Techie Stuff

TL;DR – Sometimes the smallest laptop isn’t the best option for a traveler. If you live on one machine then maybe sucking up the weight for power isn’t a bad idea. If you have a tablet then there is no question My apologies to my blog readers for two things: That my blog has not been updated in N+1 more months than it should have That it has taken a very travel oriented slant as of late I blame both on starting an international engineering firm, but it has forced me to change my habits (what do you mean I don’t have time to blog on only 4 hours of sleep!?!) and learn to get smarter with my travel. ...

There is so much hoopla about Private Mode browsing not actually keeping you private. Most of it is due to your addons for Flash and Java. Here are the extensions I use to keep the browser private ALWAYS: Chrome – Click&Clean Firefox – Click&Clean Internet Explorer – CCleaner plugin since IE is the suckage

First a few things: Intel you suck…suck hard…your own Moblin distro can’t suspend because you feel that “embedded platforms shutdown and restart” Guess what sparky, they don’t always. Fix your damn IEGD driver Dell and Ubuntu screw you both for creating some custom driver to send out on Dell 12 laptops. The driver I install now was extracted from your blob. Hate Theo from OpenBSD as much as you want, but no blobs Windows drivers for this card suck pretty bad too. There is a video demo of the GMA500 Poulsbo playing Quake 3 off a MID. The driver in Windows XP-7 cannot play flash without massive frame drops. Totally unacceptable with the 10.1 Flash Beta to still have such trouble The distro I landed with was Ubuntu 9.10. It pains me because it will never recieve the GNOME 2.30 install, but with PPA I am good with most everything else. I will use this as my hold over until Intel gets off their butts and produces quality code. I used to tell people that the Intel series of cards were the best in UNIX world for out of the box drivers. Yes+but=NO Don’t sour your good name Intel ...

I love me some eye candy that is actually useful. Conky falls into this category for me. In the olden days it was either gkrellm or a WindowMaker plugin. I have spent some time getting the conky setup EXACTLY how I want it. The results are posted below: Install: sudo aptitude install conky lm-sensors hddtemp python-feedparser Extract this file to ~/.bin and make executable. Edit the files for weather.yahoo.com Conky Scripts ...

There was a time in cable television when channel names insinuated content. Take for example the Military Channel, it is a safe bet there is going to be planes, guns, or other things blowing up from the military viewpoint. I can safely turn there after a long day and see my stress melt away with the tonnage of bombs dropped from B-52s. The History Channel used to be an escape for my other secret hobby, history. It has come to my attention after being sick this week that no longer can I depend on the name of History Channel to mean that I will learn some history. Rather new programming that appeals to the masses of fringe culture (an oxymoron in itself) is plastered from day to day. Alan Jones (or Airman Jones as I knew him long ago) put together a list that truly reflects the programming schedule: ...