Hi all,
I’ve converted my old blog from Expression Engine to WordPress. It was actually broken, but I managed to export the sql database to a csv file and imported it into a new WordPress blog. Of course many links and images are broken, and I’m missing a couple years’ worth of posts, but oh well! 😎
For my current blog, head on over to 10nineteen.com!
-Barron
I just don’t understand the fascination with Steampunk!
Last night I was up late tweaking Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon”. The update from “Fiesty Fawn” last week went pretty good, except the wireless card wouldn’t activate on startup. If I booted the computer without the card plugged in, then plugged it in after Ubuntu was running, then it would work fine. Not too big a deal, but still a hassle. Part of my tweaking last night was to get that card to load on startup, and I just had to add one line to a certain text file. I did this with the earlier install, but it must have gotten over-ridden with the update. So now my laptop is fully functional. I then started doing the fun stuff, which was installing themes! I found a couple good ones that look kind of like Vista, and I think they look nice. Click on the pic above for a larger version.
I found several really nice ones here: www.gnome-look.org
A friend and I were chatting about this story. He quotes an excerpt from it.
MyFriend: “The Earth-like Gliese 581C circles a star in the constellation of Libra that is cooler than our sun. Photograph: European Southern Observatory/AP”
MyFriend: why is their sun cooler than ours? w/e
Last night there was a birthday party at our house for myself and my friend Také. There was lots of good food, some amazing cakes, and a good time was had by all. Click the pic to see more photos at Flickr.
One of my favorite movies of all-time, Blade Runner, is being re-re-released on dvd. This one has a lot of restored special effects, and should be a must-buy for fans. “Blade Runner: The Final Cut” will be a 5-disc set with tons of extra features. Just in time for the holidays!
My Dell laptop is now happily cruising along with a new, fresh install of Ubuntu 7.04. It’s so much better than XP on that machine. Why did I switch to that OS? Read on, if you dare.
The story begins with my ailing Dell 5100. The laptop has had some issues with its RAM for the past couple months. There is 512MB of it in there, which was adequate for that machine (Pentium 4), but for some reason, it had been flaking out and only seeing 256MB. I used to be able to shut it down, swap memory sticks, and then the bios would see 512 again, but that workaround stopped working after a while. I ran memory tests on each chip, and they both checked out fine. BIOS is current and I’m still not sure what the problem is. But the bottom line was that 256MB of RAM was just not enough to run XP Pro. It would take about 15 minutes for the machine to fully boot up, which was just too long. And once I was “in”, each program I launched would just make the HDD churn like crazy. The 5100 is the machine I use to watch Japanese dorama on in the bedroom, but because of the lack of memory, it was just too much of a hassle to start up and use.
What about the iBook? Well, the Mac is great for web browsing and email/IM, but that machine is not powerful enough to play the dorama I watch, which is usually encoded using Divx or Xvid in a resultion of at least 704×396. In fact, most Flash video like the vids on YouTube are too choppy to view. It’s a nice little laptop, but it’s old, old I tell you! (Mariko, I want a new Macbook!)
The solution to my problem (no, not a new Macbook) was to install Ubuntu on the machine. Ubuntu is a completely free flavor of Linux, and has a nice GUI and tons of apps. Just looking on their webpage made it look like the perfect solution. Plus, I had just read an excellent article by Ashton Mills about using Ubuntu instead of Windows for normal tasks. It pretty much convinced me to take the plunge. (continue reading by clicking the “read more” link below)
This is pretty amazing stuff. I wonder if it is truly feasable? What is really exciting is that the effort is already underway to build a 175 megawatt plant in a 1-square-mile solar park. It is scheduled to start operating in three years.
Story at Crave.
Last night I had a crazy dream. I was a chef competing against my brother on some Iron Chef-like tv show, but then we were watching the show from the couch, and later on I met up with my girlfriend, who was Yumi Yoshimura from Puffy. It was nuts.