I came across this post at F-Secure and can honestly say “I wouldn’t have thought of doing that”. I don’t buy anything off auction sites, guess I’m still a little old school that way. But it’s a simple way to verify if a really good deal might be a scam. If anything the comment about “requesting a picture alongside a current newspaper” is an excellent suggestion.
Windows 7 RC expiration date
I’ve been running Windows 7 since last June after downloading the release candidate and it’s been going well. Since then on the plus side Microsoft released the Security Essentials anti-viris product so no need for Norton, MacAfee, etc but on the down side the “release candidate” I’m using will expire soon. This is disapointing as I’m not to keen on forking over $299 for Win7 Professional. I have a XP Pro license but it’s not installed on anything so I’m hoping I can use the Win7 Pro upgrade with the XP Pro license from that CD. If so it will save me a $100. JOY !!!
Got snow
There was never a shortage of snow in the winter growing up but since moving to Tennessee a while back there has not been much. At the time I would have never guessed the difference a few hundred miles south of central Illinois made. I can say I miss it, but not the single digits and 20+ mph winds. Nice to see that today and tomorrow we’ll get some.
Ubuntu Karmic notification icons with messed up video
For the last month or so I’ve been using Fedora as it seemed to fit my T42 better than Ubuntu did. But wanting to get back to it I plopped in the drive and fired it up. A decent amount of updates were needed and after getting through those things seemed fine. But then after resuming from suspend I noticed the pop up icon in the notification area was blank. It was almost like the something was up with the resolution or video display of the icon itself.
I’m not sure if this was one of those things I thought was a problem when Karmic first came out or not. I did load it pre-release but moved to Fedora shortly thereafter. Finding this to be odd I tried to do a little googling and research, found a few threads that pointed to some of the work the Ubuntu Desktop Experience Team was doing but not much that suggested a solution. The only thing I did come across was talk about video drivers and excelleration. This didn’t really make much sense to me, it has been years since I’ve had to care about the X config file and adjusting it manually. That takes me back to the RedHat 6 days and my Tecra 600. But it did give me a thought.
Video in general was not a problem, just the notificaiton icons. So as a guess I checked what was set for Visual Effects.
System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Visual Effects (tab)
The current setting was None so I changed it to Normal. To test I watched Rhythmbox move to the next song and the icon was normal.
Good to know that fixed the problem but interesting it needed to be done. Regardless the polish with Gnome in Karmic is really good. Ubuntu has taken Linux on the desktop where no one else has and with that there will always be little challenges. Wonder where they’ll go from here.
Home for the holidays
Wednesday afternoon we headed home for the holiday weekend. When we left it was almost 60, five and a half hours later it was in the low 40’s and raining. Visiting with family was good as we split time between mine and Kay’s. It rained through Friday and then started to snow. The snow continued off and on through Sunday morning, totaled about 4 inches.
I worked on a few machines while I was there as Kay’s dad got a new laptop and her sister in law need to move some things around.
Some general thoughts about working on machines this past weekend.
- Exporting mail from Outlook Express6 and importing into Live Mail works well, contacts is the same.
- Some day OpenOffice will already be on PC’s running Windows, I hope.
- PC’s/Laptop’s would run faster if OEM’s didn’t load all there bloatware.
- Windows Mail does not like exporting or slow IMAP connections. Copying message “files” is better.
- When crimping cables it’s best to “not” leave the wires exposed between the clip and sheathing, crimp the sheathing into the clip.
- Waiting on a machine to “do what you’ve asked” is a time killer.