This is a pic I took about 30 seconds before I started saying some very bad words.
I was so excited...
My big beautiful workhorse of a laptop has been having some pretty major issues lately, and since my work depends a fair deal on a dependable system I figured I may as well take advantage of the holiday sales going on. Found a great deal on a new HP Pavilion DV7-1177; 17″, P5400 Centrino Duo, 4Gb RAM, 64-bit Vista (don’t start with me, I don’t have a real choice in my industry… yet…). I was all ready to spend a couple hours last night downloading, configuring, tweaking, etc., but as soon as the first “Welcome” screen popped up… there they were. A big ugly blotch of dead pixels. Not frozen, not stuck, dead. Like someone stabbed the screen with a chopstick.
Thankfully, Staples has a relatively aceptable return policy. No more of that particular model, of course, but they do have a DV7-1174… almost identical, close enough for me. Here’s hoping second time’s a charm.
Major system issues on my work laptop… sadly, it’s time for the classic Windows Waltz: crash-1-2-3… backup-1-2-3… format-1-2-3… wait-1-2-3…
4-5-6…
install-1-2-3…
Install list:
- 7-zip
- AVG
- CCleaner
- Comical
- Delicious
- DivX
- DOXBox
- Flickr Uploader
- Foxit PDF Reader
- GameTap
- GDocsUploader
- GIMP
- gnucash
- Google Chrome
- IEPro
- Inkscape
- ISO Recorder
- ITunes
- KeePass
- Last.fm
- Launchy
- Thunderbird
- Microsoft Office
- Nestopia
- Network Stumbler
- Notepad++
- OpenOffice.org
- Picasa2
- Scribus
- SecondLife
- Skype
- TrueCrypt
- VLC
- Vuze
- Mozilla Firefox:
- Adblock Filterset.G Updater
- Adblock Plus
- Adblock Plus: Element Hiding Helper
- Better Flickr
- Better GCal
- Better Gmail 2
- Better GReader
- Better YouTube
- ColorfulTabs
- ColorZilla
- Del bookmarks
- Download Statusbar
- Download Helper
- DownThemAll
- FireFTP
- GMail Notifier
- Greasemonkey
- Google Docs Download
- Writing Room 4 Google Docs
- Download YouTube Videos
- Google Reader for wider screens
- IE Tab
- Password Exporter
- PDF Download
- Stealther
- Tiny Menu
- URL Fixer
- Vista Sidebar Gadgets
- Network Meter
- All CPU Meter
- Top Processes
- Simple Date
- Binary Clock
- Battery Monitor
- Various proprietary work stuff
A couple necessary evils, but looking at this list I’m pretty happy to see that I’ve managed to maintain an almost entirely FOSS work (and play) space.
I’m debating how to segment my “work” computer from my “home/personal” computer, since it’s the same machine. I’d still like to include an Ubuntu (or maybe Mint) partition, so I could always keep all my “fun” stuff there. Or a seperate Windows account. Depends how easy/hard I want to make it for myself to get to the fun time-wastey stuff while I’m in work mode.
The curse of personal responsibility… Any advice? Or any suggestions for other programs/addons that I might want to look at? Leave me some love in the comments.
Working for a small company like ours, I get to flex my marketing-design muscles a little bit once in a while. Having no real skill, I try to keep things as simple and clean looking as possible, blatently copying the successes of others. However, it is good to have a resource for the occasional original idea.
Improve your Photoshop skills and make your documents pop with Photoshop text effects. Tutorial site The Photoshop Roadmap compiled 80 tutorials of text effects for Photoshop. The tutorials are laid out so you can easily see the final product before sifting through the tutorial. Although not exactly beginner-friendly, most of the tutorials are very detailed. If you’ve got some free time, these sure beat the lame-o text effects included in Microsoft Office.
I’m trying to stay on top of a few basic tricks with GIMP… hoping to be able to play around a little more once we finally get a decent camera and start really shooting!
Cross platform, open source image editor GIMP is a powerful alternative to Photoshop that has many useful features waiting to be unlocked. Some of GIMP’s intermediate features are demonstrated in this short video tutorial by the VnTutor weblog. The demonstration includes: working with gray scale, adjusting brightness and contrast, adding noise, and working with layers (which can be very difficult for novice GIMPers to understand). The video above is just 1 of 10 GIMP video lessons if you’re itchin’ for more intermediate tutorials.
The office I’m in right now would probably have me shipped to shipped to Siberia for even reading an article like this… oh well, sometimes one has to be a little flexible in their interpretations of corporate policy in order to properly execute one’s priorities.
That sounds nice and defensible, doesn’t it?
The Wall Street Journal talks to 3 IT experts to find out what risky computing they try to keep you from engaging in, then asks 3 productivity mavens (including our very own Gina Trapani) how to get around the blocks. The list offers a nice point-counterpoint of why your IT department considers something a risk, how you can bypass their roadblocks and do it anyway, and–perhaps more importantly–how to get around it in a manner that won't completely freak out your IT department. (I'm not saying it won't just a little.) For more, see how else you can survive IT lockdown.
Hey, if I wanted something that just worked out of the box, I’d have got another Mac.
Actually, I tried to get another Mac, just couldn’t justify the finances when I added in the price of a full version of Windows to run all my biz software.
Point is, Linux, even a flavour as refined as Ubuntu, does not work straight “out of the box”, especially on a new generation laptop. Takes a bit of effort, but I’m hoping it will be worth it.
HUGE thanks to everyone linked below for their help in getting me set up and rocking. She’s looking better all the time, no major glitches, response is fantastic (finally feels like a new computer!).
I’m just waiting for the first client to recognize what I’m running… guaranteed sale!
Ubuntu Feisty users: Improve the look of your fonts in 2 minutes flat by installing a few packages. The font change is very noticeable in Firefox and the terminal. If you want to get technical about it, the process detailed in the Ubuntu Forums improves Feisty’s subpixel rendering. After you complete the steps, you will need to restart your open apps in order to see the difference. The lorem ipsum screenshot, shows the impressive result.
I admit, I’ve become one of those “pile, then file” e-mail guys, with hundreds of messages in my inbox that I’ll go through and label/file in one huge blitz every couple months. It’s that dang GMail! Google search is just so convenient that I don’t need to bother organizing anything!
Bad form, I know. Anyway, check out this video from the guru of e-organization.
King of the empty inbox Merlin Mann did an hour-long presentation on dealing with the daily onslaught of email for Google employees this week, and the video’s now available to the rest of us. Hit the play button to see Merlin’s full presentation (slides available here) which is based on his excellent Inbox Zero series at 43 Folders. His system inspired most of the empty inbox proclamations here on Lifehacker, so this is your chance to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Thanks to Merlin and everyone at Google for making this one available to the public.
Interesting… I haven’t quite yet come across the need for such paranoia in my own communications, but it’s good to know my options.
If you’re dating a cryptography geek, you should totally embed a steamy love note inside a cutesy romantic picture and then get him/her to figure it out. They’d be totally impressed!
Blogger Jimmy R. demonstrates how you can embed hidden files into an innocent-looking JPEG image using the free 7-Zip and the Windows command line. See more on the art of file hiding inside files in our previously posted feature, Hide data in files with easy steganography tools.
YES!! I really really hope this works as well as advertised… I’ve been terrified for as long as I’ve been writing on this blog (3 and a half years! That’s practically ancient by blog standards!) that one day the earth will open up and swallow the happy little server farm that’s hosting my little slice of cyber-egotrip. I had read about a way to temporarly list all your posts on a single page and save that as a backup, but with over 350 posts I can’t imagine that working as well as one might hope. Never mind how would I ever get it back up online if the unthinkable did happen…
Now I haven’t checked this program out yet, but it certainly seems a far more elegant option. You know how it is, the only way to make sure I never need a backup, is to back up!
Windows only: Save a local copy of your entire Blogger blog using the new Blogger Backup utility (currently in beta). Weblog Digital Inspiration reports:
With Blogger Backup, you can backup your blog posts into a single file or one blog post per file or multiple posts per file. The future versions may even save your blog posts into PDF files that you can distribute as eBooks.
Blogger backup can download everything or you can do incremental backups meaning backup just the new posts since your last backup or download blog posts posted between any two given dates.
Being Blogger blog-less, I haven’t given Blogger Backup a spin, but it sounds way more user-friendly than using DownThemAll! or other web site copiers. Blogger Backup beta is a free download for Windows only.
