Check out the new updated Color Scavenger. Go buy something.

I moved to *all* Linux for my desktops this week and its been interesting and kinda of a huge change. Little work habits that I have had for years and years are being streamlined with launchers of neat little commands. I’m working a hell of a lot more efficient now, but change is change… Sometimes it takes some time before it feels good.

Everything around the office is getting more streamlined as well. E-mails are answered in order and on time, paperwork is dealt with immediately (so as not to grow into a monster), data is organized, clients are happy and deadlines are met. New year going good.

I never watch TV during the summer (and even more so now that I have my media server working with my ps3). However this fall has some good content coming up. So I suggest canceling your premium cable until the following:

Dexter season 3 (Showtime): September 28th.
24 season 7 (Fox): November 23rd. (2 hour mini movie called 24:Exile)
Californication season 2 (Showtime): Just list “Fall”
Entourage season 5 (HBO): September 7th.
CSI Season 9 (CBS): October 9th.
Flight of the Conchords (HBO): January 2009

The only thing that makes me excited about 24 is Jon Voight has signed on to play the bad guy. Could be very good or very bad. I’m excited about Dexter, Californication, Entourage, CSI and Flight of the Conchords because all left off on good notes. If it wasn’t for cable content such as this I doubt I would have any at all. I would like to make the full jump to my media server and skip the cable completely, seeing as how 99% of what I get is bullshit. Maybe I can just rock the torrents to the media server, but there is something to be said about quick HD content on all the shows I mentioned. I think come 2009 I’m going to cut the cable out and stick with a linux media server with torrent abilities. Cheaper and I get exactly what I want and not “Dancing with the Stars” ugh.

I recently upgraded to ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and my Synergy between my XP machine and the ubuntu box lagged so bad it was unusable. I found a fix randomly… Just run synergy on your linux box as root. ie: sudo synergyc serverIPaddress

I have not yet tested the security issues involved with running synergyc as root so be careful of you run LAMP or other outside services on your linux box.

Enjoy!

I’ve decided to move my XP box to Ubuntu and build a new XP box. This will allow for a top of the line linux desktop experience being as how my XP box is a Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz with 4 gigs of DDR ram and a really nice gigabyte motherboard which I swear by. So Joel helped me pick out some new hardware for my new system, being as I am not hip to the newest and most dependable desktop hardware. I went with:

Coolmaster case w/ 550w power supply

GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L LGA 775 Intel motherboard

Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

OCZ Platinum Revision 2 2GB RAM

I also picked up a 24” widescreen to complete the project. Current setup below from Right to Left: Dell laptop Ubuntu 7.10, new 24” Ubuntu 7.10 and my Samsung 21” with XP.

I’ll post more pictures and comments when I start building the box. Only things left to get: one more hard drive (bringing the total for both machines to 1.3tb) and a good linux compatable NVidia video card. ATI’s isn’t too hot with ubuntu yet.

Being as how I hate Windows Vista and will never upgrade I needed to find a solution to replace XP in the future. I’ve used XP for years and years and its always worked great for what I needed it to do (photoshop, mail, ssh via putty, ftp, trillian, etc…) I’ve used Linux since Red Hat 5.1 on our first server (IBM PC 704) in 1998 which was nicknamed “The Beast” and hosted sites like tumyeto.com, skateboard.com, zeroskateboards.com, toymachine.com, etc for many years. Ah the glory days…

Moving along. I recently (thanks to Joel’s influence and help) started playing around with Ubuntu. I installed it first on a system we made out of a graveyard of parts in the office. I played with it with for a couple of days and decided to take the leap and install it on my laptop which I use almost daily. For some reason none of my systems (both Intel or AMD) would boot off the Live CD (which is very rare I’ve heard), so we used the alternative text install mode. I haven’t used a desktop Linux distro in a long time and I was completely impressed at how well it worked. Wifi worked from the start (including WPA2) and holds a very stable connection to my Linksys router and all the APs I have tried. So far every program has worked that I wanted: Thunderbird, IM, Firefox, DVD support (only with Compiz disabled for some reason), sound, Skype, TrueCrypt, Synergy, etc. I was able to import my 5gigs of mail over to it without any issues. I was even able to get my Verizon XV6800 via DUNN without any issues for those mobile hacking sessions. Not to mention the Synaptic Package Manager is beyond easy for finding and installing the mass collection of useful programs that makes any PC or Mac seem useless. Not to mention the 3D cube effect with Compiz is pretty fun.

Dell is selling both desktops and laptops with Ubuntu pre installed. The desktop looks pretty appealing and should be on my desk in the next couple weeks. Just need to pick a matching monitor.

So long story short, I found my Vista killer and I have no idea why I didn’t force myself to do this earlier. I guess work has been so busy that I never wanted to try anything crazy.

I am still keeping my main desktop box on XP to run my Adobe products and my financial software, however everything else will be linux. One day it would be nice to do everything open source. I don’t think I can watch anymore keynotes about bloated fashion technology. Although I would love to run linux on mac hardware, cause I do admit it’s pretty as hell and well thought out.

More later…

- MGMT, a band a never thought I would like, has put out a great record. Album stand out for me is the track “Kids”. Give it a listen.

- This month is my do taxes and finish all open projects/paperwork month. It’s gonna be a long one, but at least March ends with some traveling.

- If you haven’t checked out pickrset.com lately. Do it!

- I recently upgraded to Verizon’s new XV6800, which I love. Full review coming soon.

It is on!

Check out our progress! BeardFest2007.com

Thanks to all the fans. Get in next year!!!

Dear friends: Just a reminder we are watching 24 at my place this season. HD, a warm fire, kitties, beer and my insane cooking. For those of you who missed tonight, come by earlier and you can watch the first 2 hours before 8pm. I’ll be home from the data center around 5pm. Make it happen.