James LaRue - myliblog

My personal laptop is a Chromebook. I've been using it for 5 years. I throw it in my backpack and rarely turn it off. It has terrific battery life and does most of what I need it to. But it's begun to show its age. First the internal mic went out. OK, I could plug in my phone's headphones. Then the camera went out. OK, I could buy a camera--but this starts to look like a trend.  I realized I might need to have a backup computer, so dug up my 2011 MacBook Pro. It was running elementary OS 5.1, Hera, based on Ubuntu. (See my earlier post on this combo.) elementary is a good match for a Mac. Its use of the Pantheon desktop environment gives it a sleek, light, colorful look.  But Hera has been superseded, meaning it no longer has security updates. I didn't want to mess around on the internet with a vulnerable machine. And unlike some operating systems, upgrading meant more than issuing some commands. I would have to reinstall it. So I downloaded the latest elementary--versi...

I had two MacBook Pros, both 13" models from late 2011. One had 4 gigs of RAM, and the other 8. Both of them were intolerably slow. In the first case, I wound up installing CleanMyMac , which did arcane things to various files, and put up alerts to warn me about disappearing memory. But it made the machine useable again, albeit not exactly speedy. I changed some habits: Safari as browser rather than Firefox or Chrome. I tried to keep tabs down to four or five. The second Mac had bigger problems. Its charger was shot, but even with that replaced, the battery tapped out at 75%. More importantly, the whole disk had been wiped, which meant that it wouldn't boot. Recently, I had downloaded a couple of Linux distributions ("distros") on USB drives. Elementary OS 5.1 (Hera) was reputed to be a lightweight, beautiful distro that shared some aesthetics with the Mac OS. So I thought I'd give it a try. Ahead of time, I tried to read up on how difficult it might be to...

FreeGeek , 3411 W Diversey Ave, Chicago, IL 60647, is an oddity. Tucked into an alley, down a flight of stairs, into a basement, it's been around for over a decade, operates as a not for-profit, and offers some remarkably good deals. To wit: I found a Toshiba netbook (NB 505), running on Mint xfce, for $40. Nice little screen, keyboard, wifi, 2 gigs memory, 160 gigs storage, three USB ports. Pretty small, and light enough to throw into a backpack for the coffeeshop. At first, I thought this was great. Fun to play with, and I can use it when I'm offline. I almost bought it on the spot. I really like to write in emacs org-mode. I can't do that on my Chromebook. My Windows laptop now has a broken arrow key. But do I really need org-mode when I have Dynalist and Docs? The Toshiba is rather better than my old Acer netbook, which I got a lot of use from. Computers, Linux, used to be a hobby. I don't really do much of that anymore. $40 is pretty cheap for hours of t...

As usual, the end of the year makes me thoughtful not only about what I do, but also the tools I use to do it. Much of my life is spent with computers, and so it makes sense to take a step back and look at the larger picture of that from time to time. I now use four operating systems: Windows 7 at work, Ubuntu 12.04 at home, iOS on iPad in many locations, and my Android smartphone. A great deal of my work has moved to the cloud, where I can gain access to it from all these devices. Google has my Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts. the calendar syncs to my Exchange server at work (although I understand that Google doesn't offer that program anymore). Many of my working files are on Dropbox, where I work with them from Office suites on all the individual platforms (Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Polaris Office, QuickOffice). There are difference between them, but all of them do the modest work I need from them (mostly editing small word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation file...

A month or so I bought Suzanne a Kindle. Setting it up was simplicity itself. Turn it on, follow on-screen instructions, pull books from the air (via 3G), and voila . The manual for the device was one of the built-in books. Really, a piece of cake. But I was a little troubled by the proprietary format, and the rather high-handed way content can suddenly disappear from your device if Amazon gets notions. So I asked for, and got for Christmas, a Sony. This is the little touch screen. Suzanne also bought a cover for it, with a built-in light. That'll be handy as a bedside device. Over the next few days or weeks, I'd like to blog about how it is to use. It's interesting to have two librarians, and two ereaders in the same house. We're comparing notes. SETTING UP, FIRST TRY (LINUX) I had to plug it in to a USB port on my PC to charge it up. That didn't take long (maybe an hour, I guess) but I couldn't use it while it charged. (I could the Kindle.) Now we...