technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Software
It looks like my data snuck up into the cloud without telling me…
Feb 1st
I bought a new laptop recently. This isn’t my first PC upgrade. I think I’m on my 9th laptop at this stage. It’s always been a dreadful chore, exporting, packaging, burning, installing, copying, saving, importing and then configuring everything. it used to take a solid weekend before I was 100% comfortable. This time around was very disconcerting. I basically switched on my new laptop, installed a few tools, entered my MS Office license key and I was pretty much good to go.
Because my current work style is very fluid, where I hop between my office and home PCs, a laptop, More >
A pleasant surprise from Adobe
Oct 29th
I bought Macromedia Homesite 5.5 from Macromedia’s web store back in 2005, just after Adobe bought Macromedia. They’ve long since killed off Homesite but it’s never been beaten in my opinion as a HTML/web code editor. I had a need yesterday to make a minor change to a PHP file and I decided to dust off Homesite rather than edit in notepad. I went to my CD wallet and couldn’t find the CD so I thought I was pretty much stuffed. Most of my on-line purchases have been from Digital River and I expected similar treatment (at best) from Adobe. DR expects More >
How to dual boot Moblin and Ubuntu
Aug 11th
The secret is in where you put grub for each OS. Moblin, being cute ‘n friendly assumes that it’ll be the only OS on the disk so slaps it in /dev/sda (or whatever your hard disk is). Ubuntu Network Remix defaults to doing the same. What you need to do is install Moblin first but use a custom partitioning scheme (to leave room for Ubuntu). I created a 2GB /dev/sda1 root partition and a small swap partition. I then installed Ubuntu on /dev/sda3, again using a custom partition layout, but I clicked the “advanced” button to put grub on /dev/sda3 More >
Moblin Linux
Aug 11th
The new Moblin 2 distro looks like a very strong contender for an OS for your netbook. Ubuntu Netbook Remix is great if you want to do heavy work (for a netbook anyway), but there are times when all you want to do is check something quickly on Wikipedia or watch a video. At those times the 60 second+ boot time of a netbook is a PITA and Moblin’s 10 second boot time is great. Now all I need to do is get dual-boot working…
New toy – Acer Aspire One
Jul 5th
I was in PC World the other day and I picked up an Acer Aspire One A110 on sale. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, so they were selling the 1GB RAM/16GB SSD/Linux ones for €200. It’ll do the job for web & email when I’m out ‘n about.
The factory installed Linpus distro is OK-ish, but it doesn’t get upgraded as new versions of the component software gets released, so still includes Firefox 2, rather than 3. Also, it tries to simplify things too much.
I tried installing XP Home, which isn’t as easy as you’d think because there’s no More >
