Sky’s Blog @ The Dalai Lama Foundation — Spreading the word in a networked world

The Cool Globes are about to wrap up their appearance in San Francisco and move to San Diego (CA). Three-dimensional embodiments of good ideas about how to live in more harmony with our environment.

Apple Computer had already announced that there are problems with power bricks for the old PowerBook and iBook computers (now officially discontinued) - the small cord coming out of the brick (carrying low voltage) is under a lot of stress and strain, and can short out right where it comes out of the brick’s case. So I was kinda ready for this intellectually. My brick is carried in my backpack almost every day, with the cord wound around the brick, and I can attest that the stress at the point where the cord comes out of the body of the brick hasta be a factor in weakening the cord, even though I’m always careful. Over the course of four years, being coiled and uncoiled every day, that’s thousands of flexions we’re talking about.

So on Saturday, I was sitting on the floor using my computer, with an external LCD monitor attached to it (also sitting on the carpet), and noticed a plume of smoke rising from the top of the monitor. I thought a little bug had probably crawled into the monitor and been tazered to death by a high-voltage supply. But I noted the acrid electrical/plastic smell of the smoke…which didn’t really smell like delicious fried bug.

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Ubuntu is an always-free desktop (and server, if you wish) operating system. It has all of the comforts of home. I’ve been running Linux for many years, but mostly in its server-flavor, not desktop. Over a year ago I was playing with Debian Linux and for reasons I don’t recall I decided to load up Ubuntu. It is really a great little system! Why should anyone care about Ubuntu? Well there are many reasons that it’s good to have alternatives - and free ones at that - to the big operating systems. For one, these systems are free. For another, they are for the most part open source, which means that anybody can modify or add to them. [See video of Richard Stallman talking about free software at AirJaldi 2006]

The most impressive thing about it is that it can coexist with Windows XP on the same computer. I found out about this entirely by accident.

For the most part this was a great and very positive experience. Details follow… (more…)

It’s finally coming around to bite us. For so long I’ve had friends who would help test (maybe I should say “beat up”) my web sites before I’d launch them. And I needed help on Windows, using MS Internet Explorer and other Windows browsers, because I spend 98% of my time on a Macintosh. And recently I’ve noticed that so many of my friends are using Macintosh that actually I sometimes launch a site modification without adequate testing on Windows.

In fact, at a meeting the other day, someone said in all honesty “Is anyone here running Windows? I need to check something.” - there were 40 or so people in the room, and only a couple of them were running Windows.

Time to get Parallels, I guess, and an Intel Mac so I can have Windows running all the time “beside” Mac OSX to do adequate testing. Times are changing.