I tried…I swear I tried. I guess I’m just not cut out for this and am destined to be a permanent slave to microsoft.

What am I talking about you ask??? Well it’s this. Being very much “in to” computers I’ve always felt a certain sense of disgust that I still favour windows XP over either a Mac or Linux machine. I’ve used a Mac when working and missed my good old ‘Start’ button dreadfully so when my laptop came back from being repaired about a month ago I decided to give Unbuntu another try. Any previous readers of this blog will remember my utterly dismal attempt at using Debian last year (about this time) and the comment which stood out was along the lines of “you shouldn’t have tried Debian. Try unbuntu”. So I did.

I’m close to comitting Computer Murder. So far installing Unbuntu has been a frustrating, pain-in-the-ass process which has caused me to swear more in the last three weeks than I had in the previous 6 months. Only having a 6.06 CD I installed this and found that my computer didn’t like installing Ubuntu. It took 4 attempts just to install it and I’m convinced that my final sucess was only due to the fact that I sat at the computer and moved the mouse every 10 seconds…for 45 minutes. On all previous attempts the install had frozen.

Next…I customised the desktop and thankfully managed to have my portable hardrive register without problems and set up a background image, then chose a screen saver. However that is where my easy ride ended. Installing sound (MP3 support) took four hours, installing my printer has taken two weeks, updating to firefox 3 has required me to download Unbuntu 8 completely (which I’ll admit wasn’t hard just time consuming) and working out why it wouldn’t update despite being connected to the internet took about half a day.

I miss Microsoft office.  Installing new fonts should NOT take 40 minutes. What happened to drag and drop with fonts???? Open office still hasn’t registered the one font I really wanted as it seems to have serious issues with OTF fonts. Then I FINALLY get my printer installed and open my powerpoint presentation to print as handouts (Thank GOD for youtube tutorials!) and guess what…greyscale has had a bug in it since 2007 which causes to spit out blank pages. You still can’t get rid of white space and there is no spell check.

Now I’m aware that I’m new to this and was prepared for a transition however I have some suggestions to all the people who feel like pressing Ubuntu or other linux platforms to complete newbie users like me.

1. Try and work with the printing companies to make installing printers simpler.  Terminal is scary for someone like me.
2. Create a drag and drop for fonts and for goodness sake support OTF fonts.
3. Have a folder like Windows Control Panel. I know it’s small but believe me finding the basics in one place is a godsend!
4. The deb file is great…now expand it.

And finally a few notes for the open office people.

1. FIX the greyscale bug. It’s been around for at least 2 years!
2. Support getting rid of white space. I know there is a ‘view as webpage’ option but you lose your page numbers with this which is a pain and all that space can really effect the flow of reading.
3. Realise there are other languages other than American! Despite popular thinking America is not the centre of the world and if you provide other dictionaries then why not let people choose, install and set up their dictionary when they use open office for the first time??? (and remember this is a difference between US and Australian english…eg: center vs center and customise vs customize!)

I’m not recommending that Ubuntu be exactly like windows… I know it’s not. I’m just pointing out that if you want it to become more popular and get chosen then it needs to be ‘noob’ friendly. Eg…no terminal.

And that comment someone pointed out about trying Ubuntu instead of Debian hasn’t done a thing. I’m still ready to throw my entire desktop computer out the window and go back to Microsoft! But I won’t. Aside from the fact that I’m living in a rented place and will cop it if I do, I want to learn this. I just wish it hadn’t taken me 2 weeks to install my printer!

Final Note: Does anyone know of step-by step instructions online? My searches have found nothing but forums with only half the story…adding to my frustration.

A few people might remember me going on about my computer crashing about a year ago (I can’t remember exactly). Well after that huge scare I bought myself a portable hard-drive (hardrive??) to prevent me from losing stuff in the future. Well last week sometime my computer crashed once again and aside from my fault at not syncing my portable hard-drive with my computer it saved my butt!

My aim now is to work on my personal flaw. Does anyone know of some good software which helps sync a folder with a folder on a portable hard-drive or even a thumb drive? I’m aware that the first thought might be windows briefcase however I’ve tried that in the past and whilst it updates files when you press the ’sync’ button it doesn’t copy over new files. Does anyone have any alternatives? Something free of course and nothing which will clog a computer.

Well I’ll be on the lookout and well say something if I find something good. Until then happy manual synching.

December Note: In response to a question, yes the audio converter is totally free. No trial, no cost. (at least at the time of this comment and post. This may change in the future).

Ever since I used Odeo as part of class in 06 I’ve been trying to find an equivalent. Odeo was altered after we used it to disable an upload option meaning that audio had to be directly recorded on to their website. Well I’ve finally found an alternative.

Houndbite is a website which allows the user to upload up to 8mb or 5 minutes of audio and then embed it much the way youtube does with video. The length limit means that there are some limits but does work for short podcasts or song intros. Below is my example of a random audio track chosen from the site.

That said my largest song is Justin Timberlake’s ‘What Goes Around Comes Around’ which is 10.2MB and the longest is Halcyon & On & On from the Mean Girl’s soundtrack which is 9:25 so most songs will fit. However the Timerlake song does have a 192bit rate (higher than my 128 average) so many things could be brought down easily.

My feedback for the site is to make the interface clearer so you can see how much of the song has loaded, like the colour change odeo and youtube have.

Quick extra note. Because I have what seems like 600 browsers installed on my computer I didn’t want to install yet another huge program so I searched for a MP3 converter. Finally I found the Free Mp3 Wma Converter which converts most audio formats in to most other audio formats including WMA, M4A and OGG. It can also reduce the bitrate and the album/artist information in the song is not lost during conversion so it’s a great program and totally free. Not trial, not limited…free. So if you are not trying to edit audio then have a look at that. For me it get’s a 10/10 rating.

Well it’s finally happened. Google has gone and made software that they didn’t invent from scratch. They’ve gone and made a browser and I am writing this post from their lastest software - Google Chrome.

As far as I can see from the last 10 minutes of random browsing the name is the most interesting bit of this software. Chrome? Why chrome? Anyway back to the software.

The new browser itself isn’t that bad. Hasn’t crashed yet (although until I actually manage to save this post I make no promises because IE8 crashed as I was saving my review), seems to load things normally and fairly quickly. There is no Mac or Linux version out as of today but I’ve heard promises that there will be.

I’ve heard bugs of pages not loading (like Google pages lol) but haven’t come across that. I’m just left wondering if the Google toolbar will be able to be installed in this browser???

One thing I’m impressed with is that it passes the Acid 2 test (see my review on IE8 for more info on that) perfectly and quickly. One thing I don’t like is the ’speed dial’ thing (which can be overridden) and the remarkable similarity to IE7 and 8. It has the file and options to the side instead of at the top. Call me old fashioned but I like Firefox because it leaves them where they are and doesn’t mess with yet another feature which leaves you frustrated and trying to find out how to change your home page.

The TOC for this browser seems weird according to some (Google TOC concerns) and I have a message for them. This post is mine. I wrote it. I own it. They can display it for you lovely readers but that’s it.

That will do for now. Providing this post saves correctly the only thing I’d suggest to Google is to enable ctrl+s to save web pages. This is a huge one for me and I can see it being incredibly annoying not to have it.

I hope this works. I’m happy with anything that squashes IE but I still have reservations. Firefox still is, and always will be, my favourite browser. With all their add-ons how could they not be.

Google Chrome Download link (windows only)

Acid 2 Test Link

First of all I must apologise. This blog was hacked sometime in the last couple of months and I am horrified by this fact. Any warnings from Google should soon disappear and all offending links have been removed!

However…this is my only thankful thing about this embarrassing incident…I feel that being hacked is an argument against PHP standards. My stuff doesn’t conform to standards (at least not some of them) and therefore don’t use the normal things. I reckon this is plus in terms of hacking. Normal processes wouldn’t work because I use different names, different methods. They aren’t slower and I still put all the possible security checks but because they are different I argue they are harder to hack.

Anyway now that the offending links have been removed from this site I hope that this doesn’t happen again. Apologies to anyone who has been affected by this.