I’ve been hearing a lot of hype about how Microsoft is trying to give the end user the choice to use Internet Explorer or not. It seems it’s only talk.

I just finished building a custom PC for a customer, and guess what I discovered. If I install firefox and make it the default browser, Windows Update won’t work unless I make Explorer the default browser.

Some old line of crap.

Go Linux.

Some time ago I did a review on my new Asus Eee Netbook.

I have been very happy with the device with one exception: I only have a 16GB SSD. It would have been big enough except I was not willing to overwrite the WindowsXP that was installed on it. That means I only have 6.5GB to work with for Mint Linux. That’s plenty for the Linux install and all the applications I want to run on a netbook, but I didn’t have any room for MP3’s. I could have placed them on the NTFS partition and mounted it under Linux, but in the event I did use the Windows install, I didn’t want to have insufficient room there, either.

The solution: I bought a 4GB SD Drive online for 13.99. It doesn’t hold ALL my MP3’s, but certainly it holds enough for any roadtrip.

Everything is fine now.

I’ve been playing around with iSCSI for a while now and it works great. It seems to be limited in speed only by the network connection being used. setting it up is pretty easy, too. Just google iSCSI HOWTO and you should be able to find a guide for whatever distro you’re using.

I have an ASUS eeePC 900 with at 16GB SSD.  I have the partition divided in two so I can dual boot the WinXP with Mint Linux 7. Throw in a swap partition and that leaves me about 6GB for Mint. That’s enough to hold all the stuff I would want on a netbook, and with the SD I have a place for my MP3’s. It’s still a little cramped, though. There are files I need once in a while, but don’t want to take up valuable room on my netbook, so here’s what I did:

First I install iSCSI Target on this webserver. Then I opened up my firewall to allow connections from my external NIC. Then I simply attached to the drive from my netbook. It worked great, with one exception. Up here in remote North Idaho, the best internet I can get is 6MB x 512KB. That means I can write to the iSCSI drive at a decent speed, but reading from it is painfully slow.  Formatting the 50GB Partition via the connection is gonna take all day it would seem.

There are still a few things to work out.

First, I need to figure a way to change my firewall to allow the connection when the IP changes. I have a fixed IP when connected to the net here, but from the road, it’s gonna change.

Second, I am not using a password because nobody else should be able to connect to the device unless they use the IP in my firewall… or can they spoof it?

Stay tuned…

1. As a phone:

It works well and I love the BIG numberpad. I have big fingers so that’s a real plus for me. Answering a call is easy. The sound is GREAT

2. As a iWeb device:

Love it. I don’t think you could put a bigger screen and still be a “handheld” device. Safari does an EXCELLENT job of scalling. Zooming in on a page is easy too. Just double click the screen and that’s it. I have already created a couple custom websites that are designed to be viewed from an iPhone: http://www.tranquilpenguin.com/iPhone will take you to my main page and if you go to http://www.tranquilpenguin.com/iPhone/domain.php you will get a GREAT domain lookup tool I wrote from scratch. Look for more to follow.

3. As a music player:

Love it… but have some issues with it. As with all Mac iPod devices, it can’t just simply use mp3’s. we all know the drill with iTunes. the iPhone is pretty much an iPod Touch. Once you figure out how to get the music on the player with iTunes, it’s great. The tiny speakers are amazingly loud. It has a standard audio jack (unlike most phones) and I have a mini-stereo jack in my truck that goes to a 180W Amp so I simply plug in and hit “Shuffle” then forget about it. What could be simpler? I can always go to youtube if I wanna hear something different, but I have 8GB storage so I pretty much have a lot to listen to.

4. As an EMail client:

One of the first thing I did was setup IMAP to all my Email accounts. Now I get my Email at home, the office and the phone real time. No forwarding.

5. Everything else:

The phone comes with a ton of applications, and many are quite useful (and some not so much). You don’t seem to be able to delete the default applications that came with the phone, but you can delete the extra ones you add quite easily. There are many free applications, and even more if you don’t mind spending a few bucks. I did download an SSH terminal application and am able to connect to my servers without any problems. The built in camera takes great pictures. The battery lasts a couple of days for me, but mileage varies with use.

Pros:

Small (concidering the features), good audio quality, very easy to use, and quite flexible.

Cons:

I am very disappointed that Mac, which is Unix based, did not bother to concider us Linux users. As of yet there is no existing way to load music on the phone without jailbreaking and code hacking. I just am not willing to do that just yet. I suspect that will change in the next year, but until then I still gotta use iTunes on Windows to load my music. The only other down side is I don’t like the security options. You can put a password on the phone but not on the features. I wish I could leave the phone unlocked any only put the passcode on my messages or internet features, etc.

Final Thoughts:

In spite of the lack of Linux support, I think this is the phone to own if you want to use the net. I do have to pay $30 a month for internet so the phone is a bit spendy. I will eventually jailbreak the phone but not for quite some time. I’ll post when I do.

I broke my cell phone the other day, which is not good because I am very picky and found the particular model of Nokia (6555b) pretty usable. Don’t know what happened but the front screen on the “flip” quit working… Anyways, I needed a new phone so because I live in North Idaho, I opted (against my better judgement) to go to our Walmart rather that drive the hour to the big city to look for a phone. Walmart has a good selection of phones, but not the customer service one might want.

Anyways, I noticed that the iPhone 8GB was on sale for $97 bucks so I thought, hmmm… maybe that’s the way to go. But the problem was, my contract was no up for renewal, so I figured I’d not get the sale price. When I spoke to the clerk, he assured me that the special would still apply but my 2 year commitment would just restart. How could I pass up a deal like that? So I handed him my old phone, and 10 minutes later everything was switched over. Then the problem. The clerk was wrong. They system printed out a bill for $297. He make a couple phone calls then was quick to apologize for his error. Oh well, just put everything back the way it was… and that was the big problem. It took over two hour for him to work the system in reverse on the phone, and I was standing there the whole time. I really tried to be patient, and kept reminding myself that it was just a mistake, but I was really getting tired. Finally, everything was back to normal, but he told me that the only thing was the system still showed my contract as having 2 years on it. That was not gonna work. The clerk called several people then finally a senior manager came over and after a few minutes he assured me that Walmart would make this right by me. After a phone call with the cell carrier, he told me that it would take up to 72 hours to fix the contract, but after that he would be willing to give me the phone for $97 anyways and Walmart would eat the $200 difference. Wanna guess what my answer was?

So, I guess I wanna tell you how much I love my new iPhone

I will write my take on the iPhone in my next post.

Good night all

I have been ridiculed many time for this but I’ll say it again…

Did we really go to the moon, or what it all just an elaborate government scam?

I don’t know the answer but I do know you don’t either.  There is no historical record to prove the even ever happened.  Sure, I saw the footage on TV many years ago but I also saw a lot of other stuff… that was made in Hollywood…

If you want to get a pretty good documentary on the subject just watch “a funny thing happened on the way to the moon”. Just google it. Here is a short clip of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HT3_X9Suec

Anyways, I came across this article and it seems to just add more fuel to the fire: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090716/tsc-uk-nasa-tapes-sb-a337f0f.html

Anyways, Yea we went to space, but to the moon? I’ve not seen any REAL evidence…

Well, all good things must come to an and. I have been a big supporter of Fedora… for as long as I can remember. They do ride the cutting edge, so there have been moments when they seemed to not be too usable, but progress always is preceeded by pain.

When Fedora made the jump to KDE 4, I made the jump to Gnome… having been a KDE fan for many years, it was a new world to me. Since that time I have grown to love Gnome and prefer it to KDE now.

That being said, I think Fedora has taken off a bit more than it can chew with F11. To be honest, it really kinda sucks. I have installed Fedora Core 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 on this particual computer without any issues. I even was able to install the F9-F10 upgrade successfully even with the MANY apps I run (and have mentioned many times before). Well, F10 to F11 upgrade failed miserably. It seems that it’s a common problem. So, I pulled my drives out and put a new on in and did I clean install of F11. Funny, now my sound doesn’t work.  No /dev/mixer? Well, sound does work but I can’t control it

Well, that plus a few other issues and I decided enough. I love Fedora, but for my day to day system I just don’t have the time to play with it. I got work to do. So I made the switch. But what distro?

What I needed was the power of a server distro with the usability of a desktop distro. I felt the best choice was Mint Linux.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, one of the most popular desktop distros. Ubuntu in turn is based on Debian, a very qualified server distro. Mint is like Ubuntu without the things that annoy me about Ubuntu. A day later and here’s what I have:

1. LAMP server. For those who don’t know that’s Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

2. Gnome Desktop with AVANT Menu and Dual Monitors (nVidia Graphics)

3. DHCP Server for my network

4. Samba Server for my network

5. iSCSI server for my network

6. TVTime/TV tuner card

Everything is up and no error in the logs.

Tranquilpenuin.com is back.