Posts under ‘Tech’

I’ve pretty much written off my good old Dell Inspiron 8000 as an obsolete clunker doomed to crawl along, but I keep it around because I can still run Linux at a reasonable speed on it, connect via wireless in various places, and get some writing done on the road. I most recently ran Fedora [...]

I’m not a fan of Windows Vista at all. The chief reason is because it’s a resource hog: even on a brand new machine with a fast processor and a gig of RAM, it just kind of pokes along, even without enabling the fancy Aero graphics. And that’s before running an app on it. User [...]

If you took my advice and downloaded Ubuntu 7.10, aka Gutsy Gibbon, but you don’t know where to begin, try this installation guide. It’ll take you through the install from start to finish, complete with screenshots, and leave you with a complete working desktop that includes everything you need for work and play.
Enjoy!

Sony Reader
Originally uploaded by MikeOliveri.

The Wife and I spotted the Sony Reader at Borders last night and we stopped to take a look.
I’d heard a lot about the crisp, clean display, but the reviews really don’t do it justice; this thing is just plain easy to read. Hell, you can almost read the screen in [...]

“Used-to-be” Key
Originally uploaded by MikeOliveri.

Would you believe I still recovered data off of this thing?
Our high school guidance counselor came to me with the remains of her USB flash drive in a plastic Zip-Lock bag. She said she’d accidentally sucked it into the vacuum (the brush caught the lanyard flash drive was attached to) and [...]

An automated anti-aircraft cannon went berserk during a demonstration, killing 9 soldiers and wounding 14 more. The manufacturers are calling it a mechanical defect.
Yeah. Just a glitch.
There’s a good quote in the Slashdot post that lead me to the piece:
“The biggest concern seems to be finding the glitches in the system instead of reconsidering automated [...]

Best Buy is dumping analog televisions effective immediately in anticipation of television going all HD in 2009. I say good for them, because it’s pointless for anyone to purchase an analog television that’s only going to be watchable for a year and a half. They’ll also be stocking the idiotic bail-out coupons the gov conjured [...]

Just for grins, I tried IM’ing Twitter again from my US Cellular phone. I fully expected the “service not supported” error message I’d received in the past. Instead, the message went through and a moment later I received confirmation that SMS had been activated on my account.
Nice! That officially puts Twitter ahead of Jaiku and [...]

Today marks the official release of the latest version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, making it one of the best times to take Linux for a test drive. Possibly as early as this weekend I will finally be upgrading from an older SuSE distribution to Ubuntu 7.10, aka Gutsy Gibbon.
Join me, won’t you?
Need more incentive? [...]

I was reading a recent issue of Linux Journal when I stumbled across an ad featuring a prominent picture of a woman’s face and the headline “Don’t feel bad, our servers won’t go down on you, either.” I thought that was kind of ballsy for an IT publication, and I’ve been meaning to scan it [...]