I have been an avid Firefox user since 1.0. It started mostly as an excuse to use something other than IE 6.0 and was one of my first forays into the anti-Microsoft movement. Prior to that, I had used Linux for servers, and tinkering but I wasn’t doing it for posterity, just because it appealed to me and was cool. But, I started to get the negative vibe from M$FT about the time Netscape folded so Firefox was a shoe in for me. I use it and encourage everyone I know to use it rather than IE.
On my Macs I’ve been mostly happy with Firefox, but I have to admit that it is slow. When Safari 4 came out I tried the beta and was pretty happy with it and only had a few unexplained crashes and only one of those caused me to lose some work (ironically, I was editing a WordPress entry when it crashed). I found myself using Firefox for the extensions (namely Delicious). Since the official release of Safari 4, it has become my primary browser on my Macs. The reason being speed; it is noticeably faster than Firefox. I even downloaded it on my PC so when I happen to have booted to Windoze, I run Safari.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life Apple, Delicious, Firefox, Internet, Linux, Microsoft, Reviews, Safari, Windoze
I got my Google Voice invite recently. Even though I consider myself pretty tech savvy and up to date on cool betas and other Internet tools, I let this one bake for a bit before giving it a test. My first impression is that it’s a very useful tool and is yet another example of the Internet (and Google) making past and present tools and technologies commodities. In this regard, I have to express my frustration with AT&T and Apple and echo many folks before me. I’ll get into that, but first here’s my early impression of the service and features.
For a brief introduction, Google Voice is a telephone number that is supposed to be your last and final telephone number. You set up Google Voice with your other phone numbers and then you can control how and when you accept calls from who. Sounds great, but let me provide an example which may make more sense. You set up your Google Voice number to send everyone in a “Work” or “Coworkers” group to your office phone number and your cell phone number during week days from 8am-7pm, but not your home number, but you have one particular work buddy that likes to call you on weekends so you make an exception for that individual, but only for your cell phone. You never give out your cell phone number (or any other number) and Google Voice “screens” your calls.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, AT&T, Google, Internet, iPhone, Reviews
I was using the new Safari 4 beta (leo) this morning and using the wp_admin pages of my wordpress blog to edit a new blog post. I have several plug-ins enabled for editing (enhanced tiny mce being the most likely culprit). As I went back to enter a link I got the gray screen of death…(at least in the browser window)…
I took a screenshot and there were the auto saves, so I didn’t lose much text. However, I did have to re-type a paragraph or two.
It’s what you get for using a beta so I’m not really complaining, I’m just warning others.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, Wordpress
I can’t take all the credit for this. I can’t even take a small amount of credit for this. All I did was google, google, and more google for a method to get my calendar entries from my company calendar server (running Leopard Server) to my iPhone. Most of the solutions I came across involved some sort of sync between two calendars (local and remote) using paid for software (which may provide more functionality (like reverse sync)) or using paid software to sync your calendars to Google Calendar and use that as your iPhone calendar.
What I really wanted was alerts. I can’t tell you how many times I missed a conference call or was late to a meeting that was on my company calendar that wasn’t on my iPhone. I just wanted it to ping me 5-15 mintues before a meeting, is this too much to ask for?
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Sid Boswell Blog, Work Apple, iPhone
It’s still in beta (as most Google applications are) but now Google has an application that will sycn your iPhone. This concept strikes me as strange, but I guess with this you could ditch iTunes and use something like Songbird and Google to sync everything on your iPhone.
It uses a licenseable Microsoft protocol for the synchronization. Why didn’t Google just write their own? I mean how can they crush Microsoft if they are using their product?
Upon further examination, I think (at least for now) you will still need iTunes. I haven’t tried the Google sync and don’t know that I will. I currently use the Mobile Me sync to keep everything up to date real-time.
Anyone try this yet? If so, what’s the scoop?
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Sid Boswell Blog Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft
My brother-in-law had an old PowerBook G4 laying around. He said it had a bad hard drive and it was just collecting dust. He sent it to me to mess around with as I figured I could at least make it usable.
Specs:
I was able to replace the Hard Drive rather easily by following the instructions at iFixit. I wanted to do a compare of speeds of doing normal tasks so I tried to install Leopard, but after the DVD spinning for a few hours I learned that the minimum requirements for Leopard is 512 MB RAM.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, PowerPC, Ubuntu
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, iPhone, Linux, Mythbuntu, MythTV, Ubuntu, Windoze, Wordpress
It seems that Apple’s cloud computing push teknology for some reason decided that only Mac OS X and Windoze would be able to use their nifty cloud computing push iPhone teknology. In other words, they have either left the open source community hanging or they intentionally pulled the plug on compatibility across platforms. Try to browse to the www.me.com from any Linux PC (unless you are running something under WINE) and you’ll get a big fat, “it ain’t like that.” This includes eeePCs, the $199 gOS netbooks sold at GoodEmployeeBenefitsmart and anybody who decides not to back down to the evil empire or use an iPhone. For all their embracing of open source, Apple seems to have left the open source community hanging.
What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother? What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?
I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Life, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Vista, Windoze
Wordpress
So, I decided that I would move my blog from iWeb to Wordpress. One of the reasons I decided to do this is it will give me the capability of hosting more blogs and even doing content based blogging. I also was dumping my iWeb folder onto my Ubuntu box and therefore didn’t have the ability to allow comments on my blog. I will still keep my personal Web site based on iWeb (at least for now), and will work on integrating them together if at all possible.
I installed Wordpress on my Ubuntu Hardy (8.04 LTS) installation. I initially used the package from the ubuntu repositories (apt-get) but after my initial spin, I decided to go with the most recent tarball from Wordpress itself. Installation was a breeze and consisted of:
- unpacking the tarball (tar -xvf filename)
- changing the ownership of the wordpress directory to allow the Apache user write privileges (chown -R user:group wordpress)
- creating a wordpress user and database in phpMyAdmin
- browsing to the wordpress directory
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux, Ubuntu, Wordpress
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I’ve migrated just about everything from my iMac to Elvis (my Ubuntu Linux server running on my old Pentium desktop). If there are any gaping holes in any of my information please let me know (i.e. if there is anything that did not get migrated).
Now that I am (mostly) migrated, I’ll start to play around with some other LAMP based services for fun (forums, blogs, etc.).
I’ll usually post my updates to this blog or the news page on the wiki.
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Sid Boswell Blog, Linux Apple, Linux
