Want a portable gaming system with a large screen and full Windows compatibility? Don’t have several hundreds of dollars to spend on the Steam Deck or one of its knock-offs? Get a used netbook! That right there is the venerable HP Mini Note 2133. I bought that back in 2008 when it came out. It […]
Yes, that’s right. Every year on July 1, I change the two AA batteries inside my Pink Floyd Pulse CD. I bought this more than 25 years ago when it came out, and the flashing red LED still works. It’s a crappy live album though, really tedious and boring. I love Pink Floyd, but this […]
I thought we were friends, Firefox? y u do dis? I’ve been using Firefox for a very long time, over a decade, probably longer. If you search for Firefox in this here blog, you will get a long litany of blather all about my various complaints and praises I’ve had for it over the years. […]
Hooray! Oh no! Yes folks, here in Canada, July 1 marks a momentous day. And that day is the 10-year anniversary of the day I decided to ditch Microsoft Windows and switch to Linux.¹ It was July1, 2007 when I made the switch, and I remember being excited about partitioning the hard drive on my […]
Does anyone remember those replica Commodore 64 computers? I bought one when they came out six years ago, and I had been using it as my main “Internet” computer ever since. It had served me well over the years, and had looked very cool on my desk, I must say. I had also customized the […]
Oh my! I use Firefox for all of my browsing needs. This is because Mozilla is one of the few entities left who are actually still striving and working to keep things on the Internet open and free as opposed to closed and restricted. I also really like the browser itself because of the sheer […]
It’s the operating system that won’t die! And even though I primarily use Xubuntu and other Linux-based operating systems for my PCs, I still use Windows XP. I also use Windows 98, but that’s another blog post. My use of Windows XP is restricted to a virtual machine here on this main computer of mine. […]
Just what you’ve always wanted! Now you can re-live the glory days of the late 80s when the Commodore Amiga computer was the most advanced multimedia computer you could get without buying a special effects workstation. Since I use a replica Commodore 64, and since I have the interface themed to look as Commodore/Amiga-like as […]
What am I doing up at 4am? I was all done sleeping, I guess. And what better time to regale you with tales of shit which you care not the least! Like the subject of these two partial screenshots I took back in January that I thought were remarkable at the time. The top image […]
One of my hobbies, I guess, is extending the usable lifespan of my first PC. This is a vintage 1998 Hewlett Packard Pavilion 8260 with maxed out RAM (384MB) and a Pentium II clocked at 266 MHz. It has run Windows 98 for most of its existence, and over the last half dozen years or […]
W00T! Okay, not actually fun, and not terminal as in deathly. I’m talking about the Terminal Emulator that comes with every Linux distribution. It’s similar to the Command Prompt, for all those Windows users who have seen that. As much as I prefer to never use it, sometimes I do. It appears every time I […]
I’ve been having a delightful time playing old PC video games on my Windows 98 laptop. As described below, it’s a fairly new cheap laptop that runs Lubuntu as its OS and runs Windows 98 in Virtualbox. So I decided to fill up the massive 10GB hard drive I gave it in VB by installing […]
Okay, I’m 15 years late in celebrating this operating system. And I think I can only celebrate anything Microsoft or Windows at all because it fills a particular niche for me. This is odd for me to like Windows 98 so much, because it was Windows 95 and Windows 98 that taught me to hate […]
I like to try out different operating systems. This is mainly because I am a geek. I like to see what some group of developers has done with a kernel and a desktop environment and a software ecosystem. Linux is a good example of this. I should actually say GNU-Linux. Technically (those of you who […]
I’ve recently been playing around with a new-ish distro called Bodhi Linux. It’s a light-weight distro, and since I’m a cheap bastard who likes to spend not much money on underpowered hardware, I like to get the most I can out of my OS. That’s why I use primarily Xubuntu and Lubuntu, and even Puppy […]
Oh how cute, Robotman’s going to bore the fuck out of you by talking about Linux again! Yes, This is a story about a Linux distribution called “Puppy Linux“. I’m not much of a 1337 H4XXÁ˜R when it comes to Linux, so I pretty much stick to distros that I can install and use with […]
Go ahead and listen to this song right now. Watch the video if you want. That Rob Halford is one entertaining dude. My favourite singer, by the way. He even edges out Dan McCafferty for that honour. But I digest digress. I’m not even going to pretend that this post is about that song you’re […]
Well, I tried to give Linux Mint another try. This time I tried Linux Mint 13 with Cinnamon, 32 Bit. And I tried it on a computer that I’ve never tried to install Mint on before. The live DVD wouldn’t even boot. So as not to make the downloading and burning of that ISO a […]
Cue scientifical music. That’s better. This post is the first post written on my “writing laptop” since I dun reformatted the hard drive since I dun got me a rootkit on it. See below for the horrid, treacherous details of that. Sordid? Yeah, add sordid to that list of adjectives too. Am I making any […]
I really tried to like you, Mint. I really like your philosophy, and the fact that you’re moving away from the clone-Appleâ„¢ policies of Ubuntu. So I was disappointed when I first tried installing you back in 2008. The “Fluxbox” version I booted with a Live CD on my laptop looked so damn seductive, and […]
You think I’d be leery of installing any software on a Sony branded disc after the horribly unethical way that the Sony rootkit scandal went down years ago. But I was a fool. The long story short: I installed Blu-Ray writing software from Sony on my Windows XP laptop, and that software installed something called […]
I meant to post this post a while ago. Back when the details were fresh in my memory. So please excuse me if they are fuzzy or wrong. This last Spring, I had two of my computers die on me – within 5 days of each other. That fucking sucked. One of those computers was […]
Yesterday on Reddit, I saw a post titled “How to install Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 in Linux”. Why would anyone want to do such a thing? Seriously? Okay, do something fun… look down at the very next blog post on this very site. Okay. All in good fun. Ha ha. I made this […]
Or some bastardized mishmash of Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 and Windows 98? Actually it’s my writing laptop with a definite oldschool look that gives me a chuckle every time I use it. For the record, this is Xubuntu 12.04. It all started when I was bored and upgrading from Xubuntu 10.04 to 12.04. Contrary […]
As little work as possible, that is. I’ve been really busy this weekend with more Mikeification of more Jimi Hendrix. The process shouldn’t have taken three weeks. It doesn’t take more than about an hour to do an album. But I have zero time during the week to get fun stuff like this done, so […]
Here’s another nerdy story for you all! Gather around the glow of the CRT, it’s time to get geeky! I recently got a DVD from Jolly Old England (that’s what the country is officially called, I think) because it’s so obscure I couldn’t get it here in Canada. The video is this: Made by these […]
Another update to my long dormant blog. And only possible because I had a vacation day on Friday and therefore this is a long weekend for me. Friday was a very bad day for me though. Fuck you, weather headaches. Lately, I’ve been using my laptop more and more. This was one I bought in […]
dBpowerAmp is a great program. It is actually a suite of applications with different features, and the ones I use the most are the music converter and the CD ripping program. Actually, I have used the CD ripping program a lot in the past and I will use it a lot in the future because […]
Just like in Windows… an update can fuck up your favourite programs. I’ve blabbed before about how my favourite CD ripping program (Grip) no longer works, and now I’d like to bitch about how the replacement I found (Ripper X) doesn’t do as good a job as it should. Let’s start with mp3 tags. I […]
Hoe-kay. Ubuntu comes with a nifty little screenshot application. You just hit the “print” key (your keyboard has one, it probably says “Prt Scr” over “SysRq”) and voila, a nifty little application window comes up and asks you where you’d like to save the screenshot and what you’d like to call it. Nifty is one […]
Here’s a long and uninteresting story. Kind of like everything else on this blog. Except some of this drivel is mercifully short. Anyway, I am a fan of the 1996 game Civilization II. I play it a lot. It wastes a lot of my time, actually. I’ve spent hours playing it when I should have […]
Look at him! He’s riding the turtle! Actually, it’s a tortoise. But who cares! Look at him! And like all slow rides, this ride gets you there eventually. If you’ve been paying attention to this blog… and honestly, I don’t know who the fuck in their right mind would, I mean come on. Even I […]
I’ve got everything reinstalled now and aside from virtual Windows being slower, everything is better or the same as how I had it before. My grammar sucks but that is because I’m tired. So sue me. I actually spent a bit more time setting up Windows than I would have liked. Reason? Apparently Windows XP […]
Right here in Virtual River City. With a Virtual Tea and that rhymes with “W” and that stands for “Windows XP”. Apologies to Robert Preston. Theoretically, it is possible to take a virtual installation of a guest OS with you and use it on any computer that has your virtualization software installed on it. To […]
Well, my early night last night didn’t really turn out that way. I couldn’t sleep. So I went ahead and installed the new video card I got last night. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU Uncle Furry for carting me around town to get that card. AGP cards are a scarce breed these days. The […]
Okay, apologies to Nvidia, it’s not your latest driver that’s a steaming pile of shit. It’s my video card. More accurately, the capacitors on my video card are a steaming pile of blown capacitorific shit. So I need a new video card. Meh.
Alas, my internet PC has dun gone all fuckled. I boot, she freeze. I boot, she freeze. Sigh. Tarnation! I hadn’t upgraded or reinstalled Xubuntu on this thing for a while… it was still running 9.04. And now I think I’ll have to reinstall the whole damn shebang. Now, this computer has 2 hard drives. […]
Windows started life as a stand-alone workstation OS. Which is fine, if you don’t want any of that “networking” stuff bogging you down. Back in the 80s, when Bill Gates was actually writing code alongside his Microsoft cohorts, and when Max Headroom stuttered his way into our hearts… No one wanted or needed to connect […]
Okay. Back in the days of Windows 95 and 98, I learned how to customize my setup as best as I could. This included changing desktop wallpaper, the window buttons and title bars, the Start Menu, the sounds, and the mouse cursors. I customized other things too, but let’s not get carried away here. This […]
Because this is fucking VITAL information. A few posts down, I talked about how I was reinstalling Xubuntu/LXDE on my first computer. I use it for reading, so all I run is Firefox and a text-to speech program. Well, I dun got me everything set up. I installed all the updates, got the codecs I’ll […]
So now the time has come to reinstall Ubuntu on my very first PC, and this thing will go from Ubuntu 8.04 with LXDE to Ubuntu 10.04 with LXDE. But I’m going about things a little differently on this machine. First of all, when I tried to load the computer using the Ubuntu 10.04 Live […]
I made a post a while back about how I upgraded my parents’ laptop from Xubuntu 9.04 to 10.04. It went well. But since I upgraded, I didn’t get to take advantage of the vast improvements in boot times that came along with the newest version. Also, I didn’t get my chance to try setting […]
I’m a lazy guy. I read a lot while I surf the net, and I have a screen reader do all the work for me. Currently, I have TextAloud mp3 do that for me on this computer. It runs in a virtual Windows XP installation that I have in “seamless mode” in VirtualBox on my […]
My experience with upgrading my Ubuntu (and Xubuntu) systems from version 9.04 through 10.04 seems to have gone well. As I blabbed about in a post below, I upgraded my parents’ laptop first, then did the same to my own laptop. Now, I’ve done the process to my music computer. I was worried about this […]
Well, the time has come again for me to run the “Distribution Upgrade” from the Update Manager window. This usually means certain destruction. I think I’ve only successfully upgraded an Ubuntu system once before. Every other time I’ve done it, it has gone horribly wrong and left me with a broken and irreparable system. Like […]
I’ve still got that 10 year old Thinkpad. And I’m still enjoying it. Here’s a status update for those of you waiting breathlessly for such information. This puppy now dual boots both Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 98 SE. That’s a month-old operating system coupled with a 12 year old operating system on a 10 year […]
I’m losing my GRip. My GRip ain’t what it used to be. I just can’t GRip any more. All these idiotic puns refer to the great Linux application “GRip”. That stands for Gnome Rip. Gnome being the popular Linux desktop environment and Rip being what you do to CDs instead of playing them now. Back […]
As part of my ongoing quest to experience the unmitigated awesome that is the Windows 3.1 operating system, I have acquired an old laptop. Thanks, Uncle Furry. ;) It’s from the heady year of 2000, which was once a large-looming “FUTURE” but is now, like, ten years ago. And it has Windows 98 already on […]
I’ve read that this latest release is buggy. And I’ve also read that it’s got an “unfinished feel”, especially for a Long Term Release. And from what my own experience with it tells me, I would have to agree. I mentioned earlier how I downloaded the beta and installed it on my netbook. That went… […]
Well, I finally got around to checking out my new laserjet printer today. And I didn’t know this… but “LaserJet” is a trademark owned by Hewlett Packard. Meh. Well xerox my kleenex! So far I’ve printed only a test page from Ubuntu and a test page from Windows XP, but they look good. Now, if […]