Reformatted
Well, I botched my Ubuntu install when I attempted to upgrade to 8.10. So I got a bit discourage and haven’t repaired it yet. And lately my XP installation has been doing some funky things. It’s been almost three years since I last reformatted, and for me I think that might be a record. I was usually wiping everything clean once or twice a year.
So since I was in the market for a fresh install, and the Windows 7 Beta is available free to the public, I figured why not. So here I am posting from it. Installing it wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, but that wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. Since my hardware is so ancient (a couple years old) the company that made my motherboard decided that surely NO ONE would be running Vista on this hardware. So after I got Win7 installed, I realized there’s no drivers available. Luckily I was able to rob a driver from a newer revision of my board to get the ethernet working, and Windows Update took care of the rest!
It’s a bit slower than XP was, but considering my RAM barely meets the minimum requirements I’m not too suprised. I’ll experiment with it for a while and decide whether I’ll stick with it. Too soon to tell now.
Tidied up a bit.
Andrea’s been in cleaning mode all day, and I caught it a little bit. Decided to clean up the computer room a bit. Moved my tower up onto the desk so it’s easier to get to. And cleaned up all the junk on my desk. Decided to take a picture while it’s actually looking decent! Yeah, I have my Windows OS running…I just got done playing some Guild Wars.
My uber geek station.
Huh?
21.1 Megapixel 5D Mark II by Canon
I noticed a link under the Anandtech tab on bgwillers about a 21.1 mp camera from Canon. The first thought was…
What the hell do you need a 21.1 mp camera for?
Then I read on and it said something about being able to record in HD. The second thought was…
I thought this was a camera, not a camcorder! Why do you need to record in HD on the same camera you’re getting 21.1 mp with? Wouldn’t that just eat up your memory?
Oh well, I guess I’m just weird like that. It would be cool to have, but wouldn’t know what to use it on in Kansas. Plus, I never got to the price, which I probably wouldn’t want to know in the first place. I know that 7.1 mp cameras are going for $100 or so at walmart. So, that gives you a little idea of what it MIGHT be.
09.11.08Who needs Windows?
Here’s my new desktop. It’s nothing fancy, just a pretty much plain installation of Ubuntu Linux. It’s been working out great so far though! Biebs donated a hard drive, and I installed Ubuntu on it a few days ago. And since then, I haven’t even had the need to fire up Windows XP!
It does have a few issues, it won’t run Windows games without a whole lot of convincing, but I have got Guild Wars running almost as good as it does on XP. For surfing the web, photo editing, music, and just about everything else Ubuntu does just as good a job, if not better, than XP! Did I mention it’s FREE?
Lots of fun times…for a geek like me.
Well as posted earlier, we got the Wii this weekend. Andrea has already worked up some mighty sore muscles from hitting home runs in Wii Sports. I’ve been sitting around for hours creating Miis of everyone I can think of. I’ve been really enjoying the new Mario Kart, though I’m a little dissapointed they dumbed down the powerslides this time around. But still a blast none-the-less. I am still favoring the old controller over the tilt method you can use with the Wiimote. Started a little bit on Mario Galaxy, but haven’t gotten very far yet.
Biebs hooked me up with an old 160GB hard drive he had laying around, so installed Ubuntu on it and have been having great success so far. Still have a little bit of work to do getting Guild Wars to run in Linux, but I’m confident I’ll get there. It’s my first step to shedding Windows completely on my next computer I build, hopefully sometime next year!
So lots of geeky stuff to play around with, and as always not enough time for it all. If only I could get by on like 2 hours of sleep!
08.10.08Last night’s LAN party.
Well with Andrea out of town, and no reason not to, I tagged along with Biebs to go to a LAN party with a few of his friends. It was a good time, though I was getting my butt handed to me most of the time! Though I did discover a game called Homeworld 2 that looks pretty fun, but I’m going to have to get into it more before I reach a verdict on that.
I ended up staying out way too late though. Didn’t get home until about 3AM. Ugh. I hit the bed and fell to sleep immediately. But I was at least up this morning before 10:00, got some coffee in me and all is good!
Head over to biebsworld.com to check out some videos of the gaming action!
08.4.08Quick FYI.
I’m doing some changes to the technical side of the site here. If bgwillers.com dissapears in the next day or two for some reason, try to refresh. If that doesn’t work, it could be 24 to 48 hours before bgwillers.com works correctly again.
Alternatively, you can always reach this site by going to http://buthard.wordpress.com .
HP Bloatware
Seriously. Can you not hook a printer up just to print? Do you really need ink monitoring levels, a photo processing center, newsletter, and automatic updates? All I want to do is print a document once in a while.
Maybe I’ve been out of the old school hardware scene for a while, but it took a good 30 minutes to install the driver and all the damn software for an old HP3900 here at work. Surely there’s some third party drivers out there that you can install to give you basic printing functions, that don’t bog down this already bogged down hardware!
07.29.08Net nutrality gaining significance.
“I am pleased that a majority has agreed that the commission both has the authority to, and in fact will, stop broadband service providers when they block or interfere with subscribers’ access”
-Kevin Martin, FCC Chairman
The FCC appears to be taking steps to convince Comcast to stop throttling people’s internet connection speed based on what software they are using, or how big of files they are transferring. It’s still shaky ground though, as even though there’s net neutrality principles from the FCC, they aren’t legally enforceable. Comcast can just give the FCC the finger and keep doing what they’re doing if they want to.
For those who aren’t quite up on the issue. Comcast (which is an internet provider) has been intentionally slowing down people’s internet who use BitTorrent. BT is primarily used for file sharing, and I’m not going to sit here and drabble on about how many LEGAL torrents there are. I whole heartedly admit that a clear majority of torrents, probably are illegal. But the issue is, if you let ISPs control this activity, where does it stop?
Right now Comcast is claiming that it is slowing people down to help ease network congestion. (I.E. All these people downloading huge files, would keep many other paying customers from getting the speed they paid for.) Well if we allow that. What’s to say Yahoo couldn’t write Comcast a check, and with so many people going to Google.com, they slow down (or even restrict) ALL connections to that website, (of course claiming Google creates too much network traffic), and eliminating Yahoo’s main competition for an extremely large group of people.
Imagine not being able to visit your favorite sites, because they haven’t entered into an agreement with your Internet Service Provider.
Imagine having to pay a basic connection fee, then pay for an entertainment teir, that gives you access to YouTube.com. A sports tier that gives you access to ESPN.com.
Imagine not being able to chat with your friends because your ISP only allows Yahoo Messenger, and your friend’s ISP only allows MSN Messenger.
Of course all these are extreme scenarios, and admittedly a bit far fetched. I would like to believe that as time goes on, the choices in portals to connect to the internet will increase profoundly, and those with rigid, overpriced business models will be left behind by those that offer more flexable and affordable alternatives. In this regard, I’m somewhat on the fence. However, in the more immediate future, I truely hope that pure uncensored internet continues to be a reality.
I can haz interwebs!
I knew I couldn’t trust the cable company. They said they had to send somebody by. I don’t think anybody came by. The feable piece of wire that held the cable box shut was still very much like I last left it. I came home from work and Andrea was on the phone with Cox customer support. She chats with him for what seems like forever, unplugs the modem. Plugs it in, does a bunch of stuff, blah blah blah. Keeps saying our account isn’t “Authorized”. So he tells her they’ll send a guy out. Friday at the earliest. WTF.
So we trouble shoot some stuff on our end. Make sure all the connections are good. And finally I went as far as to hook the cable modem straight up to the cable that’s coming off the pole outside. Still no change. So the problem was DEFINITELY on there end. I’m convinced that there’s just a problem with our account and that they don’t have the right modem MAC address on there. So I convince Andrea to give ’em a call back, and she asks them to double check the modem on the account. Sure enough, it hasn’t been transferred yet. So after about 15 minutes of her sitting on hold, they FINALLY get it all straightened out and we have the internet again.
Seriously though. Why can’t people just get things straight? We’ve had issues setting up every single utility at this place so far. All of it just because people can’t seem to figure out how to transfer information from one address to another. Don’t even get me started on our water bill. Let’s just say there was one night last week we could only flush the toilet once. All because somebody can’t get numbers straight.
Anyway. It’s nice to have internet again. My computer isn’t anything great, but it’s sure a lot better than the ones we have at work! So much smoother and faster. And the chair here is more comfortable to boot!