IT Guru and Amateur Photographer
Computers
Remove and reinstall xserver on Ubuntu 9.10
Jan 16th
Well the time came when my good friend Richard asked for some help with his new monitor/graphics card setup.
Ubuntu had thrown him into low graphics mode. No good for his new 22″ LCD and also no good without 3D acceleration.
This fix takes about 20 seconds but will basically remove X11 from your Ubuntu install, purge the files and reinstall it so you can setup X11 exactly as it does in the installation of Ubuntu.
BT 100MB Broadband by 2012
Dec 22nd
I’ve just “thumped up” this BBC Article on StumbleUpon, so hopefully this news will spread quickly.
?http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8424401.stm
For the UK to have super fast broadband, is a big step forward for digital Britain – but that’s not why I want this topic’s interest to spread quickly. On the contrary – it’s a message to the current ISP’s in the UK to get their service in check!!
Mac OS Snow Leopard
Sep 2nd
Well it’s here finally, I ordered mine from Amazon for a cool price of £22.99 delivered and for that you get a tiny little box that looks exactly how any apple user would expect.. Beautiful.
Once opened (bloody shrinkwrap) you can upgrade within Leopard or do as I did reboot, hold down “C” and install from scratch and repartition the laptops drive… I choose this so it was a clean OS install and my work, music and apps we’re saved on my time capsule anyway…
Well once the install went through I got the first run wizard like any other time, this was crunch time would Snow recognise my Leopard time machine backups? Yes it did indeed… 30 minutes later after a full restore of my documents, etc I was happily typing this with all my applications, preferences, documents, etc working perfectly.
The new redesign of Snow seems to have made a big difference with my MacBook and has made the following big impressions within minutes of using it:
- The dock is now much smoother, and more snappy when clicking using the tackpad
- I am able to open apps such as iTunes, iPhoto, Pages and Keynote at the same time with very little lag, the whole experience seems more snappy.
- Quicktime now looks better, no more silver borders round the windows…
- The footprint of memory for the OS has been reduced by about 5Gb of my machine… so clearly they’ve had a spring clean!
All in all this is well worth the £23 so far… It’s a small price to pay to prepare your Mac for the latest software, etc.
I will post updates if I find anything else of interest…
For now, drool over the screen-casts on YouTube…
Record Online Streaming Music
Sep 1st
Back in May, John blogged about Spotify; a desktop application for streaming music via the Internet.
(Spotify – Streaming Music On Your Desktop: http://john-willis.com/2009/05/spotify-streaming-music-on-your-desktop/)
Spotify have struck a deal with the major record labels in a way that it can offer it’s service free of charge. This free service is ad supported, with various banners shown whilst the Spotify browser is open and an audio commercial every 15-30 minutes or so. There is a monthly subscription service to remove the ads, but because of this platform, it didn’t make my recession beating Windows Apps article back in July: (Windows Apps – Beat The Recession: http://john-willis.com/2009/07/windows-apps-beat-the-recession/).
But Spotify is definitely worth a mention. There are artists that have refused to sign up to Spotify, but there is still a wide variety of choice of music in its library. But you can’t download the music, and the cached versions of the files are un-openable. Quite annoying really – since the music has clearly been paid for via the ad service?
Ghostery – Firefox Add-On
Aug 8th
A lot of websites will track or monitor what you do or where you go online. Basically, so that the authors can get an understanding of their audiences, so that trends can be gathered for additional content, advertising or any other type of profitable gain.
There used to be an Internet Explorer Add-on called EyeDecide, many years ago, which allowed you to stop certain websites loading monitoring cookies or scripts.
Well, for FireFox, here is Ghostery!