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Thinking like the Physically Disabled
While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country. I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted. The sad thing is…
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Rethinking Ebooks
Until now I’ve been quite against ebooks. Back when I was in college I had an iPaq and I downloaded the Microsoft reader to it. I bought about 3 – 5 books for it and, at first, I thought it was great. It would allow you to annotate the book and highlight passages. And it…
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Opera 10.5
Recently, when I started up Opera, it updated to 10.5. I noticed a huge cosmetic change. Observe: Yes, they have copied the GUI setup from Chrome. The tabs are now above the address bar. Now, they still have a separate search bar like Firefox, but this is a pretty big change. Also, although I can’t…
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Review: Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit
I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago. So I decided it was time to see what has changed. Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. So here we go: I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04…
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Politics: A Review
The last time I really blogged about politics was back around the 2008 election. Looking over my archives, I found that, by contrast, I blogged about politics quite a bit from 2007 and prior. My heaviest political post density (for It’s A Binary World 2.0) seems to be 2005-2006. Why so much back then? I…
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Review: Zenwalk 6.0
Back in Nov of 2008 I checked out Zenwalk 5.2 and a recent LXF contained Zenwalk 6.0 – so let’s see what has changed. It loads up with the usual Kernel messages going past on the screen. The first screen for the installation hasn’t changed one bit from Zenwalk 5.2. Once again, as before, I…
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Photography
Look into my eyes…. Canon Mount Lenses I’ve been into photography nearly all my life. It’s one of my main hobbies and the one I love the most. I wrote a my lulu.com book about my Top 40 flickr photos. Here is a modified version of the introduction to that book, explaining my background in…
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Review: Debian 5: Lenny
Debian…the father and grandfather of many a Linux distro. I think indirectly Debian is probably running on more computers than any other Linux distro. It’s the basis of Ubuntu, Mepis, Xandros, and many others. And many people use Debian where they need a nice, stable distro. The fact that Debian’s stable releases come out every…
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Review: Slackware 12.2
I already tried installing Gentoo. Twice. The other Linux distro for the hardcore, for whom the Ubuntus and the Fedoras is too easy, is Slackware. Slackware is, of course, the oldest surviving Linux distro. I’ve already reviewed some distros based off of Slackware such as Zenwalk and Slax. Along the way I’ve come to learn…
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Review: openSuse 11.1
After reading through LXF, I tried loading openSuse 11.1 with the failsafe settings and it worked in VirtualBox. So I’ll now be reviewing openSuse 11.1. Here’s the screen as it booted up. and after it loads up, it gives a nice explanatory screen. So I last looked at openSuse 11.0 in Aug 2008. I’m not…
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Review: Mandriva One 2009
Somewhere in the middle of 2008 my wife’s computer kept making very disturbing noises upon boot up. She had told me she would move to Linux when her current computer broke. So I bought her a new computer and loaded Kubuntu on it because she wanted “the version that looks like Windows”. I new she…
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Review: PC-BSD 7.0.1
Today’s distro has been described as the Ubuntu of the BSD world. PC-BSD is an easy to use version of FreeBSD. FreeBSD is the behemoth in the BSD world and would probably have a much larger desktop presence if the BSDs hadn’t run into copyright and other proprietary problems right around when most of the…
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Review: Sabayon 3.5 Pod
Since both Gentoo and Sabayon were included on this Linux Format DVD, I decided I would first try and install Gentoo and then Sabayon and compare how easy the installations were since Sabayon is a derivative distro from Gentoo. As you know, I was unable to get a working installation from the LiveCD of Gentoo.…
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Avant Window Navigator
For a long while there I didn’t want to check out the Avant Window Navigator (AWN) because I was shunning Compiz. But now that I’m back on the Compiz (and since Metacity should have compositing “soon” anyway) I decided to give a shot when it was featured in Linux Format Magazine Issue 112. I found…