Ubuntu 8.10 is OUT!!!
Hurray! At a very slight glance, new features seem to include a USB Ubuntu-system-maker-tool-thing, and a System Cleaner that wipes unnecessary and abandoned packages. My old instructions on USB ubuntu are now rendered obsolete.
(taken from lifehacker)
Crossover office free TODAY ONLY
Yes: The 40 dollar shareware Linux/Mac program is available for free today only.
Now you might be thinking ‘ What is the difference between this Crossover thing and WINE? Crossover is just a branch of WINE, but payware, right? ‘ I was thinking that myself, until I found this forum post with a google search:
If you don’t know already, Crossover is just a modification of Wine. The major differance between them (besides cost) is that Crossover “Officially” supports the software. Wine is OpenSource and almost naturally is not static, so it is less predictable than Crossover. For example, release WXY of Wine might work well with Photoshop and Office 2000, but release XYZ of Wine might not function properly with those programs at all. I suggest you download Wine first and test out all the programs you need. If they don’t work fine, then spring for Crossover Office if you like.
I can verify this through my own experience, as I had to install two seperate versions, one old and one new, of WINE to get rollecoaster tycoon and Civilization III to run together. Of course, I’m not much of a WINE guru, so I might have been installing them incorrectly. ( Plus, it was like 3 years ago and I wasn’t that capable (; )
That being said, Crossover might be more of one of those ‘it just works’ program than WINE is, But is it good enough to get away with charging 40 bleepz for it on a regular basis? After all, Regular ‘vanilla’ WINE IS open source. So is it worth it to pay $40 for something you don’t want to get you hands dirty with, or take the time to learn about what is going on and do it for free?
Who knows. I’ll try it out after I finish my Homeschool.
(I am not saying that WINE doesn’t work, but what takes more of a deal of understanding what is going on? Installing from command line, or installing with an installer? )
Blogging from Mexico
Ok. So: I have managed to get back onto my laptop here at our Mexican vacation house. (Grandmas) I haven’t been able to blog since we are all to buisy taking pictures and fixing my unlce Lynns old brickbox laptop.
Seriously. This thing is BAD.When I first got here it was running Windows XP pro with these specs:
64 MB built in RAM, 128 MB extra RAM. (3/32 of the RAM my laptop has)
8 GB hard drive (My old laptop had 40GB and even that felt cramped.)
No CD drive
Too old to boot from its one USB port.
Dead keys
Faded screen. ( This wasn’t a problem since my other uncle hooked up a CRT monitor to it )
Some spyware was on it that made it go even slower and
This thing was made for Windows 2000, but I think it would be faster with Windows 3.1 .
I managed to get rid of the old operating system and install Xubuntu (XFCE Ubuntu) through Netbootin. Wubi wouldn’t see my ISO file. It feels surprisingly rewarding to be able to install Linux on a brick.
Otherwise, my vacation is going very nicely. I’m taking lots of pictures and enjoying myself. 
The coolest simple text editor around
DarkRoom is a narley little fulscreen text editor that is free of excessive any buttons and sliders to distract you. (But in windowed mode, it does have a toolbar on the top. Push F11 to go fullscreen. ) The developer compared it to the grossly overpriced ‘WriteRoom’ program for Mac os X. This one is open source. While I don’t like the default color scheme, it is easily customized by pushing ctrl+, (comma) to get to the options dialog. I use it with the font set to ‘Courier New 11pt’ and I changed all the colors too:
Font: R:0, G:75, B:125 (or B:150-175 to make it brighter maybe)
Page: R:0, G:3, B:5
Background: R:0, G:0, B:12, Alpha/Opacity:0
I really did use darkroom to catch up on 14 pages of CLEP notes in one day.
Some people may find this scheme to be a little dark, but the default black and green setting kills your eyes if you use it too long. Other than this problem, I also kept getting some ‘invalid form’ exception, but the program works fine if I just click ‘continue’.
A cool feature about darkroom is that it will make its own buffer to keep text in the editor even if you close it without saving.
And yes, I was just looking for an excuse to use the word ‘narley’
Political views
I was gonna make some big political post, but this guy is doing it for me:
You betcher’fanny that we grow bitter and cling to our guns.
Undecided voters annoy me to death. Here we are in our election with both sides presenting radically different views and opinions. If these people cannot decide between red or blue, they aren’t paying enough attention to make a valuable vote. If this is the case, their vote seems to be determined by betting on a roulette wheel based on shortsighted and false ’self-satisfaction’ and ‘gut-feelings’. How patriotic. I don’t care if you are voting for McCain or Obama. If you can’t find a reason to support your beliefs, go and get a real opinion from a news source that isn’t slanted.
Another thing is that Cosmic Humanist beliefs seem to require more faith than mine does. When they try to tell us that there is no universal truth, are they not imposing their beliefs on us? Why should I care, if what’s true to me isn’t true to them??
Addicted to Twitter
You have probably heard of Twitter. It is kind of like a cross between Instant Messaging and E-mail, but with really small messages ( maximum 140 characters :p Don’t worry. It doesn’t feel as limited as it sounds. ) that you post throughout the day. You chat with your friends as you would in, say, the Facebook ‘wall’ . I have no idea how anyone can come up with the cool little ideas for social networking sites like this.
It’s weird. It seems like the kind of thing that I would normally love to hate, but ever since I got my account last night, I can’t seem to refrain from telling the world about my daily homeschool problems. 
I know that I might be beating a dead horse, since twitter has >2,200,000 accounts and is already 2 years old, but I never actually looked into the site until just last night.
To post on twitter, you can either go to the Twitter website, or use some other client. I am using a firefox sidebar-extention beta thing ( Side note: Beta has grown to be an overused word. Considering all of the google and yahoo ‘beta’ webservices, ‘alpha’ seems to be the new ‘beta’. But still. This is 2008. -=The year of the future!=-) called ‘twitbin’. It’s cool, but it feels pretty slow, since it appears to use JavaScript. However, considering that the new JavaScript TraceMonkey engine is coming out in the next major Firefox release [3.1] (I hope I am not over-glorifying this update. ) , I think I can cope with the lag. That isn’t to say that there are better clients out there, though. I like it better than the other firefox extention -’twitterfox’, even though tfox doesn’t have issues with the other noscript addon that I use. ( I dunno. The interface just doesn’t work as well as twitbins’ does)
Another cool thing about twitter is that when you post a link, it automatically goes to tinyurl and shortens the link.
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