So on our new laptop I had gone through the pain of burning off the restore discs and then wiped the sucker completely clean. I even deleted the partition that contained the restore info. Well a few things did not work out and I decided to start over and thought about getting vista on there to play with it some more, plus I like the movie making program. So I pulled out the restore discs and got going. To my surprise it recreated my restore partition as well. I resized the vista to 50GB with the linux install disk and it all better now.

ctrl + shift + T will bring back your last closed tab in firefox.

I end up going back into my history for closed tabs many times a day. This is sure to make me even more productive

via

So the weekend was cool getting the USB hard drive to work and the extra internal storage on the computer. I was messing with it because I was fixing a friends computer. I used a linux live CD (ubuntu) to transfer his whole hard drive over to my USB drive.

I am privileged to work on many folks puters cuz they muck them all up with malware. This is the first one where I was able to just use the restore partition build into most new computers. It was so simple I was amazed. It literally tool 15 minutes. No searching for drivers and installing crap. I did add some antivirus and firefox.

I was gifted one of these fine external USB hard drives a while back. It totally saved the day cuz I figured I might as well back up my important data off my network share, then my network share died. Phew…. Since my network share was dead the USB drive got a bunch of use. Well recently is has started getting a little flaky. It would mount as read only and no matter what I did I had to reboot my machine for it to show back up. Eventually a reboot would not fix it anymore. I finally decided to just mount the sucker in fstab and it is doing pretty good now.

I added another 300gb internal drive and plan on using the USB drive as a precious data backup device only. Thing just scares me too much to use as a regular drive.

I love to show my flippy cube to people. My dad was pretty stunned to see it. Well they keep making it cooler and cooler. This is just a screen saver and not all that cool, but they keep coming up with cool stuff and I am pretty excited to see what the future holds. More here

Jeesh how long ago was it I bought the new laptop? Anyways I spent an entire week worth of evenings and hours on the weekend struggling to get the internal wireless working in ubuntu linux. While looking around and deciding to buy the laptop I did I researched the compatability of a broadcom BCM4310 chip. Broadcom does not provide info on their drivers so Linux geeks have to reverse engineer drivers. There were lots of tutorials for using ndiswrapper to get it working so I figured it was gonna be no problem. I lost a good amount of hair and struggled to not drink away my sorrows dealing with that dam wireless chip. I reinstalled at least 8 times.

I gave up after a while and started looking for a wireless expresscard. I did not want to have a USB one sticking out where my clumsy ass would tear the socket out of the laptop. There is not much out there for expresscard wireless adapters, but I was glad to see belkin had one. My old laptop used a Belkin card and it worked really well with linux. Did a quick search and saw it worked nicely with linux. Well over lunch it showed up on my door step, a brown box containing a Belkin F5D8073 N wireless card. jammed it in the slot, copied over the windows driver folder, used ndisgtk to load the driver, reboot and off the wires I was. Joy.

The funny part is I still sit 5 feet from the router with the power plug connected

really digging the new laptop. Thing is really light and small. Got a clean vista partition on there and ubuntu rocking. Both are running really fast and good, cept for wireless in ubuntu. I will get it, but it is taking me a while. The broadcom wifi chip is not very linux friendly.

Got a pretty cool DVD player from woot. It is one of those that can play any type of disk or file and the description said it had a coax out on the back. That was a huge thing for me because of our setup at home. The kitchen TV mirrors whatever is on our living room TV via a coaxial cable that also goes into my PC. Well it was not that kind of coaxial It is basically a RCA port for audio. Oh well, with some tinkering I can prob get a switch box or something, but the DVD player is so much better than our old one.

Since the car did not need a new radiator we had enough left in savings to replace our broke laptop. Picked up an little HP. Not too fancy, but decent. Tried to show the size difference in the pic, but failed. Only 14 inches. Thing has Vista installed on it and I just wanted to burn off the recovery disks. Kinda bummed cuz 2 hours after getting home with it I am still on the first step.

Vista is a turd, pre installed custom operating systems suck. It took at least 20 minutes to get into vista. First the normal setup with username, pass, time zone, etc…. Goes through its thing while showing advertisements. Finaly looks like it is going to boot into windows and “installing HP software”. I wait, wait, peel the 10 stickers off the dam thing. Looked like it was sponsored by nascar. Then the register with us, oh would you like this special offer, how about …… Got in about 20 minutes after powering it on.

Anyway vista sux, go straight to disk burning program, gonna take about an hour is says. That was just to build the disks which eventually fill 10gb of the 12gb partition, now I have to burn 3 DVD’s or 17 CD’s. I figure 3 hours in I will get to install a better OS. Gonna install a fresh non HP tainted mini partition of vista since I have access to it and a key on this, then ubuntu.

I googled for it and found bunches of xmodmap’s and other crap. I just make it another ctrl key.

System –> preferences –> keyboard –> layout options –> Ctrl key position –> make caps lock an additional Ctrl