Yesterday the Linux Mint people announced that the RC of Linux Mint 17, called "Qiana" because not all that many women's names start with "Q" and end with "A", is available. Heck with the RC, updates will turn it official soon enough, so I installed it on a partition on my laptop that previously housed a prior version of Mint. Version 13, I believe ( Read more... )

Today is Mother's Day, and in reading through a bunch of my posts from last year I found the one I put up exactly 364 days ago for Mother's Day 2013. I don't really have anything to add to that, so I'll just put up a link to it here. (If you're reading this on LJ, it'll point you to the Dreamwidth version. Actually it'll do that if you're reading ( Read more... )

When I was a kid we had a Peanuts coffee-table anthology that I enjoyed reading, even when I didn't always get the jokes. I distinctly remember one story line where, after going crazy for a week trying to find an overdue library book, Charlie Brown finds it in the refrigerator. He goes off celebrating down the hall, prompting Schroder to remark, " ( Read more... )

Fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series may recognize that phrase ( Read more... )

I suspect I've gone a bit overboard in installing apps on my new phone. At least I'm occasionally getting messages saying I have "insufficient storage" to download and install an update. Of course the message helpfully doesn't tell me what directory or item has insufficient storage so I can go fix the problem, and I am left to various spells and ( Read more... )

I do a lot of job hunting, so it's only prudent to belong to LinkedIn. I get to see what my friends are up to career-wise, I can keep track of what recruiters are looking for, and occasionally they have some decent career advice. I also belong to a couple of LinkedIn forums in areas that I'm either interested in (Perl, Science Fiction) or want to ( Read more... )

If you go to the Bing front page today (and you should because the picture is great), one of the quotes they list is from Oprah, who says, "Biology is the least of what makes one a mother." I have to agree. My wife and daughter are both mother to three of our grandkids just as much as their birth mothers are. Maybe more. Happy Mother's Day, ( Read more... )

When I first got a Windows Phone 7 right after they came out I did what every new phone owner does and set out to customize it. There weren't all that many apps available, but one that had been ported over from either Android or iOS was simply called "Backgrounds" by Stylem Media. It was (still is) an ad-sponsored app that presented possible ( Read more... )

I was barely aware of Google Voice before yesterday when my sister told me she was using it. It's a service that assigns you a telephone number that in theory will ring through to any set of phones you assign to it. So, I call her Google Voice number and it rings through to her cell phone and her house phone. There are also a bunch of other cool ( Read more... )

So, after all the excitement of the weekend about transferring files, this morning I get to work, plug the phone into the Windows machine and up comes the file system in Explorer. I can move files, copy files, delete files, pretty much anything I would want to do. I look at the phone and it's just looking back at me like, "What ( Read more... )