Windows Vista, World of Warcraft? Back to Mac

I quit Fedora, LOL. I installed, updated, and a yum install kmod-nvidia brought me to a terminal after a reboot.

openSUSE had this ridiculousness with not having a flash plugin with Mozilla Firefox on 64-bit arch... and... well that's not openSUSE's fault.

I installed my ill-gotten copy of Vista, and will probably have to pony up for some legit copies for my Media Center and gaming addiciton... speaking of which, I logged in to my WoW account management page, and noticed my account expires... tonight. Canceled... I'm not re-upping for another six months... even though I pretty much re-installed Vista just to play.

I might be ready to go back to Mac. I'll never be able to justify that Mac Pro machine though, and ugh... I dunno. I think I'll just trade and sell some hardware and snag an old PowerBook from my buddy Triikan. Then it's the iPod... and then a Mac Pro anyway, probably... LOL.

Back on Fedora

openSUSE was a pretty positive experience. during the past week, I installed from the KDE4 Live CD and DVD. I never used GNOME, and I think I could get along in KDE 4. However, I'm not really reading as many positive stories as I'd like about it.

I'm back on Fedora as I type this, having just installed from the DVD. That out of sync error on startup went a way when I switched from a crappy old eMachines CRT to an old crappy Hewlet Packard Pavilion M90 CRT. Go figure. I'm still running GNOME, and I'll probably keep doing that, unless something fabulous or catastrophic happens that requires me to switch desktops.

It is good to be back with a familiar desktop.

Oh, I did try Ubuntu a couple of times during this weekend too... not bad... I think I just don't want to be a lemming. Is *that* bad?

Router Resurrected

The power supply in my Smoothwall router failed. Fortunately, I had a few extra ones laying around. I guess I should have figured it'd happen with a power supply that must have been at least 10 years old. The machine is a Pentium III 450 MHz with two 10 Mbit 3com cards. It works great as a firewall/router.

I just need some thing smaller, and quieter, and that my kids can't just walk up and turn off randomly.

Catching up... Facebook is okay.

I've really got to get my addressbook in order. Since I've made this committment to staying in touch with relatives and friends, and then I got this T-Mobile Sidekick (and couldn't call my brother back because I lost his new number) and switched e-mail accounts and stuff, keeping up is hard.

Facebook has really turned out to be a boost to my self esteem. I keep getting notes from people who knew me from my "rockstar" days. It's a relative term... I pretty much went into hiding after college, and only a few people even knew what happened to me. Now all my friends from growing up are sending me little messages with the obligatory "hope all is well" statement. It is really okay.

The extra social stuff on Facebook is a bit of a distraction, but since I really just respond to the e-mail requests that I get, it isn't bad. I'm not going to complain too much about the invite I got.

How to be a distro junkie

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00002, originally uploaded by mvpittman.

Well, in 8 minutes, this x86_64 KDE Live CD for Fedora will be fresh off the torrent, and I'll see if I "really" want to use openSUSE some more, or just try out KDE 4 on my current distro of choice.

I noticed that I've got a lot of CDs printed here, and I figured I'd try to use Flickr to post to my blog. I'm currently running off of my Fedora 8 i686 Live CD, and I just took a picture, hooked it up, and here we go.

Yeah, not needing the photo gallery function of FastMail so much.

openSUSE is looking good

Okay, I'm writing this from openSUSE 11. I wanted to write a quick note to let all my faithful blog readers know how I liked the experience so far. I'm burning DVD images that I downloaded in KTorrent, which is a nice application. K3B is as awesome as everyone says it is.

I installed from a LiveCD, but I had the same problem I had with RC1 on all but one machine. The install image copies to the hard drive and boots, but the user setup doesn't take. I'm logged in as "linux" and the "mvpittman" user I set up isn't available.

The K-Menu makes it really easy to find applications I need though... typing "user" took me to the yast setup for users.

I'm writing this message in KMail, which is also a nice application. In particular, I like it not *sucking* and being *slow* and bloated like Evolution. Also, it has support for Managesieve, which would let me change the filtering rules on my mail server, without logging into a web interface.

Too bad FastMail messes up the inbox hierarchy, and doesn't have managesieve support. I think I'm going to trial TuffMail again.

I'm writing this message in KMail because I didn't find a blogging application, like maybe Kblogger, I think I could deal with that. A template would work just fine to let me get all the extra crap I'd normally select using logjam.

I'm going to install GimP (again, a positive nod to the search at the top of the KDE Slab menu -- "install" got me to the place to add repositories, and search for programs).

Maybe I'll get the printer set up enough to print these DVD labels I downloaded in openSUSE. (Searching for "printer" got me started again with YaST.)

So far, I haven't done anything that I couldn't have done in Fedora, unless that KDE slab/search thing isn't availble in Fedora. So if this printer works all funky, and a DVD install messes up like the Live CD did, then I might just switch back.

Oh yeah... one-click-install pwns you. Going to http://www.opensuse.org/nvidia/ was pretty simple.
However, I had to run nvidia-xconfig to get it to actually take, which wasn't really documented anywhere. I finally figured that out when some attempt to get compositing effects got me to the NVIDIA configuration utility and let me know that the driver wasn't active.

Oh, and once I got that running... The tiny fonts that I really didn't mind so much... they just sprung to life. And then there's the CCSM goodness... "Hollywood got nothing" indeed. I'm liking this alot... I'm going to move on to re-installing from the 64-bit DVD and see how that goes.

Fedora 9 upgrade, successful openSUSE... eh, not so much...

I'm posting this from a Fedora 9 desktop. I had some issues upgrading before, but I did an install of Fedora 8 (after a quick battle with openSUSE 11 KDE Live CD) and burned and printed DVDs for Fedora 9 on both x86 and 64-bit arches...

Rather than try preupgrade again, I just did the Anaconda upgrade with the DVD.

Turns out the problem I was having with the monitor going out of sync was because my xorg.conf file was using the "vesa" driver, rather than the "nv" driver or "nvidia" driver... weird... vesa should *always* work. Changing it to "nv" got me up and running.

I still have the NetworkManager circular dependency issue.

Oh, and I think I understand why distributing an SVG of CD artwork is desirable. I can import to the GIMP at whatever resolution and dpi that I want... in this case a 4000x4000 pixel image at 1440 dpi, rather than the default 480x480px, 90dpi... much better printout. Might actually be time to contribute some instructions.

Looks like the cups server is all foobar too. Damn. Did I say something like, "I'm going back to Fedora because of the easy printer configuration"? I hope not.

I don't blog about my family much ... Scott sleeping in his bed.

I'm sure 4 out of the 8 people who actually read my blog wonder why I don't talk about my family much... or rather, "why are all your posts about computer hardware?" Well, I don't really want my family exposed to the Internet. It's vicious.

However, I'll share this tidbit. We finally got Scott back to sleeping in his bed. We visited the pediatrician for shots and a checkup on Wednesday, and he recommended we just hold the door closed until he went to sleep. That was long. He got up again around 4:00 AM, and I repeated. Celebration!

Holly's "on duty" tomorrow night.

Firefox 3, FoxMarks, Compiz-Fusion, and Fedora 8

I needed to do some actual work with my computer, and needed a computer up and running. I also needed to print out a bunch of documents. My old crappy CRT had some sync issues with Fedora 9 after install, my laptop test machines were running openSUSE, where I didn't know how to setup my printer properly... so I wiped and installed Fedora 8, and got it done.

Too bad Firefox 3 isn't available on Fedora 8 from any "official" source. I guess there's the remi repo, but I assume there's reasons it isn't in the base repo for Fedora 8... might be time to try Fedora 9 again, because FF3 is about five times as awesome as 2. One thing I did notice on goin back to 8 was that I had forgotten how to get CCSM working on Fedora 8. I thought I needed to add something to my session so that it would run on startup, and my Google-fu failed miserably on finding that. Turns out Foxmarks has old copies of my bookmarks stored... scary... but useful in this case... I had a bookmark once to the blog post and the bug that gave me in the information, but I had deleted it.

I haven't been home on my PC to enable it again, but I'll probably beat on my computer some more to try and get Fedora 9 behaving properly. We'll see. I checked for the openSUSE release this morning before work, hoping to let the torrent ride out while I was away for the day, but no dice. Oh well. I'll probably go back to Fedora anyway, since my printer works by simply plugging it in, which is awesome.

Kodak EasyShare 7.0, ehh... no.

I got an e-mail about Kodak EasyShare 7.0 being released... I'll have to e-
mail Deb and let her know, since she's still on Windows.

I guess I need to investigate digiKam on this OpenSUSE installation. Maybe it
has a flickr export. If it doesn't suck, maybe I'll just switch her to Linux...
or not. We'll see.

Holy Release Candidate, Batman! It's supposed to work?

I've been trying out this release candidate for openSUSE. Certainly not any kind of formal testing, or preparation for a review, or with positive intent to switch from Fedora.

Mostly, I wanted to try out KDE 4, on a distribution where it is a first-class citizen (not Fedora, not Ubuntu... not Mandriva either).

So, some time ago, I burned a 32-bit KDE Live CD. The media I used is printable, but I didn't print a label, I just wrote on it with a sharpie... the media seems questionable, since Fedora always tripped out a little bit when I ran Live CDs from it. Maybe the stack is warped or something.


I tried it on the quad-core box, it ran so slowly, I thought it didn't work. Turns out I was wrong.

I tried it on the Compaq laptop I got form the Weldy Family, because it had their Windows Install on it, and I didn't know the password... It worked... sort of. I think the automatic configuration at the end of the install didn't work, because the desktop I got still had the "Install" icon, and a reboot after that said that the Installation didn't complete.

I tried it on the quad-core box again, and got similar results. I finally got my head wrapped around LVM and the Expert partitioner too.

I tried it on a Compaq Evo N600c this morning, and boom -- Install icon is gone, sexy desktop is there, prompted to configure for updates by adding repositories... This might go well. The release is in a day or two. I'm going to give it an official shot on some more machines... maybe write up a review.

T-Mobile upgrade, part 2 -- the T-Mobile Sidekick ID

So, I canceled my service with AT&T. I was using a Samsung R225 with a pre-paid T-Mobile account, since I don't talk on the phone that much. That phone really was terrible. My wife has one too, and she has similar feelings of malcontent with it. I did drop $100 into the account for instant "Gold Rewards" status, which entitles me to $0.10/min calls and expiration date of 1 year.

So, I stopped in the Mall of Doom (Lafayette Square Mall, in Indianapolis) for to take a look at some alternatives from some of the vendors within. They all wanted too much money, or for me to sign a contract, but some kid came in trying to sell his T-Mobile Sidekick ID. The vendor wasn't interested, but I was, so I bought it off of him. Straight up prepaid... indeed. No charger, but I figured I'd get something from Cellphoneshop.net. I think I got some e-mail for a Father's Day discount.

I thought Holly might want it, since it has a scheduler, addressbook, can check e-mail, and the battery doesn't fall out randomly. Holly thinks the phone is a bit too bulky, so, I'll probably pursue that unlocked RAZR for her. It works for me though... I'm spending lots of time in a basement at work, and the R225 never got reception down there. Today, I confirm that this phone does get reception.

Of course, the not having a charger was kind of a bummer, and I didn't immediately get on-line and order. Good thing too... we went grocery shopping at Meijer, and I took a sweep through the electronics section and found car and travel chargers for $2.00. Sweet! I bought two car chargers, and one travel charger, and charged the phone up. Works good. I haven't converted my plan, but I think I will today. I don't like the idea of paying a dollar a day for Internet access though. I'm not going to sign a contract, but T-Mobile does have some FlexPay options that might work. $30/month and $0.15/min isn't very appealing, but I can always change that up if I feel like it is too much.

I might still have to get some accessories for it though. The phone is kind of grimy, so maybe I'll get those alternative color "bumpers" and a carrying case.

I fail at Linux

I destroyed my Windows Vista Installation. I failed the WGA check, and I didn't want to activate. For some reason none of my recent media for my Linux distribution of choice, Fedora, was available, so I pulled out my 64-bit Fedora 8 DVD, and installed.

Then I printed on my Live CD of openSUSE 11.0 RC1 with a snazy label, generated with the help of The GIMP/Gutenprint and my Epson Stylus Photo R320. The images I got were pretty cool.

Why did I go back to 8? Not sure, but I know 9 wasn't working well. I wanted to grab some files from my backup drive, which was formatted in NTFS, and there's some bug, I think that requires root access for mounting NTFS drives, whereas that worked fine in Fedora 8.

But, I figured that would give me a chance to try the preupgrade feature...

"yum install preupgrade"... man that was slow. I think I'd rather have downloaded a DVD of Fedora 9 and installed. Oh well. It went okay. I think it upgraded the third party Livna Repo as well. Too bad the Fedora 8 kmod-nvidia driver was still running when I rebooted to start in Fedora 9.

"Out of Range"... bah... CTRL+ALT+F2 to get a terminal, and "yum remove kmod-nvidia"...

"Out of Range"... um... crap... I'm not a linux sysadmin. If I weren't persistent, I'd have canned this and just went back to Windows XP. "Bulletproof X" is starting to sound really good...

"system-config-display"... set the autodetected monitor to a generic 1280x1024 CRT... reboot...

whoo-hoo! X starts... ugh... I'm celebrating a totally crappy experience. At least I'm upgraded... anyone else feel that PackageKit could really use some more love... I mean, it is better than Pirut was, but crud.

"yum install kmod-nvidia"... make a blog post with logjam... wait for installation... then install 211 updates. Or should I reboot first, hoping I can get something other than 800x600? I'll update. There goes a baby crying... must be the epic failure of my Linux-fu.

Oh, it was just Julie... so here she is on my lap... and I have... a dependency failure with Network Manager. Updates fail.

"yum remove NetworkManager"? Maybe not. It might be time to fire up that OpenSUSE though... removing NetworkManager wants to remove a bunch of stuff... the edge is bleeding all over me, and now the family will be up soon... No time for this, and OpenSUSE 11 comes out "real soon now".

Age of Conan... why can't I quit you?

I just cancelled my free 30-day subscription to Age of Conan. The game is awesome, even if it is a Windows-only experience. I just can't justify the cost and time input at this point. I'll still have the account, so I can start back up anytime. No hard feelings.

Trading good stuff for what could be considered junk...

I just traded our friends an LCD monitor... my only one, for a bunch of old hardware. Kacie and Mike needed, it, and they've helped us out by letting us borrow some old clothes for the kids, so I'm certainly happy to to the trade.

But I actually *like* playing with old hardware. It reminds me of the time when I played with hardware for fun, and I never feel scared that I'm going to break it. Worse case scenario, my son wants to do what he sees me doing, and he jams a screwdriver into a motherboard or hard drive. Better that, than destroying the stuff I'm actually working on. Gotta wash his hands after he plays with it though... he'll probably get lead poisoning... none of that old stuff is RoHS compliant.

I got a 16-port 10/100 switch... I already had one, but I didn't have any dog-ears for it. This one has a serial port for console management or something and the mounting brackets. That one day, when I get a mini-rack for all my old systems, so I don't have a bunch of ATX clases laying around, It'll come in handy.

I got a working laptop, with a broken hinge/lid. Installed OpenSUSE 11.0 RC1 on it last night, while I was working on assembling the Grill, got on it and checked some messages, and it worked great, for what it was... 800x600 was kind of painful on it, but, eh... whatever. I could probably deal with it being broken, since my laptop still has no RAM or power supply. Maybe I can find a lid and actually fix it.... Who knows... I could certainly just run it closed, and hook up a monitor. I guess when I go to get some old laptop RAM, I'll get some for this too... 256 MB is kind of slow, especially when you're using 16 MB for video.

I got a couple of old machines with PC100 RAM, sound cards, network cards, modems, an AGP nvidia card and...a firewire card with an *INTERNAL* port with *HEADER PINS*. The only thing I use with firewire these days would be an old iPod, or a video camera. But, I often get cases with firewire ports, but don't have motherboards with a firewire port. That card will be useful for me, since I can't bear to have a port on a case that doesn't do anything, even if I don't use it. Sweet action.

I'm probably going to toss the cases, but I did get a DVD-ROM and another CD-ROM to add to my collection. Ive got like 30 CD-ROM drives... I would probably double my geek status if I made a machine with [a bunch] of CD-ROM drives that just ripped audio CDs to a network storage device.

Oh, and I got a printer an HP Photosmart 7350. I thought it'd work for my mom-in-law's computer upgrade that's kind of gone awry, with her old printer not being supported at all, but this one is old too, and HP basically says, "treat this printer like a DeskJet 5550". I actually had that printer, and it was junk within a year. This printer didn't work out for her, so I'll probably send it to my Mom, so she can use it on her Mac.

Late night with the Grill

So, I'm having some out-of-towners over for dinner. We were going to grill... when we planned it a week ago. However, it's looking like rain tonight. A few other peeps were coming by too, so it should be a really good time, even if we just sit around in the house and chit-chat.

Of course, we got rid of the grill we had before... it worked great, but when we moved from our last house, it wasn't something we wanted to pack up. We ended up borrowing my sister-in-law's charcoal grill. She just lives down the street and around the corner, so borrowing the Weber wasnt' really a big deal. Of course, their Gas Grill wasn't working one time, and we gave it back.

Meanwhile, I have a "brand new" gas grill in the garage, in the box, given to us as a gift from my father-in-law. It's a very nice grill, but I didn't have time to assemble it. I still didn't have time, but I made some last night. From about 2 am to 4 am, thankfully with out the assistance of my kids, I got it put together. I still need to buy a propane tank, and get a cover for it... oh, and build a deck (have one built... I'm no handyman...) for it to sit on in the back yard, but I'm happy to get it out, and get that box out of the garage. Chicken, burgers, hot dogs and fish... Oh, and Father's day on Sunday? Yeah. Awesome.

Foxmarks bookmark export -- Del.icio.us?

I never blogged about Foxmarks... probably because what I use for bookmarks hasn't really been too important. I don't surf the web much, but rather, I use a web browser to look at things I get from some other source, like e-mail. So, I don't really keep track of my surfing habits. For the places I do visit frequently, I just use my memory, or a bookmark in my browser of choice... Mozilla Firefox.

Of course, I like to keep up with what's going on in the browser scene. Opera has been a good option for me to try, and when I was in my Mac phase, Safari was coming along well, and apparently is even better now. Even Internet Explorer is sucking much less these days. I'm not a website developer, so I don't go around testing each browser's rendering functionality. When I've written on-line help that uses a browser for display, I've depended on a toolkit or template to make sure I'm compliant with the target platform.

So, using Firefox, I chose Foxmarks, and I've been happy with it, except for one thing -- not having the ability to get my bookmarks when I'm not using Firefox. When might this happen? Well, say I'm at work, where I don't want to install a new browser on my office box... (I would, but you know... it's not mine, and the company that actually owns the laptop might not approve of me just mucking around with browsers and such...) True, I can use the My Foxmarks website, and it is great, but it didn't have an export feature. So to "get" my bookmarks, I'd have to install Firefox and then the Foxmarks extension, and sync. Yeah, I did that about zero times.

The new addition to My Foxmarks changes all that.

So, rather than logging into My Foxmarks, to get that link to whatever inappropriate site I needed to look at while at work. I can just export my bookmarks and import them into Internet Explorer 6 on my laptop... right?

Okay, that seemed to work.

I almost quit using Firefox once, and consequently looked for another way of doing my unimportant bookmarks, other than just importing and exporting from the native browser menu and saving the file somewhere publicly accessible, like the personal WebDAV space from my FastMail account. It appears that that Delicous thing is a good implementation, but I don't care for the social aspect. I'm not looking for more places to waste time on the Internet. I just want to get to the places I can't commit to memory.

I'll take a look at Delicous some time later, when I don't have stuff to do at work, or at least choose to not put it off so I can write a quick e-mail to my blog. For now Foxmarks has given me the key to not using the service, which must mean it is good enough that I'll not want to stop using it.

Getting Grandma to go digital -- PrintKey alternatives.

Okay, so I made this little post about a few things involving my mom-in-law and Vista and PrintKey. Apparently someone is reading my blog... which is fine. It is public, but surprising. The reply was more of a sales pitch. That is also fine. PrintKey has worked great for my mom-in-law, if she likes it, she should pay the person who developed it... unless Windows starts including the functionality in the OS... which happens for lots of small software vendors... and large ones too.

Here's the kicker... In this day and age lots of people think that if something is on the Internet it is free. Deb isn't one to not use postal mail because of free e-mail. She still enjoys sending and receiving cards from friends and family. I think she would actually be open to paying for PrintKey. She did offer to pay for the computer upgrades I give her, but that's more of a family service thing. I wouldn't expect her to pay... I usually just give her spare hardware, and free support, and it keeps me in touch with people who don't spend all day in front of a computer, like I do.

Should I be looking for an alternative, or just tell Grandma to go digital, whip out the credit card and pay for the upgrade to PrintKey Pro? Dear LazyWeb ... um... I haven't ever really asked for much, but since I have a blog now, and people are starting to read it... I could really use an answer. It really doesn't seem like a significant issue that requires spiritual guidance, like a prayer request. I guess I could always just ask Deb if she wants to pay to keep using PrintKey...

Maybe there's a printkey-like program for the GNOME or KDE desktops that would be cool. Who knows. Could that be the "Killer App"?

Cancelling Service with AT&T

Geez, you'd think that AT&T would be "happy" to cancel my extra phone line I was carrying for my Mom. It costs $175 to terminate a line in contract. That's a lot of money. A quick "please let us siphon money from you for a long time" plea was answered with a "no". And the representative offered to cancel the line himself, if the cancellations department wasn't open. Funny, when I called Sunday night to cancel, the representative simply refused, noting that the cancellation department wasn't open.

"Did you return the phone?" WTF? Ugh... we've had the line for a year, the representative thought it was less than 30 days... Ugh. I guess he should have transferred me to the cancellations department, but I guess they weren't open. Getting that resolved... and breathing a sigh of relief... since I sold the phone on eBay to help recover the cancellation fee... I canceled the line, and that was that.

Oh well, I guess the $175 is cheaper than another year of $100+ monthly phone bills. Now to go to Wal-Mart and buy a $100 pre-paid card which, should last several months at $0.10/min.

The Obama Pound

Heh, there I was working... shuffling some documents, putting them away in the library... the Librarian is watching "The Obama Pound ".

Complete Awesomeness.

So, the guy clinches the nomination for the Democratic Party, his wife looks him in the eye, gives him the fist bump, and the thumbs up. But then... oh... the hand gesture toward the back side. I wouldn't call it a slap on the bottom, because it wasn't. But being preceded by the "closed fist high-five", and them being black... well, damn.

Obviously, The senator and his wife are in touch with each other, and I don't think anyone could read anything negative into it.. oh wait, I'm sure they will. Ugh.

Windows Vista Upgrade... This goes out to Deb, my computer guinea pig...

OSNews put up a story, How to Get and Keep Windows XP After June 30 , and I remembered my wife saying that her Aunt got a new computer, and was unhappy with Windows Vista. I'm tempted to say, "whatever... learn it and move on". However, if you're gonna learn something, why not learn something that doesn't lock you into a bunch of crap. I'm not going to detail what "crap" that is at this point. Just know there are alternatives.

Anyway, I recently took some spare parts and did a replacement of my mom-in-laws computer and discovered a couple of problems. Her old box was an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ with 1 GB of RAM and was supposedly "slow". Windows XP gets slow, and I did a few things to try to alleviate the "slowness" with not much effect. I built a machine with an AMD BE-2300+ processor a gig of RAM and an NVIDIA 8400 GS, and did a quick install of Windows Vista to see if that would work for her. I didn't get a chance to move *everything* over, so she's a bit concerned about not having her important programs installed.

I'm tempted to just put her old machine back. Besides having to "learn" Vista (she doesn't like learning new things on the computer). There were the following issues:

- She had an old parallel port connected BJC-2000 printer. The computer I built had no parallel port. Okay... I had an old BJC 2100 printer that I got from our old baby sitter who was going to throw it away when she moved. It even used the same cartridges... and had a USB connection. Awesome, I thought... Turns out that the printer is *so* old, Vista didn't have a driver for it.

- PrintKey .... this program is ancient, but again... the whole learning new things... yeah, okay. So she wants that installed, so she can press her "PrintScreen" key and send stuff to her printer (which is unsupported in Vista). I tried to download it, but there's only a paid version available. I was going to just show her the snipping tool in Vista (which is great, by the way) but it would have involved more of that "learning new stuff..." My kid started writing on her wall with an ink pen, so we had to go.

- Windows Contacts is the new Windows Address Book, and Windows Mail is the new Outlook Express. I really think she should have stayed with AOL if she's not going to do this new learning thing. That transition was pretty rough for her. I'm not sure if she'll be able to do everything, but she's making it along, after I imported her address book from her old hard drive. The hard thing is, I don't use Windows Mail or Windows Contacts. I didn't use AOL, and I didn't use Outlook Express. I offered Thunderbird, and AOL Open Mail Access . However, she wasn't comfortable with that. That's what years of AOL use will do to you. Unable to use any other platform, even for the same mail.

- Then there's the whole Kodak EasyShare thing. I installed it on the computer before I brought it over, but I didn't move her pictures. We imported some from a CD her aunt sent her, but that didn't really work out... too many questions, and she wasn't really into it. Then, I couldn't import her old pictures, because the hard drive enclosure I brought her old drive in didn't want to work in Vista on the new computer, even though it worked on my computer at home. I'll write that up to a bad enclosure... The EasyShare backup was like 4.8 GB... too big for a single-layer DVD. I guess the next time I head over, I'll just physically put the drive in the computer and move the files. Ugh. I don't use EasyShare, but I suggested it to her, based on her buying a Kodak Camera, thinking it would be easy. It was, but its still in that, learn it one way, not what is really happening kind of phase.

All this said, my mom-in-law isn't dumb. True, she's not really into learning new ways of doing things, but that's not a specific computer-ish thing. That's just her. Vista is for *new* computers, and *new* peripherals. However, the development is rooted in backwards compatibility. It's just this weird mish-mash of new concepts that are superficial and lack of support for old things that were changed without need.

The real question... of course, is... if I just said, "look, learn this Linux thing, and I'll support you 100%, would it really work out? I don't really use Linux for the things she does. The photos are really important to her, being able to read the e-mail stuff is really important to her... all those silly messages with weird things going on in the world that I'll casually glance at, because I've been "on the Internet" since college, and have seen them already... it is important.

They aren't important to me in the same way they are important to her.All my assets are a bit more digital... transient... I have a picture online, of my kids, if someone wants to see it, I send them a link. I don't really store anything important on my computer, so I don't do backups... She keeps the memory cards from her digital camera archived, and visits a store to print. It isn't really the same, but I know it is a completely valid way of using the computer.

Should I invest in using the computer like she does, so that I can help? Should I work on showing her how to use the computer the way I do, so that she doesn't have go through the struggles. She's not quite to the point where she realizes that everything is digital, and she can't "break" it. When she doesn't know how to do something, she asks, rather than simply trying. People make serious money writing books and stuff to help people out with this line of thinking/usage. I think I should write some "user friendly" books about how to do these things without Windows. I don't know if it would get published, but I do think it would be a worthwhile effort. If anything, I can use Deb as a guinea pig. LOL. I'll write that in the front of the book...

Samsung R225 Sucks -- what time is it?

Okay, I started wearing a watch again, because apparently looking at my phone for the time is too much hassle for me, and after years of religiously wearing a watch for years, I felt somehow restricted by it. Now, after going a few years without it, I've come back to wearing a watch... for many reasons.

Anyway, I got this cheapo free phone, and the time was off, and I wanted to have it at least be right. Some genius decides to put that in the "Organizer" settings, rather than the "Phone" settings. I don't use the organizer on this phone -- because it isn't a PDA. I appreciate the option, but um... no. Put the time and date settings for the phone where they should be...

Or just make every phone a Personal Data Assistant. Okay, thanks!

AT&T One down, one to go.

This past week, I canceled my service on my personal phone with AT&T. I ported my number to a T-Mobile prepaid line, with an old phone I had. I just don't talk on the phone that much. I had "a bazillion" Rollover minutes, and I was simply tired of paying for them. I sleep at night, and I see the people I want to talk to on the weekends. I have a phone of my own, at home, that gives me unlimited long distance.

I ported my wife a couple of weeks ago. She had an unlocked RAZR, which would have been sweet, but we're both stuck on these crappy Samsung R225 pieces of junk. Also, I didn't get any additional airtime added to my phone yet. I'll probably just drop $100 and go straight to the "Gold Rewards status". $0.10/min for the win... and no extra crappy fees.

Now maybe I can afford gas, and diapers. it's $4 a gallon... I should invent an auto engine that runs on dirty diapers... That'd be a total "genius" move. Minivans powered by the stuff that makes you get one anyway.

Dammit.... now I'm on Facebook.

Heh, my buddy Jim sent a message that he'd be in town next weekend. Talked it over with the boss lady, and I think I'm going to host a little grill-out. Should be awesome, even if nobody else comes. I guess that means I need to assemble this grill that Holly's dad got for us, and probably stake down the swing set.

I got the message through Facebook, but I wasn't on it before. So, I signed up, so I could reply to everyone on the message. I'm sure this is the start of something bad.

taking a bath...

I took a bath today. It was nice... My wife offered me the opportunity to "bathe", which usually means "shower, and quickly, dammit, these kids need supervision -- and you stink".

I elected to invoke my "me time" and take a nice long bath. Fabulous! I should do that more often.

To contribute or not to contribute. That is the question.

For all 5 of you that actually read my blog, this is kind of a more personal question. Don't take this as a, "I'm going to convert you all, and not help anyone anymore, and I'm abandoning my family."

I help a few people out with computers, mostly family and friends, and they're all on Windows. I don't suggest Linux, because I'm no expert, and I'm not a total convert myself. I spend lots of time in Windows playing games, because that is the platform for games... other than consoles, like the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Wii, of course.

I use Linux because I have more than one computer, and I tinker with them, and product activation and the cost of Windows just sucks for that. I assemble a box out of spare parts, to test something out, or see how it works, but before I can use it, I need a licensed copy of Windows. I don't have an extra $100 to slap around every time I want to use a box for something. Linux provides a good alternative.

When I use Linux, I use Fedora for two reasons. One is philosophical, the other is historical.

Historical -- A long time ago, in college when I was a Computer Science and Engineering student, I wanted a box, like the SPARC stations we had in the lab for programming. A floor-mate in the Residence Hall said he was going to try out Linux, so I got a book, and some Slackware CDs, and got it running. It took a few days of my winter break, and I wasn't very keen on it. I got a boxed copy of RedHat Linux, and the rest has kind of been "history". I circulated on and off Linux, tried Mandrake a couple of times. Windows stayed in the picture, because games stayed in the picture.

Phlosophical - Fast-forward to the present. I write instruction manuals for a living... or at least that's what I tell people. My family thinks I "work with computers". I have a real interest in Human Computer Interaction, but I got married and have kids instead of going to graduate school, and I'm pretty much stuck doing what I do, professionally for a while. I use Fedora, and Windows still sucks, but I tolerate it for games. Fedora's "freedom at whatever the cost" as opposed to Ubuntu's mission of displacing Windows, at any cost.

So, I use Fedora, occasionally, though not as much as I'd like. I hate my day job, I'd like to do more actual writing to help people use computers, as opposed to the regulatory documentation I work on now. I think contribution would at least give me mental good feeling, even if it doesn't change how my family depends on me to do crap I hate. But, I'm too busy with work and the extras and interruptions that come with having a one-year-old and two-year-old to really contribute at a level that "matters". The Fedora Project has done an excellent job of making it easier to contribute, and I identified some low-hanging fruit. However, I can't find the break in my schedule. I mean, I'm typing this up at work... and when I get home, my kids will be all over me, and if I stay up after them to work on stuff, I'll miss sleep, and I need that. The weekends usually involve my kids or other family members, and don't often provide the continuous spare time I need. In fact, I usually use the weekends to do the stuff I can't get to during the week.

The solution - ideally, is to get a job doing writing for stuff I care about, but um... nobody pays for that around here, and I'm carrying benefits for my family, so switching jobs on a whim hasn't really been a good option lately. Volunteering for something I care about seems cool, but I'm going to have to sacrifice something, and it seems the most likely candidate at this point is sleep. I might be able to exercise and eat better to get by on less sleep. I'll have to think on that.

Okay... back to work. I've already suspended a few tasks working on this. I really just need to find a way to make money, sitting at home, doing nothing. Anyone got some spam/scam mails I can read about that?

Tiny-ass laptops

I think I'm done with that whole mp3 player search. I'm just going to get an Asus "triple-e" or more likely, one of the billions of conceptual knock-offs, like this one . The Acer Aspire One looks awesome. I live in the United states, and I know that our dollar is all f'ed up, but a cheap, small laptop would be better than trying to fix up this old laptop I got here.

I don't know if they'll accept the extra "pounds" I have as payment. I could stand to lose a couple hundered to get one of little laptops.

Fwd: Am I wrong for not being willing to try KDE?

Am I wrong for not being willing to try KDE? I went through this funky phase where I decided that I really needed to try KDE4. I have barely any experience with it, as opposed to GNOME. My Linux-Fu is decidedly average. I just use it because it's free, and it has some apps I like, and I think Windows is dumb, except for playing games on the computer. I have some Mac experience, and GNOME is the default in Fedora, and was when I first tried RedHat Linux, so I've stuck with it. I've heard comparisons that GNOME is more like Mac and KDE is more like Windows.

Whatever... I want to use it for what it is, not what it seems like. Anyway, There's all this hubub about KDE 4. It's the "default" in Fedora 9's KDE spin, and I still haven't given it a go? Why? Because, I heard that KDE is really a second-class experience in Fedora... that's fine. I'll just try another distro. Again, my Linux-fu is only average, so switching to something like Mandriva or openSUSE to get an experience that has more of a KDE-centric focus is a pretty big deal.

I booted up Mandriva 2008 spring, and the only thing that strikes me as a "WoW" factor is that I get binary nvidia drivers and Compiz Fusion on the LiveCD. Whatever... Mandriva is fading quickly as a heavyweight distro, unfortunately to that whole misconception thing about requiring payment. It's really an awesome distro and deserves more publicity than it gets. KDE 3.x... meh... I still get the same apps, or something reasonably equivalent.

I tried openSUSE 11.0 beta. I haven't really had a good install experience. It failed on my old box, I couldn't figure out how to get dual-boot working with Vista. (I could search and find out what I need to know, and my Live CD just kind of stalled out. I think it is because I have bad media though... Here's the kicker... 4.1 isn't out yet. Everything I have read basically says it's coming along...stabilizing, but 4.1 is where the *average* person needs to come on board. Even the 11.0 DVD gives you the option of using 3.5 or 4.0, and differentiating them by their "maturity".

So, I think I'm just going to go back to GNOME on Fedora. Maybe I'll try the KDE spin with Fedora's awesome Live USB stick technology when Fedora 10 enters it release cycle. Here's some tips for Mandriva and openSUSE though:

Mandriva - buying a LiveUSB is cool, but make some tools available to let me make one on my own. GUI, please. Oh, and release or have someone in the community get some decent artwork for the media. Don't hide all the good stuff from people who just want to use your distro, and *not* pay you.

openSUSE - you're on your way to being Open. That's good. Since you're following RedHat anyway, hurry up and get that damn LiveUSB stuff working easier, like Fedora. If you beat them to a GUI app on Linux, rather than a script that requires root access. I might switch... or not, but it'll matter to a lot more people than me.

I'm not sure why I'm so miffed over having to run a script on Linux to make a Live USB stick, and getting a GUI app on Windows first. I think I understand the logic. It needs to be easier for Windows people, and if you have Linux installed already, making a Live USB stick is probably lower priority. At least a USB stick doesn't waste CDs, but I'm loving the idea of giving away this spool of LiveCDs with Fedora and kick-ass artwork printed on them with my Epson Stylus Photo R320. Too bad I'm so average that I can't figure out how to get the SVG to crop and import into GIMP at something higher than 90 dpi... the printout is much less impressive. Maybe I'll figure that out and blog about it.

Oh, and by the way, posting to my blog using e-mail from work... awesome. I don't know if I'd want to give up using a local client at home, but I'm finding myself more comfortable, being able to save drafts, and just pop an idea whenever I'm daydreaming at work, since I don't always focus 100% on the current menial task, and I have e-mail open anyway. I wonder if other blogging platforms have an e-mail posting gateway? Another blog post... back to work... or maybe lunch...

Getting back to good....

Well, that quick little romp through "let's find a LiveJournal Client on Windows" was quick. I'm posting this one via e-mail in Thunderbird - on Windows.

I tried to check out the Petrus Blogger (http://petrus-blogger.peterp.org/), thinking maybe Java will be my new friend... So, I installed the Java Runtime Environment. (I didn't have it installed, I really only use Windows for games...) Then I think, "Oh, maybe I should install OpenOffice.org on here too" and notice that the Mac OS links for it. Did they already do a native port? Hmm... My mom has my old Mac, but I'll bet the required JRE probably doesn't even run on 10.4... Maybe I should just get her on a x86 box and get her running Windows or Linux...

So anyway, the Petrus Blogger... it works from the Java Web Start, but I just get a blank window. I couldn't log in to LiveJournal... Oops... no go. I might as well just go back to Linux, or do an e-mail post. I bet a lot more people would not be using Windows if there was as much news about good applications being available on other platforms, and *not* on Windows.

So, it might be time to move back to a testing run of SUSE, or maybe Fedora 9 has settled into the post-release stability I need. I did finally break out that 4 GB USB stick I had, I made an upgraded computer for my mom-in-law, and I wanted to transfer some files. I did get it over there today, but I still need to migrate her pictures and e-mail. I think it might be time to forcefully introduce her to IMAP and online photo storage and management with Flickr.

What else... Oh, I got us much further away from "laundry bankruptcy" this weekend. I turned a mountain of unwashed clothes into a mountain of clean clothes (which is what we normally end up doing on a smaller scale). But, we actually got some clothes hung up and put away too... awesome.

Skipped mowing this weekend. Too busy doing laundry.

Finally took some pictures of my SDRAM and am going to actively work on making it go away. http://photos.mvpittman.com/memory has the goods (I really need to get on board with Flickr posting, I'm going to burn up my bandwidth at FastMail on silly stuff... maybe if I ever upgrade this LiveJournal account, I could use that too...) If you know anyone who needs some old PC133 for their computer, let me know. I also need some PC 133 RAM for a notebook, so I'm willing to trade.

Oh, and got my 700 MHz Celeron up to 512 MB after using it as a test bed, and discovering that one of the unmarked sticks was a 256 MB piece. Awesome... maybe I'll get that running as a server. I installed the Fedora 9 Live CD, and it has two 10/100 cards and a wireless B card. I'm not sure if I should wipe it and install ClarkConnect, or if I should just "learn" how to bend Fedora into what I want... "Fedora Home Server" spin anyone?

Oh, since I decided to test an upgrade with my mom-in-law... my TV-tuners got displaced from their BE-2300/AN-52 setup. But, at least the beige bomb is possibly gone. I hope this new box works out, but I wouldn't be surprised if I end up moving her back to the old computer. Still gotta migrate those pictures and e-mail though.

How shall I post... let me count the ways.

Okay, seriously, I'm on Windows, and I want to make a post to my LiveJournal Blog. I could:

- open a web browser, log into LiveJournal, post
- e-mail a post
- use a client to post

The third option sounds most appealing to me, because I don't have to be online to do do the composition... I suppose e-mail (with a client) does the same thing. I really liked using gnome-blog and LogJam on Fedora...

I just got this itch to post, figured I'd try a Windows Client. LochJournal hasn't really seen an update in a while... but neither has LogJam. This program is too ugly to live (or stay installed) buh-bye.