lincgeek.org
From the twisted mind of me!

I noticed today that my laptop was building a little dust/crud on it today so I set out to clean it up. Nothing annoys me more than to have to use a dirty laptop/keyboard. It sort of gnaws on me until I fix it. Anyway, I was cleaning my laptops and keyboards, mice and monitors (well, lcd’s really), and it occurred to me that perhaps you all were looking for some good information on how to do the same and I should probably share.

I use basically 2 products to help keep these things working, shiny and clean, Swiffer dusters (generic work fine) and Windex multi surface wipes (again, generic is fine). The wipes are for getting real dirt and gunky spots clean and they work well for a general surface cleaner. Do note, however, that you should NOT use this stuff on your lcd or crt screens. I have never had a problem with this stuff eating plastic, but it will leave a little residue on your lcd/crt screen that you may notice (I do).

For just a quick dusting, and for the most part, this is all you will probably need most of the time, just use a Swiffer duster. These things are the bomb. Use them on any/every surface and they will pull off all the dust that electronic equipment tends to accumulate with an alarming frequency. The best part is cleaning up with one of these is uber fast too.

Lastly, if your lcd/crt screen really is dirty and you need to clean it, nothing works better than using a clean soft washcloth with warm water. Wipe your screen clean with that and then immediately dry it with a soft towel. Windex and other cleaners will leave a residue that you may not notice, but after time it will build up and you’ll notice your screen looks faded or washed out. Try the washcloth and warm water and it’ll bring it right back to new in many cases. Also, don’t use paper towels because they not only leave lint, which is annoying enough, they can have paper dust which can be abrasive on your screen.

Just use these few cleaning tips and you too can keep your goodies clean and new looking, and if you have a cleaning tip, to share too, just let me know!

A while ago I mentioned that I installed Suse on a separate partition on my laptop. My intentions were to give it a test drive and then use hat partition to do the same for some other distributions. Well, last night I finally got off my rhump and tried Gos 3.

I have to say that the installation was quite painless, even for it being a dual boot. The only thing I had to do was tell the installer which partition to use and it did the rest all by itself. Truly, the most difficult part of the install was that I had to burn 2 cds to get it to work, the first one was a coaster.

The OS defaults to a quite good looking desktop that is very reminiscent of OS X, if OS X were green The installed utilities and programs in the dock are quite google centric, which to me is not a problem because I use several of them already. The application responsiveness is quick and clean as well. I can see where this would indeed make a great distribution for netbook oriented installs.

The google gadgets are also pretty neat. The are again really reminiscent of OS X. There isn’t quite the selection yet of programs and utilities that Apple has, but I suspect there ill be eventually, and the ones that are there are usable and entertaining. They even have several versions of the giant analog clock, just for dann.

Now for what I didn’t like: The color, for some reason, seems a little washed out. Maybe I am hallucinating or maybe my laptop is just getting old, but I don’t notice that while using Ubuntu proper. The menu’s are this ugly grey/brushed metal just which reminds me of the “cool menus” of the early 90s from enlightenment or maybe an old fluxbox theme. In other words, with the nice glossy look that the desktop has, I believe the menus look clunky and dated. They don’t match, but they work fine and most people will probably only use the taskbar/dock thingy at the bottom anyhow, which brings me to that. That dock is really slick looking and working too, with one exception. How the heck do you alter it? For something as sweet looking and working as that, you’d think you could add and subtract programs/icons with a right click menu or something. Last but not least, this Gos is a very netcentric distribution that even comes with an icon to start youtube right in the dock, but it doesn’t have any form of flash installed? Wtf guys? I am sure there are people out there who will say, but that’s not free software, or what have you, but here’s a newsflash for them, I don’t care and most other people won’t either. That’s just an irritation waiting to happen by design.

All in all, I have to say that I really dig using Gos 3. I actually expect it to be hit, especially among netbook users and people who want an easy and lighter Linux. I say try it. You just may like it!

I keep forgetting to publish this post, so I had better do it now before I forget again

Many of you know that I dig using (al)pine for reading my email. This is especially true on my Acer Aspire One netbook. I like to have fast access to my email and save space on that tiny flash drive and alpine rolls in around 80someodd k. Anyhow, I also mentioned, I think, that I have several email accounts to keep track of that way, in fact 5 for todays purposes, and I use screen sessions to jump between alpine email sessions on the different accounts.

The trouble with all that is, how do you know when or how many emails you have unread on any of the accounts without jumping through them all, all day long? Well, I decided to go to an old standby for a solution…. Fetchmail.

Fetchmail has the ability to poll your email accounts with a “-c” option which means to just get a count and not download anything. This is just what I need and want!

To start off, you need to configure fetchmail. This is done in your .fetchmailrc file or, in my case, from the command line. I set up all my polling connections in a little script we’ll call “chkmail” like so:

#!/bin/bash
fetchmail -c -u lxxxxx -p imap xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.edu
fetchmail -c -u lxxxxxxxx -p imap xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.edu
fetchmail -c -u linc -p imap lxxxxxxxxxxxx.org
fetchmail -c -u lxx -p imap lxxxxxxxxxxx.org
fetchmail -c -u linc.fessenden -p imap --ssl imap.gmail.com


Simply put, I call fetchmail, tell it to only count “-c” use the protocol imap “-p” and point it at my imap server’s address. You’ll notice on the gmail entry there is an added “–ssl”. That’s because that imap server uses, you guessed it, ssl authentication. No brainer.

Now the only real stumbling point here is you’ll notice I didn’t pass any passwords. Well, fetchmail doesn’t accept passwords when running from the comand line, it always prompts you for them for security reasons. So, in order to get around that, you’ll need to use a .netrc file, where you can specify your login/password information for the different systems. Your fetchmail program will check your .netrc file before prompting you for a password, so that will make our script runnable without human intervention. My .netrc file looks like so:

machine machinename.org
login linc
password ubersupersecret
machine imap.gmail.com
login linc.fessenden
password ohnoyoudidnt


Now with all that done, you can just run that little chkmail script and get an output of your current mail situation any time you want. Or, if you’re like me, I like to have that info on hand throughout the day, so I call that script in a watch command “watch -n 180 ./chkmail”. This will rerun that chkmail command every 3 minutes and put the output in the current terminal. Works like a champ.

Some times you run into some software that does just what you wanted and no more. ilohamail does just that.

For a long time now I have been running my own mail server of sorts. The short explanation is I use fetchmail to aggregate my email from various sources to my own local home server, which runs imap so that I can get my mail off of it there. It’s a great system with only a couple drawbacks. The first is that I have to use my ISP’s smtp server (they block port 25 to anyone but them). The second is you always have to have access to a mail client, well, until now that is.

Having access to a configurable mail client is not normally a problem, however, there are some times you just want to check your mail somewhere and all you have is a web browser. Tough to do with my setup unless you run some sort of webmail on your home server. Now in the past, that hasn’t been too difficult either, except since I have to push mail through my ISP’s smtp server and don’t run my own, I can’t send mail.

Last night I was browsing around the web and ran into ilohamail (no, it’s not Hawaiian, it’s actually Japanese). Anyway, one of the things that caught my attention about it was you could specify an external smtp server. The other thing was it seemed easy enough to get going, requiring only a webserver and php4 or better.

I actually installed the Ubuntu package, but I can’t imagine installing the source would be any different since it’s all php. Simply enough, you just make the packages ’source’ directory web enabled. I did that by creating a symlink from my webserver/webmail to that source directory. You can adjust some settings if you wish in the include/local.php file. Other than that, it’s up and running and working! Yay!

Seriously though, I had been looking for something like this for a long time and I have installed several webmail systems to test them out. Nothing has installed as fast and easy as this program. This was literally a 5 minute install and works great!

Special thanks to Richard Querin who designed and contributed the new logo for LinuxPlanet.Org! It’s fantastic! Richard has come through many times with his “mad grfx skilz” for different projects and his contributions always rock. This one definately gives the LinuxPlanet site a real professional type feel, which is what we were looking for (well, what I was looking for anyhow).

Now I just need to get a hold of him for some graphics for some of my *other* projects

Yesterday, a buddy and fellow podcaster, Dave Yates emailed a bunch of people, myself included, about an idea he had. His idea was to have a “planet” for the podcasters. A “planet” for those uninitiated is an aggregated weblog/feed where many people’s separate content is merged together in one place for convenience sake (mostly).

Everyone joined in with a resounding “that sounds cool” and the topic progressed about how and where we could get something like that going. I figured I would put my money where my mouth was, and after checking with my hosting company, purchased a domain and offered to host the thing as well. I purchased http://linuxplanet.org. It was getting late in the evening, but I took a few minutes to research and slap up a mockup/test site, which was met with kudos from the crowd.

Today, after my dns was working, I quickly set up the site for real and added a few feeds. I posted a note for people to check it out and that’s where the real fun began. Apparently there was some misunderstanding between parties about the intent of the site. I was under the impression that we were going to aggregate the peoples blogs, and others were under the impression that we were going to aggregate podcast feeds. Suffice it to say that after many emails telling me that I was completely wrong, I decided to make 2 websites. One of the sites aggregates Linux blogs. You can find it at http://linuxplanet.org/blogs. The other site aggregates Linux video/podcasts. You can find it at http://linuxplanet.org/casts The funny part about the whole thing is Dann IMing me during the process. You see we have been doing projects like this together for some time and we have both been privy to the nastygrams that invariably come. Anyway, Dann would make some snide comment in jest about not having this site set up the way he wanted and how he felt slighted or some such thing and no sooner would he send that to me than I would get an email from someone saying almost the exact same thing

I never learn my lesson I guess Anyway, please take time to check the new sites out. I believe they are going to be big hits. They do, of course, need your help too. They need your content, your suggestions, your graphical talents, and, of course, your patronage too! Don’t be afraid to send me emails at lincdotfessendenatgmaildotcom!

Crap. That’s my final thought on the subject.

Last night I decided to finally update my wireless infrastructure and start using WPA instead of just using mac filtering. It’s not that I am uber concerned about the security aspect of it because, let’s face it, the only way to really have a secure box and network it to shut it off. What drove me to this is my cheap router only has 25 slots for mac addresses to filter and I had them filled up. I decided if I couldn’t do that then I ought to bring things up to speed with the WPA instead (plus it’s much easier to remember a passphrase than bunches of hexidecimal octets.

I had no problem with my Mac Mini, my Ubuntu 8.04 laptop, my wife’s Ubuntu laptop, my kid’s eMac, or my new Linpus laptop. I ran into serious issues with LinuxPPC though. I was running Slackintosh on my iBook but after researching the net a bit I was disappointed to find that WPA has been an issue for a long time on the airport card. I thought, well maybe Ubuntu has it better, so I installed Ubuntu 8.04 for PPC and, although the desktop was quite nice, there was no support for WPA there either. My only option at that point was to put OS X back on the iBook. What a bummer.

Just saw this article about Mark Hoekstra of Geek Technique. Aparently, Mark, who just turned 34 recently, suffered a heart attack and passed away this morning. I have long enjoyed being a reader of Mark’s blog. His hacks, projects and love of old cool hardware have been a source of interest for not only me, but countless others as well. This truly is a bummer.

I have to tell you that I almost feel bad about this…. almost.

I just purchased the Acer Asrpire One. I purchased it at the local Microcenter as it seems they are sold out everywhere else around here. I, of course, bought the one with the 8gb solid state drive, Linux (Linpus Lite) and 512mb of ram. Initially, however, I was giving serious consideration to buying the XP version and just installing Linux on that because that version comes with 1gb of ram for a mere $20 more. It didn’t have the solid state drive though, so it sort of loses something there.

I looked up online how to do a ram upgrade because I arbitrarily decided that 512mb of ram would not be enough for me - even though I hadn’t even used it yet. Better to be safe than sorry I suppose. Well, before I went to pick up the computer, I called to see if I bought the Linux version there, could I get them (Microcenter) to upgrade the ram for me. They said that they would do so for a measly $20. After watching the video (linked to above), I decided I would let them do so.

This is what I thought was so funny. In that video you see that you have to go through 3 or four layers of screws and such. You have to practically disassemble the entire machine to add that stick of ram. All that for $20. I had to chuckle. Especially when, after a half hour at it, the salesman came and got me to tell me that “there was no place to add more ram in that laptop”. Quite to the contrary, I assured him that there was and he proceeded to take me in the back to the service table and ask me where the slot was. It was still underneath the main motherboard, which they hadn’t lifted up yet. I told them the instructions were on the web and helped them find them, lest I spend another couple hours there. They did finally get that ram in about a half hour later. Somehow I doubt they will be doing those ram upgrades for only $20 anymore

A good while ago I remember voicing my opinion on the show about those new Netbooks, the sub-compact notebooks/laptops that everyone was buying. It was my opinion that they were underpowered and pricey for what they actually offered. After all, why buy a mini notebook when you can get a fairly good regular notebook for the same price?

Well, things have changed a bit over time and so has my opinion. Dan was the first one on the band wagon with his EeePC, which he and his family loved so much, they bought a second. He kept touting that it was so convenient and easy to tote around and use. Next was Allan, with his Acer Aspire One, which he gave stellar reviews on (yes, Allan does speak occasionally). And in between those two was Pat, who didn’t get a Netbook, but DID get a wicked nice Linux laptop.

You see, after all this, I started to get laptop envy. Being a “man of some stature”, I find it extremely difficult to use a normal size laptop in a train seat. There just isn’t enough “lap room” available to me and I end up with the screen tilted toward me from the seat in front. Needless to say, it’s extremely difficult to work that way. I also thought it would be so nice to have an ultra portable to haul with me at work if there were notes I needed to take somewhere or information to reference (I hate hauling and generating paperwork). The Netbooks really started to appeal to me.

Then, this weekend it happened. I went to a computer show and saw a lovely IBM Thinkpad x31 (I think that was the model). It’s this tiny Thinkpad, gorgeous really. It was probably just the right size foe the job, and at $250, the price was pretty good as well. The only problem was that it had a slightly cracked bezel, would need more memory (only 512mb) and was, of course, used. Now there isn’t anything at all wrong with buying used computers, except in this case I knew for another $100 I could get a new one with a warranty, so I held off. I spoke at length about it over the weekend with my wife and noticed that the local Microcenter happened to have 4 of the Linux version of the Acer Aspire One left. My wife, after I teetered on the decision for a while, told me to just go and get one and stop procrastinating. I did just that.

So, at this count there are an even number of EeePCs and Acer Aspire Ones in the techshow family. 2 EeePCs for Dann, and both Allan and I have a One. I have to say that I really like this little thing. After a little tweaking, which I will detail later on, it does just the trick for me. It’s quick (again, more on that later on) and it is fantastic to use on the train. In fact, I am doing that right now!

The verdict, go get one! And stay tuned for more posts on the One as I get the time.