So back in May, after serving her well for 10 years, the power supply on my mother’s venerable Dell Optiplex (Which was a very well made machine in my opinion.) finally died. So I told her, we could go hunting around for a compatible power supply to fix the machine or, far more simply, just [...]
So, I discovered that the import file of my old posts has a lot of mangled markup and incorrect hard line feeds in it. This may be due to: Taking it straight from Linux but uploading it from Windows to a Linux server It had mangled markup in it already and WordPress did its best [...]
So I upgraded to Ubuntu 7.1 last weekend. Things went very smoothly. Prior to this, System76 sent out some upgrades for their hardware drivers, perhaps in anticipation of everyone migrating to 7.1. There was really only one hitch. My screen brightness now twitches on occasion. This is due to a known power management bug that [...]
Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. I don’t want to throw a keyboard out of a window. I want to remove the Microsoft branding from my Linux laptop keyboard. I don’t think it’s really spite. Microsoft makes a decent enough set of operating systems and applications. It’s just that it reduces my cognitive dissonance to have [...]
So I’ve had my new Darter Ultra laptop for about a week. I’ve noticed many improvements in speed for many tasks–still image rendering, page loading, conversion of file formats, copying large files and so on. I’m very pleased. A very small warning for strangers out there considering buying a System76 machine. They don’t exactly ship [...]
Day before yesterday, I bought a brand new laptop. This will be the first brand new computer I’ve bought in 7 years. My venerable Inspiron 3800 ran Win2k, XP, Redhat 7, Knoppix 3 and Ubuntu 6. I upgraded its RAM, upgraded its HDD, gave it 802.11g and replaced a cracked screen. Its DVD drive is [...]
So this is really a bunch of random computery things thrown together into a post. Yes, another boring, “Pace is thinking out loud post.” First, I continue to strike tiny blows to protect network neutrality from the lobbyists of telecommunications companies. I phoned Senator Patty Murry‘s office to ask her to vote for Byron Dorgan [...]
One side-effect of my part-time vocation as a computer technician is that people often give me their dead gadgets and old software. Actually they don’t give it to me. What really happens is that I see they are about to throw it out and that compels me to mention that there are dozens of places [...]
This is some news to me (Which only shows the limits of my expertise.) but you can actually build your own laptop. Things aren’t quite as modular as desktops. You don’t have the freedom to use one motherboard with another case, powersupply, screen or heat sink. But once you decide on the bare bones case [...]
So there’s been a lot of extensive, yet subtle change over the last few weeks here at the mighty, mighty Farlops Industries: After a period of stasis for 7 months, I moved all of my site’s legacy content into Movable Type. MT now manages nearly every aspect of my site. I’ve spent the last 7 [...]