May 07

For those of us with a full cup of Windows Vista hate, the answer is to run to Windows 7.  The release candidate (RC) is out and I too plan to overwrite Vista with this as soon as I can get my head above water.   But this article from Lifehacker made me laugh this morning.  What will happen when you get the Windows 7 RC and fail to upgrade to the paid version?  At first (in March 2010) you’ll get a nag/pop up.  I’d expect that.  Then in June, you’d expect to be locked out, right.  But no, even funnier.  You can use it for 30 minutes. Then it auto-reboots – without warning.  :)   Maybe it’s just me, but that’s funny and worse than a total lockout.  Like what you see?  Too ba(reboot).

It’s all fine.  They don’t have to give you a nag-free year to begin with. If you don’t want to pay for your operating system, then get Ubuntu (or some other flavor of Linux).

Popularity: 17% [?]

May 07

Amarok 1.4 WAS by far the best music player I had ever seen.  So many options, a great functional layout with nearly everything you wanted no more than a single click away… I did say was. My recent upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04 automagically left me with Amarok 2.  Not only was it not playing out of the box, I seem to have lost all ability to customize it or control it.  They say it’s the future of media players.  Of course they do because, it’s sure not the present.  I haven’t seen a sequel this bad since Weekend at Bernie’s 2.  Continue reading »

Popularity: 10% [?]

Apr 25

I’m up and running with the latest Ubuntu release.  It’s an upgrade from 8.10 which was an upgrade from 8.04.. you get the idea.

Only two hick-ups so far.  The first, compiz boogered up on my leaving my Panels (or menu bars as some call them) not displaying properly.  I finally had to reset them back to square one.  Which is really easy to do, thanks to this post: How to Reset Ubuntu/Gnome Settings to Defaults without Re-installing.

My next minor problem was even easier to fix: Hide the drive and partition icons from my desktop.  Ubuntu question #2625: “removing icons from the desktop”.

I also had to reconfigure my compiz settings manually. Everytime I restored from the back up profile, it boogered up something again making me reset my gnome defaults.

If you are a Ubuntu newbie and don’t understand half of what I just said, please feel free to post a comment or check in the Ubuntu Forums.  We were all new once.

Don’t have Ubuntu or even know what it is?

Check out their website: www.ubuntu.com or nag me to put up a screencast of my own desktop.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Apr 16

Really?? This was a problem?  You were accidentally hitting Ctrl-Alt-Backspace?  Personally I loved the combo and found it very handy during extreme (albeit rare) lockups.

The Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to force a restart of X is now disabled b default, to eliminate the problem of accidentally triggering the key combination. Users who do want this function can enable it in their xorg.conf, or by running the command dontzap –disable.

via 9.04 Release Notes | Ubuntu.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Mar 24

I just installed this.. follow me on Twitter if you wish: @ronshank

How to Add Twitter in Pidgin Windows/Linux ~ Web Upd8.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Mar 19

Broken Vista

No wallpaper sums up my feelings about vista as much as this one.  Sweet.

Well.. maybe this mod of it :)

Popularity: 82% [?]

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