are separate spheres.

SEO & WordPress, Neil Patel - I learned that SEO means search engine optimization. The worst things you can do are sleazy tricks. Search engines are smart.

Plugin Showcase, Niall Kennedy, et al - I was getting really tired at this point. I didn’t write down the address for the coolest plugin I saw: one that gathers all the info on the web about a commenter on your blog and displays it in a box on a mouseover. Oh well.

After all that I went to dinner with some friends and some people I had just met. I went up with Elea and Melinda, met Lauren, an Internet acquaintance, and her friend Anna, and was good to catch up with Will again. I didn’t take too many photos during the day, but by far the best one was at dinner. I don’t even need to say any more.

technorati tags:wordcamp

Blogged with Flock

A little while ago I posted on my MySpace blog about Mozy, a cool little online backup company. I’ve been quite impressed by their service so far.

Well, the people who work there started a blog. The posts so far are funny, a tad sarcastic, and even informative.

My favorite part so far has been the little jabs at the government in a post about encryption:

We’re a little unique here in that we give our users the option to provide their own private key (a passphrase, a picture, a music file –whatever) which is hashed to generate a 448-bit key for encryption.This key is stored on their PC, and we don’t have access to it – it’stored on the PC and is never transferred to our servers – which means that we can confidently protect data from both kid sisters and government agencies.

When debating which aluminum foil brand to wrap their hard disks in they recognize the threat posed by the government and cooperating corporations:

This is a tough one. On the one hand, you’ve got Reynolds – which is an old standby. On the other hand, perhaps it’s safer to use a more generic brand, like from Target. Reynolds is made in Virginia, which is home to all sorts of government agencies, and who knows how they’ve meddled with the manufacturing process of this aluminum foil. But the Target brand is manufactured in Minneapolis, which was the home of the Cray supercomputer, and everyone knows they were in cahoots with the government, specifically the NSA.

I hope they continue in this vein. I will love it.

Technorati Tags: mozy, blog

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I know I have been neglecting this blog for the past few weeks. One main reason is that about 2 weeks ago my main computer died. I’ve been chugging along for now with a machine that peaked during the heyday of Windows 98. It’s a 400MHz AMD K6-III machine with 320MB of RAM, so it works, if a little slowly. I certainly can’t multitask like I am used to though.

One day at work I even wrote up a long blog post on a piece of paper documenting my computer woes, but when I didn’t type it up that very day, it became outdated. In the end, I lost 2 hard drives, a motherboard, and a power supply. I think the power supply was the culprit in all of the problems. It took me quite a while to recover from the shock of losing over 200GB worth of data as well. Nothing original, just many years worth of collecting various bits of digital memorabilia.

The last of the new pieces arrived yesterday, so I will get to constructing soon enough.

One beneficial thing to come out of the trauma is that I started exploring some Linux distributions for use on my old machine. I’d been dual booting XP and Ubuntu for a while, but Ubuntu would tend to start running slowly. It got annoying. I’ve always noticed that Live CDs are quite zippy and started looking into some of them to use. I found an awesome one. Puppy Linux is a Live CD that loads itself completely into RAM and runs from there. It’s about a 60MB distro that only requires 128MB of system memory to function well. The aspect that really nudged me to try it out, though, is the multisession ability. Burn the ISO as a multisession disc and it will save your session back to the CD/DVD that you booted with, so that all the work you’ve done will be saved for next time. That has always been a drawback of Live CDs for me because I don’t have a USB stick, which some distros can save sessions to.

Puppy Linux seems really great. There are about 3 versions in the works right now. A standard 1.0.8 version, a community modified 1.0.9 version, and a 2.0 preview version. The community around Puppy Linux is extremely helpful and I’ve gotten great support from the forums. It’s really quite nice.

Right now I happen to be at a high school where the teacher had a PC that ran XP. I don’t know a quick way to get past a user’s password with XP in order just use the computer, so I tried the Live CD. Fortunately for me, the computer was set to check the optical drive upon boot and so I am running Puppy Linux right now.

technorati tags: puppylinux, linux