Then go download and install a proper OS, like Ubuntu.

HowTo: Install Windows Vista in 2 Minutes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

¹ We had an extremely yummy lamb roast.
² For the record, I’m a database guy these days not a support tech. *sigh*
³ And free, never forget free! *grin*
⁴ Yes, I’m still reading those wretched fun Wheel of Time books.

Windows Heck © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

LifeHacker is one of the very few blogs that I actually check daily for new content. And I’m not talking about using an agregator, I will actually pop up a webbrowser to hit them up. I read their site so often it wasn’t until today that I realized my portal page didn’t¹ link to them. As a general rule, the articles there are interesting and/or useful. I don’t have a Mac, so some articles don’t always help me, but overall they have a really good mix. I suppose given how much use I’ve gotten out of their site, I should be a bit nicer about this.… But the tip posted today was so shockingly lame that I feel the need to compile my own list of tips for windows users. Sorry, justrick but this one shouldn’t have made it past the editor’s desk!

Right that’s more than enough complaints, here’s my favorite Windows tips (in no particular order)

• Reformat your drives and load your favorite linux distro (I suggest either Kubuntu or OpenSuSE).²
• Use the Windows Key shortcuts:
  • Win + E: Launches Windows Explorer
  • Win + D: Pressed once, shows your desktop. Pressed twice, restores your windows to their prior positions. The same effect can be achieved with Win+M and Win+SHIFT-M, but Win+D takes less effort.
  • Win + R: Launches the Windows Run Box. True, this isn’t as powerful as the Linux cli but you can do some good tricks with it (I’ll cover some of those later).
  • Win + L: Locks your computer, good for corporate environments.
  • Win + BREAK: Launches the System Properties window.
  • Win + F: Launches the Windows Explorer Searach function, useful in locating files³. Of course, if what you’re really looking for are other computers on the network then you could use Crtl+Win+F.
• If you use the Windows Command Prompt frequently, then setting up some aliases for your most commonly used commands is helpful. the one I like to do on evey Windows machine I use is to create C:\Windows\X.BAT. This batch file contains only one command and that’s EXIT. Since the batch file is in the Windows directory, it’s in the system path on a default configuration. When I’m ready to close any command prompt, I just hit “x” (minus the quotes) and I’m out.
• If you don’t have a fancy keyboard with extra keys for macros or launching other programs, you might want to use things like:
  1. Press Win+R
  2. Type in “notepad” (minus the quotes)
  3. Press enter or click ok. This will launch the Windows Notepad accessory, great for editing small text files or making quick notes to yourself. the other app I frequentally launch this way is the Windows Calculator (use “calc” instead of “notepad”).
• If your Quick Launch bar is overflowing but you still need quick access to more programs and you don’t have a fancy macroing keyboard, then you can setup shortcut keys for your programs by right-clicking on their icon/shortcut, selecting Properties, clicking in the Shortcut Key field and pressing the key combo you want to launch the program. For example…
  1. Go into Start -> Accessories.
  2. Right-click on Paint and select Properties.
  3. Click in the Shortcut Key field and press Crtl+Alt+P
  4. Now whenever you press Crtl+Alt+P Microsoft Paint will launch. Keep in mind that this can cause problems with other programs if you try overwriting a keyboard shortcut that the other program already uses (e.g. Ctrl+C).

Those are all of the Windows tips that immediately come to mind. If any of my readers have additional ones they like, please post them in the comments.

¹ As soon as I realized this, I added the link.
² If this tip offends, I’d apologize but you should know by now from reading this blog, that I vastly prefer Linux.
³ Though installing Google Desktop and using hitting Crtl twice is easier overall and GD does a better job searching.

Windows Tips © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

From Pukka:

• Jack Thompson whimps out and P.A. steps up to the plate.

Not from Pukka:

• Pumpkin Apple Bread
• Ubuntu No Sound Troubleshooting [Editor] I recently installed Ubuntu 5.10 on my ancient laptop and I plan to get KDE up & running on it. I’ve had problems before getting the sound to work with this laptop. So I’m making a note of this page as the Ubuntu forums link to it for help with sound issues.
• Backlink Checker [Editor] You can use this site to see who’s linking to you.
• Anti-game activist Jack Thompson under investigation
• Transparent aluminum [Editor] Makes you wonder if Scottie stopped by and gave ‘em a tip. :)
• Official Site for gDesklet Sensors & Displays [Editor] I recently wiped out my laptop and loaded the Ubuntu Breezy (5.10) on it. One of the things I added to it was gDesklets (KDE users should think SuperKaramba, Windows/Apple users should think Konfabulator).

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Let me ‘splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry’ Humperdinck in a little less than half an hour. And every Wednesday, myself and a few co-workers head over to the Terrapin to get a cup of real coffee². Almost without fail, I order a “Grand Canyon” which is 2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a shot of dark chocolate syrup and a shot of mango syrup. *yum* When I got there today, I picked up their tea menu and Rob (one of the owners) ordered me to put it down. I explained about the congestion and he accepted it, but I wouldn’t say he was happy about it. Then I ordered their Chinese Breakfast tea, as the description sounded similar to the yunnan jig tea I’ve mentioned before. Hot caffeinated beverages acquired, we headed back to the office and I headed back to the mountain of email that had arrived while I’d been out. After clearing out that mess (most of it went straight to the trash), I started/continued testing a problem I’d been working on Friday. I’m still processing the data for that test now, but I’m also starting to wonder if I should have stayed home again.

Today, like Sunday, I woke up feeling better than the day before. The problem is like Sunday, I didn’t stay home. Sunday, Ariesna & I were invited to go to Niabi Zoo over in Illinois with some of her family. It was a fun day and I took quite a few pictures³ but by the end of the day, I was totally wiped out and realized I should have stayed home. Now I’m not wiped out (so far) but I do feel more tired than I should from just sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen. Ah well, not much I can do about that now.

BTW, last night I upgraded Cath’s site to the current version of WordPress. I was kind of annoyed at how long it took but then most of that time was taken up my crappy ftp client having problems deleting the files for the old version from the webserver. Mind you I was booted into Windows at the time⁴ which undoubtably was part of the problem. But I did eventually get it done and wouldn’t you know it looks nearly identical to what it did before. I’d call that a good sign for a seamless upgrade, but I’m waiting to hear back from her before I call it a success. So why the upgrade? In part to patch some old security holes and in part because all the new/interesting stuff for WP is happening on the newer versions. This way if she feels like going out and picking a different theme⁵; it should be trivial to install it.

Anyway, one of the reasons I was annoyed with the amount of time it took was last night also happened to be the season premier for NCIS. I’ve been a fan of this show for a while now, but season 2’s finale was murder. Quite literally, as they killed off one of the NCIS agents. I was very much looking forward to seeing where they’d take the show next, but with upgrading the site and some other things I didn’t get to watch the show as thoroughly as I would have liked. From what I did see, I’m not sure how enjoyable season 3 will be. I don’t care for the new characters they introduced into the NCIS office (Director Jenny Shepard and Agent Ziva David). The romatic background between Gibbs & Shepard could be an interesting subplot but they seem to be pushing it too hard in an episode which should be dealing more directly with the remaining NCIS agents working to find Kate’s killer. And then to make the episode a 2-parter leaving us on another cliff-hanger is distinctly annoying. *sigh* I guess we’ll have to wait and see if they can pull this up with next week’s episode.

¹ Next to chicken noodle soup, hot tea works best for clearing up congestion and helping me feel better.
² The first part of this paragraph is a quote from The Princess Bride. And when I say coffee, I mean flavored espresso.
³ I’ll see about posting some of them later. Incidentally, there was a classic car show being held on the zoo’s premises so don’t be surprised if you see more car than animals photos.
⁴ I had some work to do that required M$ Word, as OpenOffice Writer couldn’t properly edit the fancy formating in the document (originally created in M$ Word).
⁵ By perhaps looking through the themes in Alex King’s Theme Browser.…

Feeling Better & Mumbling Randomly © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.

Instructions:

1. Open Firefox.
2. Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
3. Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
4. In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
5. Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
6. Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.

This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.

Firefox Tip © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

So what ftp client have you found to be the one that makes you happen in a forbidden love kind of way?

*grin*

Office Conversations (Part 2) © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One of the many lovely gifts that Ariesna and I received for our wedding was a Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G router.¹ Since a wireless router is useless without something to connect to it; I went out and picked up a Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Notebook Adapter. Since I was still kind of dazed from the whole wedding/honey-night experience; I didn’t stop to check whether the router had SpeedBooster and if I could get the card online for much cheaper than I could in the store.² I had cash in my pocket and techno-lust burning in my heart. I bought the card, took it home and immediately started mucking about with my laptop to try to get it to work. In a previous fit of whimsey, I had wiped M$ Windows from my laptop and replaced it with SuSE 9.0 Pro. Since APT is such a wonderful thing, I used it to keep SuSE updated; rather I used it to update SuSE on the laptop whenever I booted it up to use it. So the first thing I tried doing in my quest to get wireless networking running on my laptop was to run APT and grab all the latest stuff for SuSE 9.0.

For the first time ever, APT let me down and in doing so it let me down badly. Something in my xserver configuration (or maybe the startup scripts) got hosed. I fiddled with it for a couple of days, but had no luck in correcting the problem. I could work around it, but not fix it. Once I got to that point, I tried to load some missing software I needed to get the wireless card to work, but the software was not listed in the APT repositories I was using. This is especially problematic as the CD-ROM in this laptop tends to be very flakey, so I couldn’t hope to go back to my original CDs and load it from there. In the meantime, I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu (Hoary 5.04). I did this planning on borrowing the modular CD-ROM drive of a co-worker with the same ancient Dell laptop to replace SuSE on my laptop (if all else failed). Tonight, I was home alone and annoyed that I still didn’t have my wireless network up & running. So I ran over to Best Buy, picked up a spindle of CD-Rs, burned Ubuntu to disc and tried installing it.

Much to my utter amazement and total surprise, my laptop decided that it liked this burned CD and allowed me to install Ubuntu without error. It took several hours to do it, but eventually I was looking at an incredibly ugly Ubuntu desktop. This struck me as odd, but then I realized it was displaying at 800x600 when my laptop’s native resolution is 1024x768. So a bit of googling later and a quick run of: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and I was looking at the very pretty version of Ubuntu’s desktop. About an hour later, after following these directions in the NdisWrapper wiki, and I have wireless networking running on my laptop. Now I just need to look into a 2nd battery for the laptop so I can have be a bit further away from the wall socket than my power cord lets me go. Still, it’s so very nice not having to sit in my lousy desk chair to do some work on the computer. It’ll be even nicer when I can put the funds together to build a MythTV box for the living room to watch all my anime with. :)

Updated 2005-05-27, 19:55 GMT-06:00: I noticed a typo in the dpkg-reconfigure command above, so I’ve edited this post to correct it.

¹ Yes, I do realize that considering this a lovely gift puts me completely and forever in the “geek” category,
² The answers to those questions were: No and Yes.

Sweet, Sweet Wireless Internet © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Of course, staying home to fix my computer means I missed another Mindbridge meeting but I doubt they’ll really miss me there as usually I just sit there silently. Hopefully next month, I’ll be able to make it to a meeting again And come to think of it, I probably won’t make it to next month’s meeting as that’s awful close to my wedding day. *shrug* You win some, you lose some.

¹ Usually, it’s up & running either grabbing new, fansubbed anime via BitTorrent or transcoding video files for burning to disc.

Back in Business! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

This means that there are new security updates available. I launched YOU to get the new updates and noticed it was an updated kernel. I didn’t think much beyond that and let YOU do it’s thing. But after I rebooted I couldn’t get into my Linux install; it looks like some of the kernel modules didn’t get installed correctly. Specifically the one for the filesystem that my harddrive is formatted in. *grumpf* I’m doing research online to figure out how to revert back to a previous kernel to fix this.

That was the bad news. The good news is I got a bit ornery with my iPod not syncing with iTunes & fought with it again. After getting several BSODs, I just randomly decided to plug the iPod back into the onboard firewire port and for whatever reason it worked! Wheee! Now if I could just get my Linux install fixed; I’d be a happy camper.… At least until the next computer screw up!

Mixed Day © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.