Tag: computers

Ubuntu switcher

[Ubuntu](http://www.ubuntu.com/) Feisty Fawn came out last week and I finally decided to pick up another harddrive (they’re cheap, after all) and dual boot Ubuntu.

I’ve been pondering the switch for a while. I have to use Windows all day at work, and I’ve never been overly fond of it. Sure, it’s not quite as offensive as it once was, but my nonconformist tendencies kinda force me to look for alternatives wherever possible.

I bought my first PC in 1999 (I’d owned and used [Amigas](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga) all through high school and university. I had to give it up in the end because, honestly, a 7 year old computer just isn’t useful no matter what sort of computer it is). When I got it, I’d fully intended to run Linux as my main operating system. Maybe I’d dual-boot Windows 98 for games or something, but I had no intention of staying there.

That didn’t last very long. Desktop Linux wasn’t anywhere near ready for prime time. It was just painful.

But here I am, 8 years later, trying it again.

I’ll switch to bullet mode to talk about specifics.

* I’ve got the pptp client connecting to work. I had to flip the “Refuse EAP” switch in the settings because the debug log said the connection errors I was getting happened right after an EAP request. Huhn. I have no idea what that means either.
* So I can log into work and log into my desktop with the default remote desktop client. Hurray, I can do work stuff.
* I miss [foobar2000](http://www.foobar2000.org/) already. I haven’t exactly settled on a music player, but my favourite so far is [Muine](http://muine.gooeylinux.org/).
* OpenOffice Spreadsheet kinda sucks. The graphing is pretty primitive. Gnumeric is quite a bit better, but it crashes when it tries to import my diet-related Excel spreadsheets. I’m thinking about writing something to accomplish the same task with Python, GTK and sqlite. That could be fun.
* Gaim isn’t Trillian, but I guess it works all right.
* I actually got my Dell 1110 printer sort of working. I was kinda annoyed after I got the thing that it was so resolutely Windows only. I hope Dell starts thinking about Linux drivers. They’re going to be selling Ubuntu machines, so getting their hardware to work with them would only seem sensible.
* In some cases, hardware support is actually better than Windows. Probably because hardware manufacturers are shitty software developers. So having actual coders have a crack at the hardware yields better results. Sometimes. Except when shit doesn’t work. Like my Linksys USB wifi adapter.
* I still hate The Gimp. At some point I’m going to want to edit images and I’m going to be forced to use it. I’m not looking forward to that day.

Flash!

I didn’t think you could get them anymore. When I was hunting around for heatwraps, I stumbled upon what I thought was an extinct species: low-capacity flash memory cards. And they’re cheap!

I found 64MB compact flash cards at Pharma Plus for $7.50. Perfect for the Quickpad. They’ve got bigger sizes too, but you’re probably better off going someplace like Canada Computers for those.

They’ve got smaller xD (only Type M at the Shoppers I checked) and SD cards too, of course. Those might be useful for something.

I’d have never thought to look in drug stores. But it makes sense. My dad’s pharmacy always did photo processing and stuff. So it makes sense.

I just picked up my old 2 megapixel camera from home, and I’m using the 8MB card from that, but I think I might pick up one of the 64MB cards, just ‘cuz it might come in handy. I mean… $7.50! Sure the price per MB sucks compared to [the 4GB+ cards you can get these days](http://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=013334&cid=990.437), but I don’t need that space.