the reality tunnel

I got a new MacBook from work and need to migrate files from my old Dell notebook running Xubuntu Linux.  Luckily, I had recovered a drive from a bricked machine that was donated to pages that I could use to transfer the files.
I don’t like the Fat32 file system, so I formatted the external drive [...]

Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like.

I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  So, [...]

Linuxfest 2008 web page.
In the first talk the presenter said that he felt the greatest contribution of Linux was that it was the great equalizer and that it was responsible for the generation of skilled IT workers in India, China, and other parts of the world that are emerging as producing a lot of technology [...]

I got Rich’s old notebook from work and installed Xubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) see update below on it. I’m tracking issues I’m having with the distro/platform here.
Spell Checking in OpenOffice Writer – FIXED
After having this machine for a while, I just noticed this issue.  I followed some instructions I found here and tried File [...]

I’m running debian lenny/sid with  kernel 2.6.26-1 on my workstation and for a while, my audio hasn’t been working in most applications (I was most annoyed by the lack of sound in flash), though it has been working in amarok.  I was getting error messages like this when trying to do audio playback.  These particular [...]

I finally got off my butt and fixed a few things that had been driving me nuts with the settings on my workstation.
Weird KDE copy/select behavior
First, I use KDE, and the copy and paste behavior was driving me nuts.  If I copied text in an application with ctrl-c and then selected text with the mouse, [...]

I was leant a Dell Latitude D810 that has a Synaptics touchpad.  Eventually, I had to admit that the tap-to-click setting was a little to sensitive and kind of annoying (most frequently, I accidently clicked things in my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox).  I found that I could disable the tap-to-click feature by adding the line:

 Option   [...]

Search and Replace in Multiple Files

perl -pi -w -e ’s/search/replace/g;’ *.php

from How to do a search and replace over multiple files

There’s an old imac under the table at bz’s house that’s gathering dust and I was going to try to put Linux on it. I’ve had a good experience with xubuntu running well on older hardware and having good, easy-to-use features (and it’s debian based), so I’m going to try that and document my [...]

I decided to go to the IU library to check out the book The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? (ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-678-4) and found a wealth of other interesting books in the HN80.N5 section on the 7th floor. I also checked out There Goes The Neighborhood (ISBN-10: 0-394-57936-4), [...]