I’ve delivered simple, clear and easy-to-use services for 20 years, for startups, scaleups and government. I write about the nerdy bits here.
— @joahua
Thought I’d just praise Bigpond for a moment, seeing it doesn’t happen very often.
I just downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu using wget. The numbers speak for themselves:
18:50:56 (1.09 MB/s) – `ubuntu-5.04-install-i386.iso’ saved [615,307,264/615,307,264]
I was also browsing at normal speed, whilst streaming 96kbps audio and watching Flash video. Cool for $AU60 a month, hey?
For a hedgehog.
No, really – it’s like Warty, only beautiful. It feels like a far more mature system, and everything just works. They’ve switched it to X.org from the old X server, and the font rendering shows it. Applications which previously clawed your eyes out when upgrades were attempted now work flawlessly (most notably Firefox and Liferea, for myself). Audio works a charm, with even XMMS now playing nice.
It’s good.
Mostly because of the interfaces.
In related news, I downloaded that ISO and didn’t use it – no big deal, seeing as I grabbed it from files.bigpond.com (doesn’t count towards my quota) and it went quickly – because it’s possible to simply edit the sources.list file and use Synaptic to update everything!
Basically change all references from “warty” to “hoary” in your sources.list file ( /etc/apt/sources.list ) and run Synaptic. Took me about an hour and a half from editing the sources.list file to a completed upgrade, no breakages.
Good work, Ubuntu!
“How do you want to approach this revision?”
“From a distance… with a large, pointy stick.”
– Andrew responds to a teacher’s suggestion that revision be undertaken.
I’m starting to get a tad sick of my trusty 9 year-old ViewSonic 15GS-3 CRT monitor, with my eyes suffering somewhat due to the inevitable compromise between resolution (screen real estate) and refresh rate (headache-inducing flicker).
It puts up an admirable performance for a 15″ monitor (I’d say probably the best I’ve ever used), and manages 1280*1024 at 60Hz just fine – but a 15″ screen really isn’t meant to be run at that kind of resolution, and 60Hz is just TOO low (I can’t generally pick flicker above 85Hz, but anything below and it’s unpleasant) a refresh rate to use permanently.
The problem with screen resolutions is that it’s impossible to ever go DOWN a notch – I used to run at 1024, then shifted to 1152 for ages, and have recently switched to 1280 to make life easier. All this on the same monitor! So I’m wishing I had a bigger, unflickery screen right about now.
Does anyone have recommendations for a 17″ LCD? Looking for something which does 1280*1024 and has DVI (VGA would be cool, too) input. The response time isn’t particularly important as I don’t do video or games…
I think, if I had my time again, I’d start a new blog for Extension 2 and eventually print it all and paste it into a journal. I would write more often, from anywhere in the world, and everything would be centralised, linear. “Boring”, but all there. If I wanted to include things I’d drawn or diagrams, etc, I’d scan them… I go to that sort of effort, absurdly, whilst not bothering for a plain physical medium.
It’d certainly beat the anarchy which currently passes for a “journal” of the process of composition in months past! At some point in the next two weeks, I somehow need to sit down and sift, paste, annotate, and generally make intelligible the dribble of work that has been steadily produced (although never consolidated into one) over the past months, before I’m required to submit that thing for marking.