The first part of this post can be found here.

With the hardware part of my new/old desktop tower running I went to Ubuntu.com and downloaded the disc image for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. Once the 700ish MB download was done was I proceeded to try and burn the disc image to a 1 GB USB drive I had lying around and this is where I ran into my first problem. I tried about 5 different ways to do this on a Mac without any success and finally I gave up and read the instructions on the Ubuntu site that said that this was not a ‘recommended’ method of installation. Windows apparently, was needed to create the USB installer. So a few days later I got hold of a Windows laptop and created a bootable USB drive from the image.

At this point I should clarify that in all fairness my inability to create a bootable disc from the image was due the fact that I use Mac OS X and there is apparently NO way to do this on a Mac except for some weird terminal commands that did not work for me. Also, I could have easily avoided the trouble I had with the disc image by just burning it to a CD but if you read the first part of this post you will have noticed I had a CD-Writer that I doubted was still working. Long story short, it wasn’t and I didn’t want to buy another drive for what I thought would be a one time use only. Read more…

Rants, Tech AMD Sempron, Kallaway Leopard, Leo4All, Nvidia, OS X, OSX86, SnowLeo, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Ubuntu 10.04 review, Ubuntu Sucks, Windows XP

So, (I have to stop starting posting posts with that word) on a recent vacation in Goa that lasted nearly a month, I cycled around pretty little villages in North Goa like crazy (I also decided I would “Go For A Run” but that just ended with my thighs screaming “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING TO US?!“ at me and having to heave myself off the toilet the next morning by pulling my body up using the door handle because I was pretty much paralyzed from the waist down, but I digress…)

One of the  many joys of cycling around was being able to listen to music with earphones in and be reasonably confident that I wouldn’t get run over by a bus or an SUV tearing around a blind corner in the opposite direction. Other joys included blasting down a hillside, free-wheeling at 45 or so, silently whooshing past little old ladies on Honda Activas, while resisting the urge to yell “Outta my way Jesus Lover! Comin’ through!”

Ahhh Goa!

I also managed to borrow a reasonably decent camera from the same charitable people who lent me their house and took a few photographs which are on ‘the flickr’ here. Mostly old houses, abandoned and gone to seed, being slowly reclaimed by the undergrowth and some churches.

So, the song. Besides a ton of Goldfrapp and Tosca, this song by Groove Armada was playing in my ears a lot of the time and boy did it fit the setting. Its called At the River and is from the album Vertigo. If you want to hear Groove Armada’s best album though, SoundBoy Rock would be a better bet. Please ignore the video, which is a mash up of some footage including an Nvidia graphics demo from a few years back, when we would actually go out and buy a new graphics card and slot it into a desktop PC and then run the demo and ooh and ahhh (at the rendering not the chick, okay maybe a little bit at the chick)

Anyways, vacation over. Back to the mines. Same shit, different day. Repeat. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum .

Music, Random At the River, Corjuem, Cycling, Flickr, Goa, Goldfrapp, Groove Armada, Moira, Nachinola, Nvidia, Soundboy Rock, Tosca, Vertigo

Since I am feeling rather geeky today I thought I’d write about a new utility I discovered recently for my notebook and how that got me thinking about the Mac platform. If you aren’t into tech you should probably just skip this entire post. Go look at cute cats here.

One of the greatest things about a Macintosh notebook is that you never, ever need to shut it down, ever. One things Macs do really well is what the PC world calls a suspend state or in Mac lingo is Sleep. This is particularly important on notebooks because once you are done with your work, say in a library, in class, at work or wherever, you drop the lid on your MacBook and get up and go. Once you’ve got where you want to be you pull out your MacBook, open the lid and you are right back where you left off. Immediately. No boot up, no login, no restarting applications or opening documents, everything is the way it was when you last closed the lid.

You pull out your MacBook and start doing what you have to with it while people with Windows notebooks sit and look at boot-up screens resignedly and if they are running Vista you’re normally done googling, mailing or writing half a page before they hear their Windows startup sound. 

Its also fun to just close the lid and drop the MacBook into your bag and have people say “Don’t you need to shut it down?” and answer “Meh.. It’s a Mac.”

 
From here on things get geeky.

Read more…

Tech apple, apple killing firewire, developers, firewire, Intel, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Pro, Nvidia, Power PC, Safe Sleep, Smart Sleep, Steve Jobs