I’d decided to start dual booting again, running Windows XP Professional (I’ve no interest in running Vista) and a Linux distribution of some sort.
So I bought a couple of Linux magazines to find out how much things had moved on since I used to dabble with Red Hat Linux, around four or five years ago. I thought Ubuntu looked worth trying, but I had a problem with the download hanging at around 98% mark. I could’ve tried another server, but persevered. The download never finished, and I went off to reconsider…
Two days later, Ubuntu 7.04 was released! I tried the Live CD which downloaded without a hitch, liked it, and installed it on my hard drive. Then I realised that I’d have preferred to use Kubuntu (I didn’t know that there were several variants of Ubuntu). I installed the K Desktop Environment (KDE) package on top of Ubuntu, and it works flawlessly.
If you’re not sure about installing Linux, try one of the Live CD versions first. One thing that really makes life easier: if you’re using online services such as Gmail, Google Reader, and del.icio.us, rather than running a Windows email client and saving your bookmarks locally, you’ll be able to access all of your email and bookmarks on either platform. Firefox, together with most of its extensions like the excellent Groowe Search Toolbar work beautifully on both platforms too. It’s great to be able to boot into either operating system and have access to all of your mail and bookmarks. Just be careful if you decide to dualboot that you don’t overwrite your Windows partitions.
BlogFlux, which has a number of interesting services available for bloggers, has launched a new service called Commentful.
Commentful is used for tracking posts on blogs, bulletin boards and a number of social sites, and it notifies you whenever a new comment has been added. This is useful, for example, if you ask a question on a blog, as it means you don’t have to keep revisiting the comment page to see if anyone’s posted a reply.
A full list of the sites supported by Commentful can be found here.
If you use Firefox, there’s an extension available (isn’t there always!) which allows you to add a site to your watchlist by right clicking on the page you wish to track and choosing “add to Commentful”. It really is that easy to use. Users of other browsers can add a bookmarklet, and click on this to do the same thing.
I’ve been using another service called coComment to track online conversations for a few months now, but I’ll be interested to see how Commentful compares. One bonus with coComment is that the system uses avatars, so when viewing posts it’s easy to spot other coComment users. Commentful does show promise, though, and there’s really not much in the way of competition (the only other similar service I’ve seen is co.mments, which I haven’t yet tried properly).
I’ve not looked at anything in the emulation scene for some time, though I’ve always been impressed with what developers can do in emulating old games hardware. I was a great fan of the Commodore 64, though I started off with a VIC-20 and RAM pack.
It turns out that Jeff Minter of Llamasoft (a long time hero of mine) is happy for all of his old 8-bit games to be made available for download, for free.
Together with the VICE Commodore emulator, there’s not a lot more I could ask for in terms of gaming!
There’s an interesting article over on Bull3t’s Blog about how Commodore Gaming (nostalgia rush alert!) are inviting folk to submit images, which they’re calling c-kins, which can be used to customize the cases of PCs. This way, their customers can get a complete custom build (rather than the shiny boring black, but stunningly gorgeous, custom build I bought from Komplett recently).
I’m about to go all C=64/Amiga googly-eyed in a moment…
In Alaska, a commercial fishing boat has scooped up a giant rock-fish, weighing 27 kilos and thought to be between 90 and 115 years old. A bit younger than the oldest ever caught, but fascinating nevertheless.
It only takes three words to save polar bears: “Threatened Species Listing”.
If you want to help protect them, please visit Polar Bear SOS, and take the next five minutes out of your busy schedule to submit an Official Citizen Comment. You can do this up until April 9th.
