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ubuntu

Appreciating Ubuntu Even More

Want to learn to appreciate the power of a modern desktop Linux install? Spend a week at your folk’s place, swearing at your stepmother’s WinXP box. Shockingly crippled… how do Windows users victims put up with this crap? No integrated FTP or SSH in the file manager, text editor that doesn’t recognize and support HTML or PHP, no support for SVG, OGG, PNG or a host of other useful file formats… blergh.

I love visiting the folks, I’m actually glad it’s snowing so we can hopefully get a good cross-country ski in tomorrow, but getting back to a proper, fully-functional computer will be kind of nice!

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Uncategorized

You Are Not Stuck In Traffic…

We say we are “in” traffic, dramatising ourselves as a lone vehicle of noble and rational intent, with a sea of malevolent, deadweight antagonists stretching endlessly fore and aft. It was in a bid to highlight the flaws in this position that a German transport campaign erected roadside boards reading: “You are not stuck in traffic – you are traffic.”

An otherwise quite ordinary Guardian Comment is Free column on the latest Chinese super-traffic-jam points out something I’ve blogged before: the exceptionalism of insulated, protected, self-absorbed car drivers.

We’re all traffic. Traffic is never “them”, it’s “us”, and that bears repeating in the (faint) hope it might eventually stick.

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Uncategorized

%$#@*# Wireless

Today’s lesson: wireless involving old, cheap, slow routers is a waste of time.

In fact, such wireless networks are the reason Cat5 exists in 75ft lengths.

Getting old and crappy routers actually routing is for those who can’t string nice blue cable…