vented spleen

blogging internet stupidity

Sunday, March 18, 2007

twit

a couple of months ago i bought and ipod nano. i still like the iriver mp3 player, but anybody who owns one knows that the interface is horrendous to use. because i only had the 256 meg model i didn't do a lot of mp3 transfers with it. my biggest use was listening to the radio with the built in fm tuner. the nano made it more convenient to transfer and navigate.



up to a month or so ago i'd completely avoided podcasts. i have to read enough idiot content on the weeb, i didn't want to hear it also. patrick norton of dltv fame mentioned the TWIT podcast. twit is hosted by leo laporte who used to host the sceensavers and still does call for help. i've never watched call for help as it was mainly clueless windows users who got themselves into trouble or for some reason didn't know about or couldn't find google.



anyway, i downloaded a few ep's of twit and i was hooked, both on the show and with podcasting in general. i found it was too time consuming to watch dltv and cranky geeks, so i started listening to the audio only podcast of those shows. i've since added security now. i'm behind on all of them, taking me a while to catch up but i'm enjoying them a lot.



i'm not likely to start my own podcast. not really in my personality, and i know bandwidth could become an issue.



anyway, if you miss the old screensavers you can get the same thing with twit and dltv, and if miss the old techtv show silicon spin you can get the same thing with cranky geeks.





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Monday, March 05, 2007

kubuntu

i had a chance to install kubuntu the other day. i'm not really a fan of kde, but i wanted an ubuntu install with kde.



kubuntu suffers from the same problem that all debian distros suffer from. first off the latest kubuntu itself was out of date. i have yet to install any debian based distro that didn't have to pull down more updates after the install.



then of course there is the debian philosophy that older buggier software is more stable.



i finally had to wipe the kubuntu install because i couldn't compile vim with gui support. i just couldn't seem to pull down enough libs for the configure to find what it needed. if i want to do that much work with linux i'll just work up an LFS.



in contrast to that, i installed xubuntu, and found it much easier to work with. i'll keep with that to see how it goes.





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