nirak.net - Musings of an LIS Student

I finally signed up for Twitter. You can find me at: twitter.com/karindalziel.

Twitter has a mobile interface, but I can’t get it to work on my Pocket PC. when I try to go to the page, I’m prompted to download a file called “login” - and that’s it. Hopefully I can get it working before Annual, so I can use it to keep in touch. It would be a pain to try and add unlimited texting for only one month. (here’s hoping there’s some good free wifi…) I’m debating whether or not I should bring my laptop to annual. I like the idea of being mostly computer free for a few days.

In other news, I thought my class started today, but it really starts July 9th. That means I’m still officially on break. I’m so happy- much more reading to do…

karin :: Jun.11.2007 :: Asides :: No Comments »

I am happy to see that Wordpress has a mobile posting option - I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose. If I only had a keyboard, this would be much quicker.

karin :: Jun.09.2007 :: Asides :: No Comments »

Portable Applications are running in Ubuntu under Wine, including FSCapture and Thunderbird.

Terminal is up for show.

karin :: Jun.06.2007 :: Open access/Open source :: No Comments »

I’ve started making a mental list of windows programs I am *really* going to miss now that I’m using Ubuntu as my main OS. There’s Photoshop, of course- mostly for the “patch” tool and the layout- I’ve been using it since v2. I’m hoping I’ll get Photoshop running through Wine, but we’ll see. Gimp is a good enough replacement, I just need to learn how to use it.

Most of the programs are little convenience things, though. Like a little program called “FSCapture” that I have been using to make an annotated screen captures. (I can use Gimp to make screen captures, but there are not as many features, it’s not as easy, and it’s just not the same.) Or the Lifehacker program “Texter,” which I have used some and enjoy. Besides that, there’s the shortcuts- windows+E doesn’t make the file browser come up, windows+D does not show the desktop. I’ll adjust, or add my own shortcuts.

Of course, there’s also my Portable Apps. One of the big things that kept be back from using Ubuntu full time is the fact that my portable applications won’t run. What to do? Well, I already have the linux version of many of my portable applications installed. Open Office, Abi Word, Thunderbird, Gimp, VLC, are all in the Ubuntu repository. The big holdout was Firefox, and especially my Zotero database- I didn’t want to have to export every time I switched computers. Luckily, the new version of Zotero includes the option to store your Zotero DB elsewhere- so I can share the database between computers using my Flash drive. My other most used program, FileZilla, is made obsolete by the fact that I can open up an FTP server as if it were just normal files on my desktop. Neato. I use del.icio.us for bookmarks, so that’s not a problem.

I don’t want to sound like switching to to Ubuntu is all doom and gloom- in fact, there are several programs that far outstrip any of their Windows or Mac competitors, like F-Spot and Amarok. Plus the desktop experience is far and away better than Windows.

karin :: Jun.06.2007 :: Open access/Open source, Uncategorized :: 10 Comments »

I have not been blogging much lately, except for these micro posts that probably belong on Twitter, except I don’t have an account yet. Maybe this weekend…

Anyway, yesterday, I ordered a Dell computer preloaded with Ubuntu. Yay! With the current $150 discount and free shipping, it was not much more than piecing a similar system together myself. Also, I am reading “Dreaming in Code” which is very good.

karin :: Jun.06.2007 :: Asides :: No Comments »