Category Archives: Computers

General computer stuff

Polypaudio? Please, not yet…

I tried out polypaudio a couple of days ago because Ubuntu is aparently switching to it. In general, it seems like a great concept, and I’ve heard great things about it, but I have this one problem: it dies with an assertion on ppc. It only seems to happen on PPC (x86 and [...]

Redemption

Best Buy has redeemed themselves in my eyes. I went in to my local store today and asked if I could order something there that was online. Sure enough, I could, so I ordered the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer for Bluetooth. I tried the one they had in the store that was part [...]

Bluetooth tales…

Word of advice: if you’re getting an iBook and you think you will ever use Bluetooth with it, make sure you get the Bluetooth option installed when you order it (it’s $50 extra). Otherwise, you’ll be paying more than that to get the module installed aftermarket. I took my iBook in today to [...]

You’re getting very sleepy

Benjamin Herrenschmidt is the man. The week, he posted some patches to the debian-powerpc list for sleep on the Aluminum Powerbooks and iBook G4’s (basically, the new laptops with ATI cards). After 4 patches and relentless testing from eager users, I think he has it. There are only two flaws that I [...]

LiteStep theme

I’ve been asked about the theme I created for LiteStep last week. I don’t have it posted anywhere, but I do have a screenshot I took today:

I still have to work on the menus on the desktop (which aren’t shown in the screen shot), but it’s coming together nicely. Yes, I know, it’s [...]

Troubles in computer land…

Well, it’s official… my iBook’s hard drive is dying (it’s not dead yet!). The cool thing is that it’s covered under warranty, so getting it replaced costs me nothing but shipping & handling. But wait! There’s more! There seems to be an Apple Authorized Service Provider here in town, so it [...]

Ubuntu

Yes, I caught the fever spreading like wildfire… I downloaded and installed Ubuntu. It’s a pretty darn sweet distro with only a few quirks:
1) It comes with pbbuttonsd as the default power manager. I tried it for a few days and found that pmud does a way better job with power management (I [...]

More Bluetooth…

As you probably know from my last few posts, I’ve been looking for Bluetooth stuff and I think I’ve found something really cool: a bluetooth print adapter to do wireless printing. I also saw this one from Anycom and this one from HP, but the IOGEAR adapter looks the most promising. If any [...]

Bluetooth

I’m looking to get into the Bluetooth craze, but my iBook is not equipped with Apple’s preconfigured Bluetooth module (and you can’t get it installed aftermarket, from what I can tell). So, I guess that leaves me with the option to get a Bluetooth USB dongle. I know Apple recommends the D-Link DBT-120 [...]

Virtual Desktops

So, I’m at my desktop at my internship and I forgot how crappy it was to actually work on a windows machine. I found the setting to turn on anti-aliased fonts (although, it isn’t as good as GNOME’s AA support), but I still miss virtual desktops. My mind works better when my work [...]