Google Reader now has a vastly improved email feature. You can send an article from an RSS feed you’re reading, exactly as it appears in Reader, with all of the formatting and images intact. You can do this directly from Reader itself, and if you have a Gmail account, you can use your address book to add the addresses.

I’ve just tried this out, and it’s excellent. More information is on the Google Reader Blog.

Technorati Tags: email, google reader, rss

Powered by ScribeFire.

Two very stupid things happened on Wednesday night.

Firstly, I had to get a Word report off the old PC, as the document was needed for work. I disconnected the new PC from the monitor, and from the gizmo that the wireless Microsoft keyboard and mouse use. I haven’t connected the printer and scanner to the new PC yet, and it only took a couple of seconds.

So, OK. Straightforward stuff. What more could you ask for?

Next, I connected the old PC to the power cable, and plugged in the USB wireless gizmo for the keyboard and mouse. The old PC runs Windows XP Home - no Linux. But, given the experience I had installing Kubuntu Linux a couple of weeks back, I was certain I’d have to make sure that both keyboard and mouse were set up as USB items in the BIOS. Then the OS’d be fine! I powered up, hit the delete key to get into the BIOS, and started hunting around for the USB options.

Just then, my wife came into the room and asked what I was doing. I explained that I needed to set the USB options in the BIOS to enable the keyboard and mouse. She looked at me strangely. “No, you don’t”, she said. “But I have to”, I explained. “I needed to do that for Linux, so I’ll need to do it here”. “OK… But how are you moving the cursor around in the BIOS?” she asked.

Stupid thing number one: me.

OK, so the wireless gear works fine when moving around in the BIOS menus. Brilliant stuff - Windows XP boots up!

Uh-oh. Guess what? Kubuntu Linux works beautifully with a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse. Microsoft Windows XP doesn’t, without installing the Microsoft drivers. Ever tried installing drivers without a working keyboard or mouse?

So… can you guess what stupid thing number two is? Can you say “irony”, folks?

Technorati Tags: hardware, kubuntu, linux, microsoft, windows

Powered by ScribeFire.

Lyndon Maxewell over at Esplanade has posted some amazing photographs of art drawn on the foam on the top of cups of coffee.

It does make me wonder whether people who start off doing these when they work in coffee shops end up following an artistic career.

Technorati Tags: art, coffee

Powered by ScribeFire.

Matthew Newton of PC World has written a helpful article on seven post-install tips for Ubuntu 7.04.

While they’re not all relevant to me, I confess I hadn’t heard of Automatix. This is an application which allows you to add additional components and codecs to your Ubuntu installation, which will give your system much better multimedia support.

Matthew also points out, quite correctly, how useful the “Add/Remove Programs” option is. If you don’t have a specific application installed that you need, this program will connect to the relevant site, download the software, and install it for you. This is much better than the similarly named option on Windows XP.

Technorati Tags: linux, multimedia, ubuntu

Powered by ScribeFire.

Excellent news here for those who don’t want Windows Vista installed when they buy a new PC from Dell.

Regardless of when Microsoft want to retire Windows XP, many of us are very happy with it. In my experience, it’s always been stable - much more so than Windows 95, 98 or Me. Why would we want to pay money to change something that works just fine?

Technorati Tags: dell, windows, vista, xp

Powered by ScribeFire.

My timing was just right.

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.

Technorati Tags: kde, linux, kubuntu, ubuntu

Powered by ScribeFire.

Nick Pruett has started a project where he would like 2,000 bloggers to submit a word that is important to them.

Seems like a fun idea! Why not hop over there now and add your word?

Technorati Tags: blogging

Powered by ScribeFire.