Devil Works

It’s getting harder and harder to find good domain names that aren’t yet registered. You can try the resellers route but if you’re trying to get into a hot topic then you’ll be paying through the nose for it.

However I have found this little tool which helped me get a reasonable new domain for my new project.  Actually it didn’t come up with the one I ended up using but it gave me an idea and I translated it into something that rolls off the tongue a bit easier.

I’m normally fairly blind to advertising on the web but Gmail’s contextual advertising caught my eye.

I was just looking at a brief email conversation I was having with my girlfriend about not sleeping very well.

Google has matched that thread with Nocturnal Incontinence…… who knew !

When I first installed Ubuntu I got a message saying that as my B43 WLAN was proprietary I would have to install the firmware myself.

So I did what I normally did and googled my way through a dozen pages with instructions on installing B43 wireless firmware that didn’t really help me.  I tried a couple of step by step command line methods and none of them worked without errors.

I’d resolved to hit the IRC channels on the weekend and see if I could get some help there.

I was perusing the menus and clicked a few things and now I have wireless working.

In brief here’s what I did

1. In the toolbar go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager
2. Enter your password(almost like Vista’s UAC but not often enough to complain)
3. Click the search button and search for B43
4. Select B43-fwcutter
5. Accept everything that comes after that
6. Restart Ubuntu

That’s it, I know have working wireless.

It’s day three and so far I’m pretty happy with my move to delete Vista from my laptop and install Ubuntu.

To follow up on the last post

• the screen brightness issue seems to have resolved itself.

• I haven’t fixed the wireless issue yet, but I have found the instructions… I have little motivation when I’m house sitting in a house with no wireless.
•  I realised that while twittering was fun, it didn’t deserve the effort to get tweetdeck working at this stage. I can still use twitter.com if I need a fix.

Some other things I’ve noticed

• Booting up and shutting down are really quick. I used to flick the power button and go and do something else for five minutes while it kicked itself into gear. I’m now patient enough to wait the 30 seconds for Ubuntu to load.
• I tried hibernate mode and it froze. Then I realised that I can shut down and reboot in the time it used to take Vista to wake up from Hibernate. There is also a menu option for Ubuntu to resume where you left off after a log out, but I haven’t tried this yet.
• Some of the keyboard shortcuts are different, but the only one I’m missing at the moment is using the backspace key to go back a page in Firefox
• All the applications open a lot quicker, even when I have 10 Firefox windows to load, it kicks Vista’s ass.
• It comes with more games than any version of Windows I’ve ever had.
• Did I mention it’s so much quicker than Vista

I’ve still got lots more to learn, but almost everything I’ve done so far has been pretty simple once it’s set up. On the other hand, things on Vista are pretty easy to set up but a pain because they never work properly.

Overall I’m pretty impressed, before I installed Ubuntu I may have had a total of 20 hours linux experience and maybe 20 years of Windows experience, so I can’t expect it to be as natural to me as the Microsoft solution.

I really haven’t found a reason to go back !

It was a little bit scary, but after a few Vista related problems in the last few days I’d had enough.

A while ago I figured out that most of the things I do online involve Firefox and with a bit of research it was easy to see that most of the other things could easily be adapted to Ubuntu.

Months ago I’d looked at doing a dual boot set up but due to all the crap that came with Vista I didn’t have enough space on my hard drive.

This afternoon I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu and burnt it to a CD. One of the great things about Ubuntu is that you can run it from the CD. It ran as fast as Vista did so I thought once I had Ubuntu fully installed then it would be flying….. I wasn’t wrong.

So using Vista I spent 4 hours backing up 6GB of data to a portable drive then deleted Vista from my life forever. I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to, My system didn’t come with restore disks, and I didn’t make any either.

Overall the experience has been pretty good. I’m making this post in Ubuntu without having to do anything special.

So far I’ve come across three minor problems.

1. My laptop screen brightness has dimmed and I can’t find anywhere to adjust it (there is a fix, need to look for it)
2. My wireless networking isn’t working (but I think I know how to fix it)
3. Adobe Air is only an alpha release so Tweetdeck might not be real stable (i’ll look for an alternative)

I’m sure I’ll get all these things sorted within the next few hours.

I’ll post some updates on how things are going.

Update: I just realised that Vista won’t be entirely out of my life until I convince my girlfriend she doesnt need to play World of Warcraft anymore

I thought it was just me when I logged in this morning and got an error from AVG anti virus that said “can’t find .bin file”

Then my girlfriend got the same message when she started her computer up.

I googled the problem and didn’t find much out except that we weren’t alone.

So I tried the old reinstall trick, but that didn’t work.

So I headed to the AVG website, it appears to be massivley overloaded and when the page did load it wasn’t saying anything useless.

So I asked on Twitter and got sent this link to a possible fix. I haven’t tried it, too busy backing up in preparation for my move to Ubuntu

I’m almost ready to wipe my entire hard drive of Vista and say good bye to it forever.

I was trying to connect to my spare laptop today to transfer some files, when I clicked my network icon Vista reported that network discovery wasn’t turned on. So I click the links to turn it on (even though I never turned it off) and I get an error message “%1 is not a valid application”

I’ve done my usual Google searches and can’t find a solution, though it appears that it’s quite a common problem…. dating back from XP days.

I originally wanted to install Ubuntu on this machine, but didn’t have a big enough partitionto set it up as a dual boot install. I’m thinking that I might throw caution to the wind and backup my files and do a clean install of Ubuntu.

I am receiving a whole lot of bounced auto responder email at the moment.  It would appear that someone is using my devilworks.com domain in the reply to field on the email they are sending out.

Sorry but I have no way of stopping the emails coming to you, I now route all my incoming email through gmail, so that’s catching a lot of the problems for me. If it’s causing you issues I suggest you try the same.

Darren at Problogger organised what has become known as the Social Media Love In.

I spent several hours adding all the tweeters to my profile.

So far it’s been a good experience, but I have already started removing the Tweeters that seem to be interested in nothing more than self promotion.

I’ve got a handful of memory sticks (aka USB thumb drives) that said on the package they are ReadyBoost capable. ReadyBoost is a Windows Vista Feature that lets you use a memory stick as extra memory to make your computer run faster.

I hadn’t bothered with using it for a while, but this morning when I inserted the memory stick, and attempted to engage readyboost, Vista reported that the drive wasn’t suitable.

I found this a little unusual as I’d used it in the past for this purpose.

I had a bit of a think, then reformatted the memory stick and like magic it was suitable for ReadyBoost again.