LincolnBlogs

Kudos Amazon!

January 19 2010 by linc in Customer Service, Gear, Hardware |No Comments

Amazon

Quite a while back, in September in fact, I ordered a big honkin battery for my Acer Aspire One. I bought the 9 cell version through Amazon from a place called NewMP3Technology. The battery came, I charged it right up and used it on the upcoming Ohio Linux Fest. My only note on it was that Allan bought a similar battery, obviously from a different place and seemed to get a bit more battery time out of it, but all in all, I was happy with it.

Fast forward to Christmas time. I took the family to my parents house for Christmas this year and brought a couple laptops with me for some recreational surfing while there. They live in upstate NY where there is little else to do 🙂 While using my AAO there, I let the new battery completely drain. When I plugged it back in, it would not charge. I googled around for similar problems and found that there was a bios update that fixed some of these, so I updated the bios and, you guessed it, that didn’t work either. After I got back home, I checked the original battery which charged fine.

I checked my paperwork for the new battery and found that the original listing on Amazon had a 1 year warranty on the battery. Elated, I wrote the seller through Amazon’s contact form and asked them how I would go about getting a replacement. Well, long story short, I wrote them 5 times over 3 weeks or so and never received a response other than a form email stating that the exchange time limit on the purchase had expired (30 days). Now Amazon has an A-Z guarantee that is 30 days as well, but I had passed that too. I looked the seller up in the Better Business Bureau’s website and it said they were probably out of business. Frustrated, I sent off an email to Amazon anyhow, explaining the saga and telling them that these guys were still listed as active sellers on Amazon’s site. I figured I had done my good deed for the general populace and that Amazon would remove the seller and at least nobody else would get bit. To my complete surprise, Amazon, *extended* their A-Z guarantee for me and completely refunded my money (including the shipping!) I, of course, ordered another replacement battery from a different seller through Amazon.

It’s just so uncommon these days to find a person or a business with some integrity that I just had to pass the story along. And especially so with the anonymity that the web provides. Many thanks and kudos go to Amazon. I know I’ll keep buying from them. If you are going to buy things online, you can’t find a better place to do so.

Oh, and stay away from NewMP3Technology.

Updates

January 18 2010 by linc in BashPodder, Customer Service, FreeLinuxBox, Internet, LinuxPlanet, System Administration, TLLTS |No Comments

Updates, updates everywhere. I pushed a bunch of updates to FreeLinuxBox.org, my Blog, LinuxPlanet Casts and Blogs, LinuxForChristians, TLLTS Planet and the Lincware forums. Everything looks ok right now, but please let me know if you see anything strange happening (or not happening as the case may be). Thanks and you may now return to your previously scheduled rss feed.

Prey

January 13 2010 by linc in F/OSS, Linux, Security |No Comments

Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

That’s what their website says anyway.

You have to admit that it sounds quite intriguing. There are a lot of utilities around that you can *pay* for that offer some reasonable facsimile of helping you track your stolen laptop and get it back, but this is the first open source one I have come across.

Further inspection shows this to be “the real deal”. At least as far as I am concerned. I cannot yet comment on the mac/win versions of the software, but the Linux version is pretty slick.

Essentially, Prey runs through cron every 10 minutes by default, completely in the background, hidden from view. It checks for the existence of a specific website and if it doesn’t find this website (gets a 404 message), it starts grabbing information from your machine like ip addresses, screenshots, pics from your webcam, etc., and sends them either to Prey’s website for you to view, or directly to your email account. This is all information designed to help you track down where your laptop is, and identify who might have it.

I tried it on my Ubuntu work laptop and the client is literally a drop-in dmg package. It installed and asked me to run a control panel applet for configuration. This only really asked me for 2 pieces of identifying information, the API key and the device key, both of which were available to me after I registered (for free) on Prey’s website at http://preyproject.com.

Once you are registered and get your device (laptop) listed on the website, you can tell Prey, via the website anytime, that your laptop is missing by going to http://control.preyproject.com (and after logging in) clicking on the appropriate device listing (they let you have 3 for free btw), changing the “Missing” slide switch to “on” and hitting the update button at the bottom of the page. There are other options in there you can change as well to suit your needs. The next time your laptop can find an internet connection and check in, Prey will have it sending reports out so you can find it. I was pretty happy and impressed with how well it worked actually.

The only con I can think of with this program is the fact that I run Linux. Not that people won’t steal laptops with Linux on them, but that I imagine that anyone who would steal one of my laptops would immediately install windows on it, thus rendering Prey useless. If I were to employ the use of that auto-login stuff, that could perhaps stave off a would be thief long enough for Prey to do it’s job, but I do like having to log in to my machines (just makes me feel more secure). It’s something to think about, and I will look into what other people have to say on the subject in Prey’s forums. That being said, however, I am still putting the software on my laptops. Hey, it can’t hurt right?

Mark moves on…

December 18 2009 by linc in Ubuntu |1 Comment

In a morning press call on December 17th, 2009 Mark Shuttleworth announced that he was stepping down as head of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. In his place, Jane Silber, the current Chief Operating Officer who has been with Canonical since 2004 will take over as CEO………….
Read the rest here…

What will this really mean for Ubuntu? What do you think?

Magnatune

December 17 2009 by linc in Internet, Music |No Comments

I thought really quick this morning that I would like to play a little Christmas music, something nice. Where to get some in a hurry? Well, of course, I went to Magnatune.

Really, I don’t mention these guys enough, not here or on the show. As their motto implies, they are _not evil_. They are DRM free, they carry a FANTASTIC selection of music of all tastes and interests. You pay REASONABLE prices that you decide, and Magnatune actually gets money back to the artists too, much unlike the big music industry giants.

Do yourself and some really talented musicians a favor and check out Magnatune today. You can also arrange Magnatune gift cards, and , of course, listen for FREE to their ENTIRE collection!

Ferret Food Bowl

December 16 2009 by linc in Pets |1 Comment

Here’s a tip for all you ferret people. I have a ferret named Puff, and his most favorite thing in the world to do is to dig in his food bowl and fling his pellets around the house. The farther the better it seems. Long have I struggled to find just the right food bowl to help prevent this. Ideally, I thought some ferret owner somewhere would have seen the problem and come up with a heavy ceramic croc-type bowl with a pronounced lip around the edge which would be a good food-flinging preventer. No such luck. I could never find anything that was just right until one day my wife mentioned getting yet another food bowl for our ferrets so we could go on a trip. She wanted a gravity feeder trough-type bowl. I just knew this would be the best toy in the world for Puff and set out to see what I could find on the internet.

What we came up with was no-spill doggie bowls. We actually found 2 that were acceptable. The first is the No spill pet bowl, which we found locally at PetSmart. Although this was not my preferred design and I thought this would be the first one they foiled, it has held up surprisingly well while the other was ordered off the internet. The main reason I am not sure about this one is because of the lid. I expect that sometime soon one or more of my fuzzies will figure out how to pop that sucker off and then the bowl will be , essentially, useless. The other problem with this specific bowl is the no-spill hole does not have a lot of food clearance at the bottom of the bowl and I am afraid that any food that goes toward the rim of the bowl at the bottom, will become inaccessible to the ferrets.

The other bowl, pictured here, is the Premier Pet Spill Less Bowl. This one mimics most closely the original design I had in mind and addresses the problems I have with the first bowl. There really is no place for food to get stuck and hidden beyond reach, and there is no lid to pop off. I am betting on this one as the winner. The only problem is we just got it and I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test (and the other one is still working quite well). The only drawback I see to this bowl and the other as well is they are both made of plastic and not heavy at all. Of course this means that the ferrets will push them all over the cage. Oh well, I guess they need some sort of entertainment in there at 3am right?

Either way, these bowls are just right for diggers like I have, check them out and let me know what you think! And if you are into making ceramics and want to take a crack at making a ceramic version of the second one with a little more weight, you just let me know, I’ll be your first buyer 🙂

Santa the Sysadmin

December 11 2009 by linc in Humor |No Comments

Santa

Similarities Between Santa and Sysadmins

1. Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny.

2. When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal.

3. Santa seldom answers your mail.

4. When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he’s got, he says, “Elves make it for me.”

5. Santa doesn’t care about your deadlines.

6. Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves.

7. Nobody knows who Santa has to answer to for his actions.

8. Santa laughs entirely too much.

9. Santa thinks nothing of breaking into your $HOME.

10. Only a lunatic says bad things about Santa in his presence.

Really? You gotta be kidding.

December 10 2009 by linc in Politics |No Comments

Nobel Peace Prize

Sale, Nobel Peace Prizes, 5 for $1.

Apparently, our new President Obama has garnered himself the international peace prize by doing absolutely nothing. I am amazed, stunned and disappointed. Perhaps they will just start handing them out for free now or is this going to be the new subway token?

Google Chrome

December 9 2009 by linc in F/OSS |No Comments

I have been using Google Chrome Unstable now for some time. It has been a pretty interesting browser and pretty quick. The only issues I ever had were no flash and java support. Well, recently I noticed that flash was working just fine, and after some digging, found that you have to have Java 6.10 to get Java working, although I honestly haven’t tested that yet.

On 12/8, Google released it’s Chrome browser for Linux in Beta (no longer unstable). I quickly uninstalled my Unstable version and added the Beta. WOW is it FAST! I thought it was fast before, however, it literally starts the browser now almost as fast as I can click on the icon. Other than that, it works exactly as you would expect it to, clean and quick. If you have been running Unstable as I have, the only difference I noticed is it is way faster. I don’t have a clue how you did it Google, but good job and I can’t wait to see what this is going to be like when it’s out of Beta!

Now if I could only convince Google to make a mail client to replace Thunderbird! 🙂

Mint 8 Helena

December 8 2009 by linc in Linux Mint |No Comments

What can you say but “wow”. Although maybe not as impressive a release as I think Mint 7 was, Mint 8 is up to date and strikingly beautiful. I have said before that I believe Mint to be Ubuntu done right, and I believe this to still be the case.

The first thing you notice with Mint is how fast the install is. Compared to Fedora, Slackware, Suse, etc., the install absolutely flies. With my 1.xghz test machine I was literally from first boot to reboot and in my new Mint install in about 15 minutes.

Once there, you are greeted with Mint’s beautiful desktop graphics and everything is ready to run for you. My only additions were to test out the non-free-codecs and install vlc. That was about it. With a couple clicks I was surfing around with Firefox, reading my mail with Thunderbird and watching a TV show I had pulled off my Tivo earlier (that Steven Segal – Law Man cracks me up!)

I am not sure what else I can say to inspire you to try Mint yourself other that to say that I, personally, just don’t have the time when I am working to adjust my desktop environment. Linux distributions that require me to do that simply don’t get used. It’s about time for me to update my work desktop again as it’s currently running Ubuntu 8.04 and I can’t think of a better Distribution to replace it with than Mint 8.