voyhere.com

Yes, it’s out.  Took me 12 hours to download today, but it’s done.

Noteables:

• Firefox 3.5 (woo!)
• OpenOffice 3.1
• Out of the box support for my Creative X-Fi finally
• Sound no longer dies after coming back from Hibernate (woo!)
• Mouse’s “Back” button now works in Nautilus (woo!)
• Sexier startup
• Seems to have sped up my shabby notebook a lot from 9.04

All in all I am very pleased.  None of my precious Firefox plugins were broken in the upgrade and I’m happy to finally be on board with 3.5, it seems much faster and lighter.

Slight issues I’ve had:

• Search bar icons not showing up in the dropdown, but I fixed that via System->Preferences->Appearance->Interface->Show Icons in Menus.  (source).
• My media files were also playing back in a strange blue hue which drove me nuts for a second but all it took was go into Movie Player, Edit->Preferences->Display, and reset the Hue value which was for some reason set all the way to the left.
• The new “Ubuntu Software Center” is great and all but I prefer the old style of Add/Remove Applications (with the star ratings), and I discovered how to bring that back by just installing “gnome-app-install” via Symantic, then it is to be found under System->Administration.
• My Conky also got a little quirked but I’ll figure it out.

Get 9.10 from System->Administration->Update manager

Or from here if you’re some kind of late adopter.

Then go get your free stickers.

Ubuntu Linux 9.04 was released last week (up from 8.10), and it’s better than ever.  If you’re uninitiated, there’s frankly no better time than now.

You can try it out without affecting your system in the slightest.  Head to ubuntu.com, grab and burn the .ISO (aka Live CD), and boot your computer with it in the drive.  You should see an Ubuntu boot screen and something to the effect of “Try Ubuntu without making changes to my computer”.  Select that and your system will boot Ubuntu, running from your CD and RAM.  In other words it’s completely temporary, everything you do will be gone at shut-down.  But it’s a great way to check for compatibilities with your system such as video, wireless networking, and other various hardware.  Just don’t judge the speed of Linux when booting from a Live CD, since anything you do is loading off the CD instead of hard drive, so things may open sluggishly.

Why Linux? Let me break down some pros:

• installation ease.   Installation is a breeze.   It will happily install itself alongside your existing XP/Vista.  You can choose to install to a new partition on your C: drive, or to another drive.  I highly recommend first defragging the drive you plan to install to, multiple times if necessary.  Back-up files on your Windows drive which would make you cry to lose.  If possible, try shrinking the Windows partition first, but otherwise Ubuntu can make a partition for itself using the free space on your drive.  Be a little careful.   If you have a system which cannot install from a CD, you also have the option to create a USB drive install kit.  (System->Administration->USB Startup Disc Creator).  I had to do this on my laptop which has a bunk CD drive.  You can boot the Live CD on a machine with a working CD bootup, then create the USB from there.  (Note: if your system doesn’t boot from CD, it may be easily fixable in your BIOS.  Look for Boot Priority or something to that effect, you may just need to move your CD drive above your HD.  Or likewise to enable booting from a USB stick.  I had to do this on my laptop.)  Linux will install a boot menu called Grub which appears at bootup and gives you the choice of which OS to boot.  You can tweak the options for this from Linux->System->Administration->StartUp Manager.  (If you’d like more info about installing a dual boot of Linux with Vista already installed, here’s a guide.  There’s also info for installing Vista with Linux installed first, here.)
• fast.  Compared to Vista especially, it’s very snappy.  And none of the fscking incessant HD thrashing that Windows does.  My semi-old laptop runs much happier with Linux than it did with XP.  If you want to run an even cleaner Linux installation because you have a wicked old comp or are just a wicked minimalist, there are other Linux installation packages (aka distributions, or “distros”) which come with far less installed and running, but likewise may require more setup or tinkering on your part.  See here for more on that.
• free. Always.  Nuff said.
• secure.  You basically don’t even need anti-virus or spyware apps with Linux because they’re not really an issue or concern.  When security patches ARE needed, they appear that day, not every 2nd Tuesday of the month of whatever.
• software.  Firefox, OpenOffice 3.0, and GIMP come already installed, as well as many other free open source software solutions.  Many more are available via the “add/remove programs” equivalent, which is much better than that of Windows.   See here for more apps or just google it.
• classy.  Something about running Linux is just classy in my opinion.  Maybe it’s the screaming lack of Arial everywhere.  Maybe it’s the “alternative” nature of it all which makes me feel like the cool kid that I am.  Whatever it is, there is definitely a certain je ne sais quoi.
• Compiz.  This is a suite of highly configurable visual effects.  Desktop cube, wobbly windows, transparencies, zooms, etc.  Look it on up the youtube to see.
• Conky.  Conky is a sweet desktop resource monitor, and more.  Ultra customizable if you don’t mind tinkering with text files.  See my screenshot, this is my setup for now.  You can have it display weather details, resource usage and graphs, to-do lists from a text file, and email box counts (which is the 22 in the lower right of my screen).  If Conky is too much for you, Screenlets are the next best thing.
• highly customizable.    You can customize pretty much everything.  Boot up and login screens, window schemes, fonts, colors, mouse pointers, etc.   http://www.gnome-look.org/ is a great resource.
• compatibility.  Out of the box compatibility with Windows files.  You may see a slight issue with text  file interoperability, the solution is just to start using Notepad++ to edit texts in Windows.  There is a Windows emulator called Wine which comes installed, you can use this to run just about any Windows software, even games.   Or you can use VMware or virtualbox to run entire Windows or other operating systems from within Linux, allowing you to completely ditch a dual boot.
• subtleties.  There are just little bits and bobs around Linux which are just simply done better than Windows.  I don’t have specifics at the moment. Here are a few: 1) you can mouse-scroll windows that aren’t in the foreground just by mousing over them  2) before the screensaver kicks in, a slooww fade-to-black occurs, which is cool for watching vids without missing a frame. 3) The calculator shows everything you enter on the line so you know if you’ve typed that + or not, etc. 4) When you capture the screen using PrSc or alt-PrSc, a pop-up appears which shows a preview and lets you choose the file name and save location, or simply choose to copy to clipboard.  5) When you rename a file, only the file name is highlighted by default, not the extension. This way you can just type and press enter without having to reenter its extension (oh yeah, and linux actually shows you file extensions out of the box). 6) Toggle hidden files display with a simple Ctrl-H.
• online knowledge.  There is a wealth of info online about Linux.  If you have an issue or a question, there’s a 99.9% chance someone else has too, and there’s a solution in a forum somewhere.  Just google it.
• career.  After teaching yourself Linux, you can put it on your résumé.  More and more companies are starting to use Linux instead of Windows, and your expertise could give you the edge over other candidates.

Cons:

• learning curve.  The basic stuff like navigation and where to find things will take a couple days to get used to, but it’s the the terminal commands and things like that which can take a bit more learning.  But hey gotta keep the noodle sharp right?
• breakability.  If you F something up, there is a small possibility that you could break your Linux bootup, hah. This can happen especially when toying with video driver stuff.  But as long as you run a dual boot, or have another system to Google things on, and have half a brain, you should be able to rescue it just fine.

Questions/comments?   Comment or contact.

If you are interested in keeping track of your caloric and/or nutrient intake for the purposes of improving health or losing/gaining weight, I recommend taking CRON-o-meter for a spin.  It is free open source software for Windows, Mac, or Linux.  You input each item you eat and it tallies all the nutritional data for you.  You may find this too tedious to be doing long-term, but I recommend doing it for a few days or a week to see how some of the numbers look, you may be surprised at the results.  You can run a report which will show you daily averages.  It’s also very informative in that you can see the nutrient breakdowns of various foods, and learn to eat more of certain things if your diet lacks in certain nutrients.

It has a pretty large database of foods, but if you don’t find something, you can also add the food manually.  Keep in mind that if the food is not in the database, it may be a sign that you shouldn’t be eating it (i.e. processed crap).

You can also group a set of foods into a custom recipe for ease of adding later (but be aware that if you alter the recipe later it alters it in your previous days also).

You can alter your nutrient goals if you don’t like the predetermined RDA’s for you.  (Some RDA’s are BS, as influenced by the meat and dairy industries.  For instance the protein and calcium recommendations are too high in my opinion.)  It will show you what proportion of your calories come from Protein/Carbs/Fat.  You can alter this target ratio.  You can track your weight or other parameters on the Biomarkers tab and use it to graph them over time.  Remember: to lose a sustainable pound per week of fat, shoot for a daily 500 calorie deficit.

There are on-line solutions for this kind of thing as well, namely fitday.com and nutridiary.com, which I admittedly have not tried.  I like CRON-o-meter because it’s light, snappy, simple, powerful.  I don’t feel the need for any extra functionality.

Remember it’s best to eat whole fresh ripe raw organic fruits and vegetables, and not rely on supplements.  It’s best to avoid refined sugars and starches, processed foods, and dairy.

http://spaz.ca/cronometer/

The search box in the upper right of Firefox should be a staple for you.  Here are some things you may not have known.

1. Ctrl-K gives it focus.
2. If you want to remove or re-order the searches, go to ‘Manage Search Engines’ under the dropdown.
3. You can also ‘Get more search engines..’ from that same Manage Search Engines screen.  It takes you to an add-on subpage; just key in the site you’d like to find a search for, e.g. IMDB.
4. Sometimes while web browsing you may notice that the dropdown in the search box will glow blue (color may depend on your theme).  This indicates that you can add a search for that site very quickly to your search bar.  Look for the option under the dropdown.  There aren’t many sites which feature this ability, but CNN is one example.
5. You can assign a keyword to a search on the Manage Search Engines page.  They work like this: you pick a few letters for a keyword, e.g. asd for IMDB, then you can type the keyword followed by your search terms in your address bar to quickly perform that search, e.g. ‘asd tom cruise’.   Note that you can also do this directly from basically any search box you find on the net, by right-clicking in it and selecting ‘Add keyword for this search’.   Ctrl-L gives address bar focus.
6. You can update the Google icon to their new favicon by following the directions here.

Trick I’ve discovered in Vista for muting just Firefox, say if you’re playing a flash game with no mute button on it and you want to hear your iTunes..

1: Click speaker icon

2: Click Mixer

3: Put your junk in that box

Not only is selectively muting apps highly useful, but this is also the place where you can permanently change the relative volume of anything which doesn’t have a volume knob.

Addendum 11/12/09: Now Ubuntu 9.10 has come on board with this capability.  Right click the sound icon and enter Sound Preferences (or via System->Preferences->Volume Control).   It’s on the Applications tab:

A free iPhone app has been released for browsing and viewing TED talks.  Get the app here.  Note, these TEDtalks are also available as free video podcasts which can be uploaded to iPhone for offline viewing.

Very versatile, open source (free), amazingly feature-rich, and yet lightweight.   What more could you ask for?

Hints: Ctrl-H goes to a clean Minimal View.  Space bar is pause/resume.   Also nice, since the window doesn’t remember it’s size from last time: under Tools->Preferences->Show Settings (All)->Video->Zoom Video.   This lets you choose a custom zoom level for default, if you’d like.  I chose 1.30x because I found 1x too small for 1920×1200 resolution.

Get it here

This add-on lets you click and drag anywhere on a page to scroll it, versus using your mouse wheel or using the scroll bar.  It’s a bit of functionality lifted from Internet Explorer.  I prefer it lately to the mouse wheel because it’s smoother, and allows for varied scroll speeds.  It’s similar to just using the scroll bar, but you can grab the page anywhere.  Great for use with a tablet pen, and it would also be nice with a touchscreen to emulate iPhone sweetness.

I recommend going ahead and using these 2 options, so as to leave your text selection and mouse gestures unmolested:

After installing, notice also that the add-on has placed a hand icon in the upper right of your ‘Fox; clicking this will toggle the functionality on/off if you’d like.  If you don’t like this icon, here’s how to remove it:  right-click some dead space at the top of your browser (try right below the URL bar) and you should see a context menu with an option for Customize.  Simply drag the hand icon into the pop-up window which has appeared, and it goes away, into that “sandbox”.  Learn something every day.

There’s also a new link to the Grab and Drag preferences under the Tools menu, which you can disable in the add-on’s preferences.

Nab Grab and Drag here.

Wicked electric car from Dodge slated for 2010 — that is Lotus styling.   So cool, and FAST.

How to Build a Cell Phone Interceptor — ?!?!

Origami your used Netflix papers

Stupid cops think they OD’d on some pot brownies — “I think we’re dead.”

CNN gives advice on when to take a sleeping pill

Creepy/funny dude likes his stereo power cable better than women

“Horny goat weed could be better than Viagra” — now that is a headline

Gimp 2.6.0 is out

#1.  Do you use the ”WindowsKey+E” shortcut to open Explorer?   Of course you do.  But the window opens up small, don’t it.   Here’s how to simply make the default size of that window larger.   Open a new Explorer window.   Resize it to where you’d like.  Now hold Shift while you click the X in the corner.   This should save that window size for next time.   Works for me; let me know if not for you.  If that didn’t work, try Ctrl-clicking the X.  Or Ctrl+Shift+click.  Damn Vista is weird.

#2.  (If you have Aero or some other undefined visual capability enabled):  You should see the window in the above step evaporate in slow-mo.   You can also hold Shift while you minimize a window to see slow-mo.  And it also works while restoring minimized windows from the task bar.

If you’re into PC gaming at all, you’ve hopefully played or at least heard of The Witcher, it was one of the very best games of 2007.  Well the champs at CD Projekt Red acknowledged that it wasn’t a perfect release, and today are releasing a super premium Enhanced Edition in stores today or soon.  BUT, if you already own the game, and register[ed] it, you are entitled to download it free.

If you don’t own this, now’s the time to buy.

If you already own it, make sure you’ve registered it, and try downloading the files here.  You’ll need to download the (1.4) patch, and the English language pack.  Good luck with those servers though, I had much better luck with fileshack.

Well not really an application, but sort of.  Here’s howto:

1. navigate your iPhone’s Safari to the online lyrics site of your choosing.  lyricsmania doesn’t seem too bad.
2. zoom in on the search box
3. tap the + on Safari’s bottom and then select “Add to Home Screen”
4. title it Lyrics or something similarly appropriate

Done.. Just tap this new link on your home screen and it will load that search box where you can search on lyrics to an album/song you’re listening to.

a.k.a.:  operation clear browser tabs.

30+ “must-have” Firefox addons

11 Firefox extensions that replace stand-alone applications

Will Quantum Computing kill the PC? – wtf?

Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us, and Hacker News algorithms exposed

How to “peel” a hard boiled egg without peeling – i call BS.  esp on this guy, the “4 hour workweek” guy

America’s top 20 growing and disappearing jobs

20 Healthiest Foods for under $1

Set Up Cheap Ambient Lighting with Rope Lights

Hilarious review of Quiznos’ subs written in 2003 – oh Black Angus you are so luscious

The “Stanley Kubrick files”

2 Hot Chics demonstrate 28 days of Kama Sutra (nsfw)

Japanese Sushi Rage Threatens iconic Mediterranean Tuna

10 Most and Least Expensive Cars to Insure

7 Essential Cheat Sheets to Download

Pushups: do 100 in this 6 week program

Police threw 32 pounds of pot on a Maryland mayor’s doorstep then stormed in and killed his dogs – wtf

You’ve seen the Dramatic Hamster – now witness: Dramatic Cat

Esquire’s 75 Things a Man Should Do Before He Dies

MapMyRun.com tells you how far your run was

Battery powered ultralight plane – very hot

theonion.com: ‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Players Play a Character Playing ‘Warcraft’ (video) – lol

12 Foods you don’t have to buy organic (and 12 which you should)

Liquid Nitrogen Dumped into a swimming pool (video)

CO-ED Magazine’s ‘10 Bands You Need To Know But Probably Don’t

CSS Layouts: 40+ Tutorials, Demos, Tips, and Best Practices

California bans all trans fats

Christian The Lion – wow I got a little verklempt thanks for the link Mom

Best Chinese Restaurant Name Ever -  sounds delicious!

The 24 Best PS3 Games

The 36 Best PS2 Games

SomaFM.com’s famous Groove Salad can be streamed right to your iPhone, wherever you go.  The nice thing I discovered about this is that you can still do anything else on the phone while it plays, except for use the browser.  I didn’t think apps were allowed to “run” in the background, but apparently SomaFM’s implementation gets around that.  Pandora has that limitation, which I’m sure it will be freed of in the future when Apple relaxes the SDK.

Steps:

1. navigate to somafm.com in your iphone’s safari
2. tap ‘WiFi/3G Streams’ (unless you’re in the sticks then select Edge)
3. press the ‘+’, tap ‘Add to Home Screen‘, trim the name to SomaFM
4. tap a station and a player will appear, press play and the stream begins
5. return to your home screen and position your new SomaFM icon
6. go enjoy a bowl of groove salad.

While you’re at it, if you’ve got some extra change, throw a few into their coffers, it looks as though they could use it.

Rare leopard’s photo captured via camera “trap” in Russia

Guy describes how he wrote a bot which makes $$ at online poker

OpenOffice 3.0 beta is out, ARS gives it a preview

Breast-fed children found to be smarter

OJ’s former manager says he confessed to him while stoned. omg!

Sad Kermit sings Elliott Smith’s Needle in the Hay (video)

Cocaine subs which hold 8-10 tons are the new thing in drug smuggling

Common Herbicide Disrupts Human Hormone Activity In Cell Studies