I need to get pictures of screens for reporting problems. I don’t usually want to take the full screen or even a window - I want the smallest section that will show the problem. Using Ubuntu, I wasn’t able to find anything that would do it as easily as I would like. I’m guessing with some certainty that I could have rigged The Gimp or something to capture the screen but then I would have to work at reducing the size, etc. ...
Really liked this article. Linux Audio Players, Tested and Graded. I’m working my way through the Linux equivalents of Windows apps. I’ve used iTunes under Windows because it would talk easily to my iPod. I tried Rhythmbox but it was out immediately. I want to keep my songs on a network-attached storage drive. Basically, the SimpleShare is a hard drive with an ethernet port. I don’t expect it to be as vulnerable to attacks as Windows XP. I don’t have to punch holes in its firewall that might allow people to get control of my Linux box or my wife’s Mac. Rhythmbox wants import all my music to one local location. No. ...
Do you use Google Reader? I’ve thought that other readers were better beause they’re faster. I really like RSS Owl, which uses IE to display pages. It’s based on Java and is cross-platform, usable on Macs, Windows and Linux. It uses one file to track what feeds you read. Problem is, there’s no standard way to show how far you’ve read in a newsfeed. Articles are updated, the online services fetch them at different times - Google and Bloglines are online all the time but your RSS reader probably is not. So I can’t easily keep offline readers in sync unless they’re hooked up to something to like FeedDemon. ...
I really like to be able to click on links while reading an article but not have to deal with the links until I’m done. I’ve got enough ADD issues without tabs popping up. So I was very happy to find this reference to making tabs work better (for me, anyway): Firefox: Open diverted links in new background tab instead of new window It’s kind of an adjustment process because FF is relatively “quiet’ - the tabs are opening all the way to the right and not grabbing attention. Just the way I’ve wanted but it’s a little unnerving - I’m checking to make sure the tabs did open. ...
One thing that was kind of exasperating about Ubuntu was the (weird( version numbers. The successor to 6.06 was 6.10? The next version was 7.04? Huh? Fortunately, somebody finally blogged about this: What’s With the Ubuntu Version Number Scheme? – Johnny’s Thoughts No big secret: the first number is the year and the second is the month. So 7.04 translates as 2007 and April or month 04. Now I can sleep at night.
We got an HDTV last year. After a few months of watching DVDs on it, I started wondering what HDTV was like. I tried getting an indoor HDTV antenna which didn’t work so well. I started looking at DirecTV and Dish Network and upgrading to higher levels of cable with Comcast. There’s occasional things on ESPN that I want to watch and there’s probably a few things that my wife would like to watch. ...
Was reading Deep Jive Interests about Dell’s Crowdsourcing More Than Hype: Tells Microsoft to “Suck It!” I’ve spent some time the past 10 days or so putting Ubuntu 7.04 on 3 PCs, all of them dual-booting some flavor of Windows. Obviously there’s a lot of interest in doing this on Dell’s site but it’s not clear at all that Dell is going to reduce the price just because they don’t install Microsoft. I still don’t have hibernation working properly on my desktop - haven’t tried on the kids’ or my laptop yet - so I’m a lot more interested in paying the same price as a Windows box just to have hibernate and wireless work without a glitch. ...
I love the way that Firefox and Thunderbird can be extended by extensions. But I’ve been somewhat concerned about the reliability and stability of Greasemonkey scripts. There were a couple of features that I wanted to try (more on that later) so I broke down and installed it on my laptop. Wow. I’ve been very pleased with how well the scripts worked. I’m still cautious about installing them, since they’re not looked over anywhere near as much as extensions on the official Mozilla site are. But the Userscripts site lets you look over info from the author and comments from people before installing anything. ...
I found Eric Sink’s blog via some references from Joel Spolsky’s blog. This is a nice post about the problems with whiz-bang technology.
This is an excellent write-up of why I don’t think Blu-Ray or HD-DVD are going to matter. And some good insights in the comments, too. The Unwinnable War in high definition DVD