Category Archives: General

The flavours of Mint

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I first installed Linux about six weeks ago.

It is really quite remarkable how easy I have taken to it.  I rarely use the Windows setup these days, and only boot into it if there is something specific I need to do, such as running Photoshop, as my Gimp skills are still not fully developed!

What has surprised me is the way I have started to experiment.  Last week for example, I scrapped my installation and did a fresh install of Linux Mint 10 Julia, which is still at the Beta stage.  It is only released with Gnome, but comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavours.  I decided to go for broke and install the 64 bit flavour.

The first thing that strikes me (apart from the very nice graphics) is the speed.  The developers have trown in a load of fancy gimmicks that allow your windows to dance around the screen or act like jelly, and I tried a few of them out.  The developers needn’t have bothered.  The system is so fast that I never get a chance to see the gimmick before the window closes.

Up until now I had been using KDE as my front end, but I am getting very used to Gnome at this stage.  Just for the craic, I installed KDE into Mint 10, and it works very well but does have a few minor quirks, which I would expect.  One major quirk is the inability to shut down.  It allows for Sleep, Hibernate and Log off but there is now way to shut it down without using the command prompt, or switching user (from myself to myself) and selecting Gnome.

There are a few things I really miss in Linux though.  The biggest one is probably Windows Live Writer which I used for all my blog posts.  The nearest in Linux is Blogilo which is very definitely the poor brother.  It lacks most of WLW’s features, and to my disgust, I can’t get even that to run under Gnome (and believe me, I have tried).  I have had to fall back on Scribefire which is a Firefox plugin and therefore platform independent.

If there is anyone out there who hasn’t tried Linux, I would suggest giving it a bash (hah! Linux joke!).  Like other flavours of Mint it can be installed within Windows so no partitioning, or allocation of diskspace is required.

Go on.  Give it a try.  You never know – you may become a convert?

You can download from here.

Upgrading

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I can’t remember exactly when I bought my first desktop computer, but I think it was around fifteen years ago.

Boy, how things have changed!

My first machine was a Tandon 386, with 1Mb of RAM and a massive 40Mb hard disk.  It had the standard 5.25” floppy drive, but I spent a little extra and got a 3,25” floppy as well.  I was forward thinking!

I have just taken delivery of a 2Tb external drive which is hooked up now to my laptop, along with a slightly unreliable 1Tb drive.  I have just been doing the maths on how this humble little laptop compares to my first machine.

The memory has grown from 1Mb to 4Gb, which is 4,000 times more.

The storage has grown from 40Mb to 3.35Tb which is an increase factor of 83750!!

The laptop has a 2Gh dual core processor compared to my old 16Mh Tandon which is the poorest improvement – a mere 128 times faster.

I haven’t seen a floppy drive in years, nor have I seen a floppy disk.  This yoke is DVDs (and CDs) only.

Of course the display and sound have improved beyond recognition too.

But by how much has the price increased in the fifteen years?

I actually paid about half the original cost on my current setup.  Allowing for inflation, I have spent considerably less.

Not bad. huh?

A Classic Menu in Windows 7

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I wrote yesterday that I missed the Classic Menu in Windows 7.

Why the option was omitted is anyone’s guess, but the fact is that it’s gone.  I did a search on the Internet and found a few solutions that were all going to cost me.  Now, I’m not averse to paying for good software, but this didn’t warrant  any expenditure.

I searched a bit further, and found an extremely simple solution that not only is free, but doesn’t require any additional software at all.

First of all, through Control Panel, –> Folder Options make sure that “Show hidden files, folders and drives” is selected.

Now, right-click on the toolbar and select Toolbars –> New toolbar…   This will open up a folder selection window.  Select ‘C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\windows\StartMenu\Programs\

That’s it.

The new item appears on the right-hand end of the Toolbar:

Classic_menu

Click on the double arrow ‘>>’ and away you go.

Is the recession over?

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I have been running advertising on Head Rambles for the last three years.

Growth in ad sales was quite spectacular up to March of last year, but then the recession hit.  Since then, revenue has plummeted month by month.

Sales for last month were up on the previous month (only by 1% but I’m not complaining), and forecasts for this month show another slight rise.

Are we finally out of the storm?

recession
Monthly sales.

A bit of an overhaul

A Pipe and a Keyboard Posted on by

I think the look of a site is important.

First and foremost, it should be pleasing to the eye.  It should also reflect the general content of the site, so that a simple glance at the screen should give an idea of the type of site it is.

Customising a theme can be simple or difficult, depending on how far you want to go.  My philosophy is to take a theme that is as close as possible to my final desire, and then to make the minimum of changes.  Head Rambles, for example has been through a couple of modifications.  It is now heavily customised to the point where the original theme is almost unrecognisable.

As I said before, I wasn’t too happy with the theme here.  I felt it was time for a radical overhaul of the entire site, both in look and name.

Why chose “A Pipe and a Keyboard”?  Mainly because it sums up my necessities for writing.  It is a personal site, with quite a bit of technical stuff, so the pipe represents the personal, and the keyboard represents the technical. 

I chose the design for its simplicity.  I like the simple layout, which doesn’t detract from the content, and apart from a few minor tweaks to the font, the only big change I have made (so far) is to substitute the banner image.  There are a few changes to be made yet, of a minor nature, such as additional navigation and tweaks like that.  I’m not too sure about the image, as yet.  I know the pipe looks a little unusual, but it is the pipe I generally smoke, so it deserves its place on the Internet.