Well I have been having a lot of success with my ubuntu install. I have to get it to mirror windows functionality or the rest of the family will be frustrated.
I have an Acer Aspire 5100 and its a powerful work horse. It has AMD Turon 64 x2 processor in it but since I couldn't get the broadcom wireless 43xx card to work in 64 bit I am having to run 32bit.
The range of the wireless is also less than windows however I did find a link (which I'll post later) which explained that the developers hadn't worked out the best power settings yet and that 2.6.23 kernel would be better. Ubuntu 6.04 has the 2.6.20 kernel and runs the depreciated SoftMAC wireless stack so I am probably hampered until next year's release of ubuntu (or creating my own kernel).
Current successes are:
World of warcraft
Thunderbird sharing address books and accounts and filters sync'ed
Firefox bookmarks and settings sync'ed
Pidgin setup for home
Power management (much better than Vista)
Installing Tux Paint (for my eldest son)
Installing K3b for burning
ATI binary drivers (which I hope to drop next year for the OSS version)
Wifi on boot (rather than wait for Gnome to start)
Still to do:
MMC card slot not working
Wireless on resume from hibernate is not coming back up (might be authentication delay)
NTFS writeable (while this is easy Vista has a bug where it doesn't shut down 80% or the time and will leave the drive dirty, when ubuntu tries to mount the drive it gives a warning and fails, the Acer technical support told me to run the recovery process to revert me back to XP and destroy all my data! Clearly not a solution for the real world, do I get compensation as the laptop has a sticker saying Vista Premium Ready?)
Turn off disk check after 35 boots (who decided this? I can't even skip it if I am in a hurry)
I think longer term I'd like to become certified, just to know I have reached a level of competence.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Zen habits and me
Well for the last two weeks I have been reading ZenHabits.net and have tried some of the advice.
First I cleared my office desktop.
Second I take time with my cleaning (Buddhist monks use sweeping as a form of meditation/contemplation time).
Third I cleared my windows desktop of icons (have to do this regularly).
Forth I tried concentrating on just the moment, which is very hard for a long period.
Fifth removed all but 5 RSS feeds.
Sixth I cleared out my inbox and promised myself I would only check it once per day.
Now the last one was the hardest, but I figured out a system. I have a folder and a filter for all mailing lists or automails. I never need these beyond a week or two so I told Thunderbird to delete any emails older that 14 days in that folder. The inbox I changed to move read emails to an archive folder after 7 days. I get about 10-20 emails in my inbox now. Somehow it seems fresher, I have an archive for referring back to something important and stuff that isn't is deleted automatically.
I wanted to move back to using gmail but deletion is a pain the rear. You can delete a page of emails but you cannot delete a tagged set of emails. You cannot setup a timer to delete certain tags after a time as well. But on the plus side its conversation view of emails (seeing your response next to a received email) is just outstanding. My inbox and sent items should not be separate folders in my view.
Generally I seem to have more time and am a little calmer. Doing things in small steps is the key. Don't do all those things in one day.
Oh and I can heartily recommend http://www.google.com/notebook/ it has helped me keep track of what I plan to do. I look at it nearly hourly now and it just works.
First I cleared my office desktop.
Second I take time with my cleaning (Buddhist monks use sweeping as a form of meditation/contemplation time).
Third I cleared my windows desktop of icons (have to do this regularly).
Forth I tried concentrating on just the moment, which is very hard for a long period.
Fifth removed all but 5 RSS feeds.
Sixth I cleared out my inbox and promised myself I would only check it once per day.
Now the last one was the hardest, but I figured out a system. I have a folder and a filter for all mailing lists or automails. I never need these beyond a week or two so I told Thunderbird to delete any emails older that 14 days in that folder. The inbox I changed to move read emails to an archive folder after 7 days. I get about 10-20 emails in my inbox now. Somehow it seems fresher, I have an archive for referring back to something important and stuff that isn't is deleted automatically.
I wanted to move back to using gmail but deletion is a pain the rear. You can delete a page of emails but you cannot delete a tagged set of emails. You cannot setup a timer to delete certain tags after a time as well. But on the plus side its conversation view of emails (seeing your response next to a received email) is just outstanding. My inbox and sent items should not be separate folders in my view.
Generally I seem to have more time and am a little calmer. Doing things in small steps is the key. Don't do all those things in one day.
Oh and I can heartily recommend http://www.google.com/notebook/ it has helped me keep track of what I plan to do. I look at it nearly hourly now and it just works.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Blog reborn
I have been running my own blog for a while.
I hadn't worked out as I gained nothing from hosting it myself.
I want to put some effort into making a new start on this one.
Updates promised.
I hadn't worked out as I gained nothing from hosting it myself.
I want to put some effort into making a new start on this one.
Updates promised.
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