(Second part of a series inspired by experiences in amateur tech support and the endless stream of articles yapping about how the time for desktop Linux is either never or next year. The first part is here.Did you get that? No. Read it again. Still don't get it? Hmmmm... not sure why, it's plainly obvious ( Read more... )

(First in a series inspired by experiences in amateur tech support and the endless stream of articles yapping about how the time for desktop Linux is either never or next year ( Read more... )

I use Firefox as my primary web browser. One of its major features is the ability to add extensions to its functionality, and one of the most popular extensions is Adblock, which works as a simple image, frame and applet blocker based on a blacklist. It won't prevent all ads from showing up, especially on first-time visits to websites, but, it ( Read more... )

... because I don't know anything about Macs ( Read more... )

I just upgraded my home system to KDE 3.4.0 using the Debian pre-packages from alioth. Note: these packages are made by the Debian KDE team, but are being held back from unstable because of the upcoming release of sarge. Curious and unable to wait, I tried them, simply by adding this line to my apt sources.list:
deb Read more... )

Draft response of debian-legal on why Creative Commons copyright licenses are not considered to be "free" by the terms of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. If nothing else, an interesting read in the all-important legal minutiae of the free software world. Most of their issues surround worst-case understandings of CC's sometimes vague language ( Read more... )

This will probably mostly be of interest to anyone who finds this blog by Google, rather than any "regular" readership.

An "annoyance-fix" entry is how to fix a problem that:

1. I found particularly annoying
2. It wasn't necessarily easy to find a working solution on the Internet
3. or... there were multiple solutions available on the Internet, and I liked ( Read more... )

I found myself back using Windows on my home computer because I don't (yet) have a Mathematica license for Linux (and there is no good free-software alternative). When I first loaded up, I had to replace my expired Norton Antivirus software with (free-as-in-beer) site-licensed school-provided McAfee Antivirus. Then, I noticed how old all my ( Read more... )

The computer is a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop. It has been rescued from crashing constantly under Windows ME ( Read more... )

I never thought I'd actually be happy to have an Apple in the house, but DW just got a new iBook G4. This means no more ranting about how slow the 'ol Celeron 600 notebook is, and no more recovery from Windows ME crashing. (I'm going to take over the old clunker and give it a new lease on life as a Debian laptop ( Read more... )