The killer apps of academia via iGeneration
Zack Whittaker’s iGeneration blog has quickly become a must-read. His post on The Killer Apps of Academia is well worth bookmarking for future reference. He mentions quite a few apps I use every day,...
View ArticleIn search of the best OS for a 9-year-old laptop: Part V — Where I’m headed
As I say in a previous post on this very topic, there are many reasons to choose Puppy Linux as the primary OS on the nearly 10-year-old Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop. For one thing, Puppy is ideal —...
View ArticleOne thing that preload helps run quickly: OpenOffice
OpenOffice Writer starts in about five seconds in Debian Lenny on my Gateway Solo 1450, and I have to think the preload app is responsible. I’ve written before about how preload doesn’t seem to have...
View ArticleDebian patches OpenOffice
Upon seeing 17 software updates waiting for me on my Debian Etch box this morning, I hurried over to the Debian security site and learned that the Debian security team issued a flurry of patches on...
View ArticleGoogle Docs: Not its brightest moment (or mine) on my desktop
So I’m working on a not-so-complicated (but not plain text) document that began its life some time ago in Microsoft Word, which means it’s a .doc file that got uploaded to Google Docs. It sort of, kind...
View ArticleOpenBSD 4.4 update: Opera fixed, laptop runs great with 768 MB of RAM
Time’s short, so I’ll hit the high points: The fix for all the problems I was having in Opera 9.51 (the Linux version) in OpenBSD was easy. All I had to do was change from asynchronous DNS lookup to...
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OpenBSD: I swap Firefox 2 for Firefox 3 (and don’t melt silicon in the process)
When I set up this Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop with OpenBSD 4.4 late last year, I decided to go with Firefox 2.0.0.16 instead of the newer Firefox 3.0.1. I had used FF3 in Ubuntu and on Windows...
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We don’t need Word (or anything remotely like it) anymore
Jeremy Reimer writes an excellent article for ArsTechnica on the demise of Microsoft Word and the whole idea of a “word processor” that is designed to format text to be printed out on (gasp!) paper...
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Ultimate ‘itch-scratcher’: The 18-button mouse
I’m having a very, very, very hard time believing this is not a joke. Apparently there’s a group of people developing an 18-button mouse for use not just with OpenOffice but a bevy of other...
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An afternoon in Tiny Core
After slogging through Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04 for the morning, not the most satisfying experience on my 1.2 GHz Celeron system, I decided to run Tiny Core 2.11 in the afternoon. I added Firefox 3.6,...
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