The technology gremlins are running amok in my house over the last week. My wife’s desktop has some sort of file system error that causes it to take about 15 minutes to boot. Once up, it seems to function normally, although it will lock up if left unattended for a few hours. Not sure what [...]
I just watched two hours of the most brilliant film making ever put to “film.” Star Wars uncut takes home made fan recreations of Star Wars from 405 film makers (I counted in the credits) to produce a scene by scene recreation of Star Wars. It goes from fairly serious attempts to recreate the movie [...]
O’DonnellWeb will be 16 years old on 12/31/2011. It’s hard to believe I’ve been writing here for 16 years. It’s even harder to believe that anybody reads. The archives only go back to 2001. The earlier stuff is lost. I probably should be thankful for that. The story of how O’DonnellWeb came to be. (This [...]
60 days of having less Google in my life, and somehow, my life doesn’t feel empty of less fulfilling at all. Huh. I’m a raving fan of Duck Duck Go. I strongly encourage both my readers to give it a try. I don’t miss Google search at all. As mentioned in the last update, I [...]
It’s been a month. I’m sold on Duck Duck Go a a viable replacement for Google search. I’m still using Horde on my server as my primary email interface, but I’m not quite sold. There are just a few too many quirks. Overall, it works, but after a month I still find myself thinking about [...]
If you aren’t a geek that pays attention to this sort of stuff, you might be only vaguely aware that Facebook has been all over the news recently as the roll out “enhancements” to the service. And by enhancement, they mean, “Stuff that will help Facebook’s customers sell even more stuff to you.” In no [...]
So I’ve been using Horde as my webmail interface for 10 days now, and I must say, I really don’t have many complaints. It may not be as elegant or snazzy as Gmail, but it works just fine, and I know that the Googlebots are not reading my mail and instantly deciding what to sell [...]
As part of the ongoing De-Googlization of my life, I’ve been investigating various options to share photos on the web. There are plenty of purpose built apps that will do that, some of them rivaling Flickr or Picasa in features. I was looking for something very simple, and finally settled on the web album export [...]
I was initially a big fan of Google+, and I still think it is a more privacy friendly social networking platform than Facebook. However, Google’s insistence on real names in the service is concerning. I’ve always used my real name online, but I certainly understand that for many people, there are very good reasons to [...]
We are all familiar with Microsoft Word and Excel. Most of us are familiar with Open Office, or Libre Office as the current non corporate controlled fork is called. However, very few people are familiar with Gnumeric and AbiWord, and that is a shame. Gnumeric is a open source replacement for a commercial spreadsheet (*cough* [...]
Xubuntu is a lightweight derivitive of Ubuntu. It works better on older computers. What you lose with that is some of the overhead that makes things in Ubuntu pointy and clicky. That said, I don’t think you can point and click this in Ubuntu either. However, it really is not hard to make Xubuntu, Gmail, [...]
Last week I noticed that all my keyword searched from Firefox address bar were going to Bing. This wouldn’t be that surprising, except that I run Linux! I still have absolutely no idea what was causing it. I deleted Bing from the search tools list, and I edited URL.Keyword to point to the default, Google. [...]
ChristianCollegeGuide.net sent us a 32 page full color glossy magazine full of ads for small Christian colleges across the land. (We are ignoring the target marketing fail here. That is a whole ‘nother post) Check out the Photoshop job on the back cover. The back cover! I used to work in printing. That is the [...]
Amazon S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service. At .15 per gigabyte, 50GB will cost me $7.50 a month, versus $20 for Dropbox or UbuntuOne. And odds are those services are planting your data on Amazon servers anyway! It’s a damn good deal for redundant storage. Both of these services give you 2 GB for free, [...]
This nifty trick, requiring Firefox and the Adblock Plus extension, will block Facebook from your computer, except when you are on the Facebook site, or using the photo uploader on Facebook. Personally, I recommend not hosting your photos at Facebook. Use PicasaWeb or Flickr and link to them from Facebook. That way you don’t lose [...]
Tagged geek, social media