#“So I got a new laptop. That’s probably the last time I’ll ever mention it”
Laptops for me are like desktops, phones and screwdrivers. They are tools, not an expression of who I am as a person or what lifestyle I aspire to. I got my last proper one four years ago. It's still going strong and still as dog slow as the day I bought it, second-hand, on eBay. It was a Dell D420 which I have been juggling with a 120 quid Acer Netbook for the past few years. »
#“How to Get Rid of Those Damned Giant Skype Pop-Up Ads”
Pretty much every time I bring up Skype, I get one of these massive overlay ads. This is despite me saying I don't want to see ads and, more importantly, the fact that I'm a paying customer. This is customer abuse, plain and simple.
Luckily I found a solution on one of the Skype forums.In Skype, go to Tools > Change Language > Edit Skype Language File. »
#“That means 7,000 out of 26m people on Skype are using Video Chat right now”
My Skype says 26m people connected right now.Skype says that 300m video chat minutes are used every month.So 10m minutes a day.So 7,000 people every minute out of the 26m connected. i.e. a maximum of 3,500 chats.Sounds about right. i.e. bugger all. What is this bubble obsession with video chat apart from small kids and their parents/grand-parents when they are away? »
#“Hurrah - D-Link brings the Boxee Box remote to PC”
via engadget.com Love that remote. Hate the generic Chinese eBay MCE one that we use at the moment. I assume it'll also work with XBMC? $50 is a bit steep tho. Now we just have to wait for Boxee to be stable on Ubuntu again. Roll on Autumn.
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#“Just discovered VMware Unity - Standalone Ubuntu Windows in Windows 7!”
Last night I did a clean install of Ubuntu 11.04 in VMware Player on my Windows 7 machine. I love the Easy-Install feature which makes this an unattended piece of cake. But I was perplexed to find that the new Ubuntu Unity Desktop was missing. Eventually I sussed that it doesn't work (yet) in Player. But in my search I kept finding references to another "Unity" in VMware so I had to see what it was. »
#“The 627,000th Post on Google+ This Week”
You are all probably as sick as I am of all the stuff written about Google+. But I've found very few posts digging into the functionality beyond the usual top-level feature list. I'm really pleased that Google is actively soliciting feedback after their ostrich-like behaviour with Buzz. But there is too much here for me to enter as individual tickets.
Overall
Overall I like Google+ and think I'll be using it quite a bit. »
#“Today I "Attic-ed" Some Of My Favourite Old Tech”
I did a big clean out of one of our big cubby holes upstairs that held a lot of my old tech from the past few years. Anything that was already of no practical use had been moved to the attic when we originally moved to Cork back in 2004. This stuff was in the "well you never know, I _might_ need it some day" »
#“Android Running Perfectly on an EeePC Netbook. Totally Mad.”
This just totally blew me away. I grabbed the ISO of Android X86, "burned" it onto USB stick, booted it on an ancient 700Mhz EeepC 701 Surf and 5 minutes after the initial download, it was running. Almost flawlessly.
Only issues I've run into so far are Wifi giving a bit of grief (LAN fine) and some text entry playing silly buggers. »
#“Google Takeout - Why You Can Still Love A Multi-$Bn Corporation”
via youtube.com https://www.google.com/takeout/ - Unlike G+ it works with Google Apps accounts. This kind of stuff is why they are still my fave company on the planet and why we root for them when they try car-crashes like Buzz, Wave, Latitude (and hopefully G+ won't end up in that list).
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