There are tons of places that offer free file storage online these days. Microsoft has recently launched its “SkyDrive” with 25 gigs free. (Alas, there’s also an upload limit of 50 MB.) But if you want to sync with your Linux desktop, Microsoft’s SkyDrive won’t have software for you.
Dropbox offers online file storage and sharing with software for Windows, Mac and Linux (plus many mobile platforms, but alas for me, the Blackberry version is not ready yet). So as a Linux user I was pleased to actually have current software that works…the syncing is not only easy but super fast.
With a free account you get 2 gigs, which is not a lot, but you will receive 250 MB extra for each person you refer (up to 8 gigs). Of course, I have a referral link I want to share with you…if you use it when you sign up for an account, you’ll also get an extra 250 MB:
The pricing plans for upgraded accounts with more storage are reasonable, but not amazing in terms of gigs per dollar; but the service does not limit file size, and supposedly everything is encrypted so you have your privacy.
I’m finding the service most useful when I want to share things with someone else who is not local. You can just drag and drop files into a shared folder and it adds the files to the Dropbox folder on the other user’s computer almost instantly.
I just got an email from China saying that someone in China was looking to trademark my domain name and register a number of variations on that name. I’m always suspicious of these kinds of emails and so I looked it up. Sure enough, it’s a scam. They send these letters to try to sell people on domain names they don’t need at ridiculous prices. For more information, see:
I like Hulu for its online streaming video, but one of the main reasons was that it was free and had very brief commercials. Unfortunately, getting current episodes in any sort of timely fashion (and keeping up with them before they expire) has not been the easiest on Hulu.
Hulu is “solving” this problem by adding a $9.99 monthly paid service. The main “benefit” is that you can access entire seasons of many TV shows. Problem is, you still have to watch ads, and Netflix trounces Hulu when it comes to movie availability (and lack of ads). Judging from the comments posted on this Yahoo news article, the reception to Hulu’s new Plus service is not just negative, but downright hostile. As one commenter said succinctly:
Hulu actually has employees with business degrees and they come up with this?
Really?
Really?
What Hulu isn’t getting is that they are not just in competition with Netflix, but DVRs and torrents. I’d consider paying $9.99/month for no advertising and a huge selection along with high quality streaming, but I certainly wouldn’t at Hulu’s current level of service. They are promising HD quality for the extra fee…which would be enticing were it not for the fact that half the time my Hulu videos are as jerky as webcams were back in 2002, and I often manually lower the video quality to try to improve the streaming experience.
It remains to be seen whether Hulu’s new Plus service will take off. In the meantime, if you want to try another free streaming video site, check out Crackle. They have a quirky selection and actual real staff members respond to your questions in the comments.
One thing that will be going the way of the do-do eventually with all of this online streaming will be the hard copy DVD rental. Red Box and Blockbuster watch out!
Google has their own operating system that is being developed for Netbooks – call it Chrome OS or Chromium, your choice. I downloaded a version bootable by USB, developed by a very smart 17-year-old. With bootable USB in hand, I was able to get Chrome OS running on my laptop. Here are my first impressions:
Basically, Chromium is Google’s Chrome browser set up as an operating system. When you boot up and login, you are put into Chrome. From there, you can use Google Apps to get your work done via the “cloud.”
There is no way to save things to the hard drive or install native applications. It’s designed that way. You have to have Internet access to do anything.
This might be fine, but in my first attempt to use the OS, it did manage to find my wifi network, but froze on the authentication. It also didn’t seem to like my external mouse much. Ultimately, the system hung and I shut it down. I’ll play with it more later.
I’d say, this is a promising “lite” operating system, if just to have on USB for those times when your hard drive dies and you just want to login to the Internet to check your email. Whether it will be robust enough for daily use remains to be seen.
Just what we need – another reason to upgrade our televisions and create more electronic waste! Though, at least this TV will save some space in the landfill once it’s thrown out. It’s the new LG super flat flatscreen. It is less than 7 millimeters thick. There’s no official name for it. Just think of it as the skinny jeans of the TV world:
So I downloaded and burned a copy of Fedora 11 Linux and found it won’t work at all on my Gateway laptop with the ATI built-in graphics card. The LiveCD wouldn’t work. Couldn’t even get to a desktop. I tried a bunch of different boot options (and yes, I tried “nomodeset”) and still it didn’t work.
Apparently, the latest bleeding edge Linux kernel doesn’t have ATI drivers that work with it. OK…why release a distro that won’t even work with a large number of graphics cards? That’s just strange to me.
I’ve downloaded Dreamlinux 3.5 instead. The LiveCD works perfectly and I’m installing it now, over a Linux Mint Elyssa installation, which was out of date. Review of Dreamlinux to come. (I still like Mint and I use it on my main computer.)
Thing is, I hate burning these CDs and then wasting them when they don’t work. A lot of useless techno-trash. I’ll give the Fedora CD to a friend who can hopefully use it.
Twitter is abuzz with this admission from Greenpeace that it was “emotionalizing” (i.e., exaggerating) the global warming issue:
The problem with this “emotionalizing” is that it discredits the environmental movement and gives power to people who say global warming is a hoax. I personally don’t find the global warming issue to be a compelling one. I have been around long enough to remember that environmental scares come in waves: for a while we were focused simply on “pollution.” Then “acid rain” came in vogue. The hole in the ozone layer was a focus for a while. Lately, it has been global warming.
There are so many other problems the environmental movement could focus on. For example, I would prefer to see more focus on overpopulation. Let’s face it: Our environmental problems are caused by too many people on a small planet. I would prefer to see the environmental movement support education and family planning in third world countries as a means of helping keep birth rates down. Global warming in and of itself is too open to debate and gets us off-track on more important issues, such as the toll our big cities are taking NOW on our watersheds.
Whether or not global warming is man-made, part of the cycles of the planet, or both, it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters to me is that we humans are burdening the planet in a manner that is not sustainable. Let’s focus on that and not so much on polar ice caps, which just ends up causing ridicule against environmentalists.
My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.
I did like how fast Puppy Linux was, but the USB mouse problem was something I was unable to fix and made it not worth keeping the distro. (I also found Puppy to be a bit too techie in its style.) PCLinuxOS 2007 was actually the best, most stable Linux distro I’d had on here, but I was concerned they were moving to KDE 4 and knew that would never work on an old computer. Concerned about upgrades, I dropped PCLinuxOS to test other distros.
Of course, I opted for the LXDE install. I’d never tried it, much less heard of it, but the screenshots looked nice enough. The LXDE version of PCLinuxOS comes as Live CD that doubles as the install disk. Installation was fairly easy, but I missed the information about logging in as root when I signed in. Because I was logged in as “guest,” when I hit the install button, I was asked for a password. You’d think after years of playing around with Linux I might have figured out to type in “root,” but I had no clue what to do. (I had to search the Wiki to see what to enter.) This could truly throw off a newbie.
This minor gripe aside, the rest of the installation was a snap, and I had the system running in no time. No painful configuration to deal with – pretty much everything worked out of the box. Even video including, amazingly, Flash in the web browser! PCLXDE comes with Midori as the default web browser. I have no idea what Midori is based on, but it works great on this old laptop.
The stripped down LXDE version of PCLOS includes a small selection of programs, including the AbiWord word processor, a simple soltaire card game, and a few basic Internet tools. OpenOffice.org is easily installed with pretty much the click of a button. Synaptic Package Manager is available on the toolbar for easy installation of other programs. And the best part about PCLXDE is the Control Center, which makes it easy manage the system. This is really one of the most professional-looking aspects of PCLinuxOs, which is sure to impress non-Linux friends who might be otherwise skeptical of Linux.
As for LXDE, it is an amazing desktop. Fast, attractive, and very easy to use. I have Gnome running on my Linux Mint installations, and I am never quite happy with it. It just doesn’t feel “modern” to me. But LXDE has that nice polished feel that makes you feel like you are actually using a modern-day piece of desktop software. I don’t feel like I’m using “Linux” here…I’m just using a computer.
I had a few minor problems: I screwed up installing my wifi card but somehow managed to get it working after some poking around. For a moment there, though, I thought I had really screwed up my wifi drivers. This could be improved in terms of making it a bit more bulletproof.
The monitor also had to be manually set to the 1400×1050 size, though at least this setting held once I adjusted it (as for some reason Mint didn’t like those monitor specs and kept starting up X server with the wrong monitor resolution). And the installed Twitter application would not let you open your account unless you had put in your “default keyring” password, which you would not know because you haven’t set it yet. (You have to go into your home directory and delete the default keyring file hidden in there to get this to work…kind of annoying.)
Otherwise, I am excited to be web browsing and even watching YouTube on this old computer – though it’s a bit jerky due to the low RAM I have on here (only 256 MB). I have had so many problems with Flash on my other computers with Mint installs that I’m wondering if I shouldn’t just switch them to PCLOS. We’ll see.
Verdict: Big thumbs up. I would highly recommend PCLinuxOS 2009, the LXDE version, to anyone who has an old computer that needs new life breathed into it. This is probably the best Linux distro I’ve found for this computer, and I’m going to keep it.
Computer:
Sony Vaio
Pentium III
850 MHz
256 MB RAM
20 Gig harddrive
Netgear PCMCIA Wifi Card (WG511)
PCLXDE default installed software:
Midori – Web Browser with Flash and Multimedia playback
Abiword -Word Processor (Get Open Office available after hd install)
ePDFView – PDF Viewer
Leafpad -Tex Editor.
Transmission – Bittorrent Client
Emesene – Instant Messenger
XChat – IRC Client
Sylpheed – Email and News Reader
GRDC – Remote Desktop Client
GPicView – Graphic Viewer
MTPaint – Graphic Drawing Client
Alsaplayer – Music Player
Mplayer – Video Player
PCMan – File Manager
Simple Backup – Backup Software
Xfburn – CD/DVD Burning Software
Gnome PPP – Dial up Client
File Roller – Archiving Software
PCLinuxOS Control Center – Adminstration Tool
LXDECC – LXDE Control Center (provided by Lord UnR34l)
AddLocale – Convert LXDE into your language
XPat2 – Card Playing Suite
Tiwtux – Twitter Client
Grsync – Graphical Rsync Client
Virtualbox Additions added
“Carbon offsets” have for some time now seemed to me to be the same as “Rape credits”.
Someone like Al Gore guzzles up huge amounts of energy, with resultant huge carbon emissions, for just one individual, but buys “carbon offsets” from some outfit, maybe one that he even gets “dividends” from.
Now, image that there were such a thing as “rape credits”, where a man could go around raping women and instead of being sent to jail, or castrated, instead he could purchase “rape credits” which would “absolve” him.
The two concepts seem basically identical to me. With “carbon offsets” someone is paid to do something like plant trees somewhere that “breath in” carbon thus counteracting the damage (or supposed damage anyway, but that is another matter) done by increased carbon from all Al’s guzzling. “Rape credits” would be the very same idea. Al Gore could go around raping large numbers of women but pay money to some outfit, probably one that Al Gore got “dividends” from, and they would donate money to rape crisis hotlines and centers and councilors who would undue some of the damage. Maybe they could undue on average half the damage per rape victim, so rapist Al would have to make two donations for every woman he raped.
Hmm. Interesting analogy. What do you think? Do you think carbon credits are like “rape credits”? I certainly see the point of not using carbon offsets as a justification for trampling over the environment, but it’s better to have carbon credits than nothing at all.
Here’s an interesting way to recycle those Altoids mint tins: Turn them into MP3 players! 
My old Pentium III laptop has served as my testbed for Linux distributions that can work on older computers. So far, I’ve had Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS 2007, Linux Mint, and Puppy Linux installed. Most worked fairly well, except Linux Mint had a problem recognizing the 1400×1050 pixel monitor, and Puppy Linux screwed up my USB mouse.