Recently I once again came across an article about the benefits of the btrfs Linux file system. Last time I’d come across it, it was still in alpha or beta, and I also didn’t understand why I would want to use it. However, the most I’ve learned about the fragility of our modern storage systems, the more I’ve thought about how I want to protect my data. My first step was to sign up for offsite backups. I’ve done this on my Windows computer via Backblaze. They are pretty awesome because it’s a constant backup so it meets all the requirements of not forgetting to do it. The computer doesn’t even need to be on at a certain time or anything. I’ve loved using them for the past 2+ years, but one thing that makes me consider their competition is that they don’t support Linux. That’s OK for now because all my photos are on my Windows computer, but it leaves me in a sub-optimal place. I know this isn’t an incredibly influential blog and I’m just one person, but I’d like to think writing about this would help them realize that they could a) lose a customer and b) be making more money from those with Linux computers.

The original fedup - 0.7 - did not work. Upgrade to 0.8 and then it complained about three packages - gthumb, picard-freeworld, and kipi-plugins. I THINK what happened is that my Fedora 19 version was the same or greater than the version in Fedora 20, but the dependencies were written in such a way as to not allow greater library versions. In other words, depends on library 1.0 and so version 1.1 doesn’t work. Sometimes that can be an important hedge against APIs changing, but often it can lead to annoying upgrades and updates. There are times where I couldn’t update a bunch of packages because of another. So I would remove that one and upgrade (or update) and later I could reinstall it. So I removed these packages and proceeded with the upgrade. It still complained about nvidia (which is really the only thing that is a problem after every upgrade)

For once I found a way to run Windows for free that wasn’t a scam! Turns out the Microsoft makes VMs of Windows XP through Windows 8 available for free. The point is for you to be able to test how your websites will look in different versions of IE and different versions of Windows. Now, because of this, they’re time-limited - you can renew them ever 30 days until 90 days and then you need to regenerate them. So you can’t really use it as a complete replacement for buying a Windows license. However, if you wanted to test how well Windows would run on your Linux computer it’s perfect for that. My short-term goal is to be able to run Windows within a VM for everything but video games and therefore not have to run two computers if I want to, say, work on my photos. (I use Lightroom although Digikam is pretty awesome if you don’t already have your workflow setup in Lightroom) So to me this is the perfect way to make sure all the programs I want to run on Windows (mostly Lightroom, but occasionally some others) will work well in a VM with my current hardware (before I spend the money to buy a Windows license). Another nice thing about running windows in a VM instead of its own computer is that it’s easy to create a new VM when a new version of Windows comes out and then have the VMs side-by-side as you migrate over to a fresh install. It actually wouldn’t be a horrible idea for my main Linux distro either, but then I wouldn’t have ANY OS taking advantage of being the main OS that’s not virtualized.

It’s not a surprise that I love Amarok. Take a look at the related posts below. I think nothing beats it as a music program. If the KDE4 for Windows libraries were more robust I’d recommend it for everyone. As is, I think it’s the best on Linux. But, until the most recent updates there was something lacking that really bothered me. On a stream like NPR’s All Music Considered it wouldn’t update the Now Playing track to the song that was on. And that made it really hard to use that stream in the best possible way - to discover new music! It’s fixed now and that’s awesome! Woohoo!

Nearly a year ago I did a comparison of Virtualbox and Red Hat’s virt-manager.  Although I was pretty happy with virt-manager, I’ve had to continue using Virtualbox because so far virt-manager isn’t able to do a bridged ethernet connection without having to ditch NetworkManager and/or do some weird stuff.  I’d given up on VMWare a long time ago because it used to be very cumbersome to install on Linux.  However, I recently found out that I might be able to one day run Windows inside VMWare on my Linux computer and have 3D accelerated graphics work well enough to allow me to play games.  It’s already made huge strides in that direction.  So I figured I’d check it out and see how it compares to using the other two programs.  I’ll be installing Fedora 18 XFCE beta (which I’m currently using on my netbook).  Here’s the first dialog I got:

Recently I was listening to a Talk of the Nation interview with Jerry Brotton about his new book A History of the World in Twelve Maps.  He mentions how the maps have a political reason for existing as well as having an effect on the viewer.  He also mentioned how the map creator always puts him or herself in the center.  Interestingly, I learned that for most of human history it has not been governments who have created maps, but corporations (such as the Dutch East India Company) who needed maps for commerce.  The last map he mentions in his book, which he worked on for seven years, is Google Earth.  I haven’t read the book yet, but during the interview he mentioned that it was one of the first times we have a union between a globe and a map.  Also, that through the “magic” of computer technology it’s an infinite map as you can always keep scrolling in any direction.

Recently I was looking at this old post and the screenshots of Amarok 1.4 reminded me of something I loved about that version of Amarok - the stats that would display when you were playing a song - like if you were playing a Five Iron Frenzy song it would tell you your three favorite (or most played) Five Iron Frenzy songs.  That functionality never made it back into the Amarok 2 series.  So when I was looking through the Amarok scripts in the script installer I came across Rating Statistics.  It basically gave me everything I wanted other than being linked to the currently playing song.  It allows you to search your favorite songs based on all kinds of criteria like number of plays, user-assigned rating, or auto-score.  You can also assign some weights to it and get your best songs based on that weighting.  Here are the stats about my library:

Around a year ago I decided to KDE in Spanish to learn some technical terms. Back then I was using GDM, but now I’m using KDM. I didn’t see a way to set the language! How would I change the language to Spanish? I took a look online and found instructions. I’m going to reproduce them here for others. The great thing about the way that KDE handles things vs the way that Gnome does is that you can set a fallback language. When might this be useful? Let’s take a Vietnamese computer user. Vietnamese people (at least of a certain age) tend to be fluent in Vietnamese and French with some familiarity with English. So a Vietnamese person could set his computer to Vietnamese with a fallback to French for any programs that didn’t have translations into Vietnamese. As usual, I LOVE the level of customization in the KDE desktop.

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about replacing my file and print server with a Pogoplug. Overall, it’s worked perfectly. I even made it my DNS server because the number of internet connected devices in my was growing so much and on some computers (like the laptop and netbook) I was constantly changing distros so DNS became preferable to maintaining a bunch of /etc/hosts files.

Everything was working just dandy until I wanted to install mysql to have all my xbmc installs reference one library. I wasn’t able to install it because the mirrors and package lists were out of date. Being unfamiliar with arch, I decided I needed to upgrade my system to get that ability. And, as part of the upgrade, yes, it did update the mirrors and package lists and I was able to install mysql. But it also did something that killed ssh. So I could no longer connect to my Pogoplug (babyluigi).

A few months ago I took a look at KDE-Telepathy from within Fedora Rawhide. I said I would check it out after upgrading to Fedora 16 and then I got busy getting ready for the arrival of my daughter. (my first kid) So I just kept using Kopete for my multi-protocol IM needs. It’s the only way I keep up with anyone on Gchat or Facebook chat because I refuse to have to keep any specific tab open on my web browser for chatting. Also, it tends to be more annoying to chat - instead of chatting in a small window that I can put off to the corner of whatever virtual desktop or activity I’m in, I’d need my entire web browser.