Sean’s Blog

I keep finding more useful ways to use Remember The Milk.  My booklist, my wedding planning, my bills.  It is just a generally great tool.  Last week though, when I went on vacation I ran across a really cool feature that I’ve never used.  Tags.

I had a whole bunch of tasks that that I wanted to get accomplished during my week off.  The problem I had was they were spread across a bunch of lists.  Some were things I needed to do for the house, some were things I needed to do for the wedding, some were things I wanted to do for my blog.  I didn’t want to make duplicate action items in a new list, but I wanted one place to be able to view them all.

So I added a tag.  That way, I could just click on that tag and it would pull all the items I had tagged to a list and let me work off that.  I know this is a pretty obvious feature, but I was really impressed with how well it worked.  Generally, the only way I’ll learn a new feature is to actually have some sort of use case like this.

This week I went ahead and installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my laptop and am generally pretty happy with it. As usual the install was painless quick from the upgrade button on the Update manager. I have been holding off on installing on my desktop because I want to make sure everything is running smoothly before I do a full switch.

One of my grips though is why Firefox 3 beta 5 was included. I like it and it seems to be pretty stable, but several of my plugins don’t work. Google notebook appears to work, but when you try to open it, it just pops open a new blank window. Google Gears is not yet supported in FF3. Several days ago the del.icio.us plugin was upgraded to work at least.

Here are a couple tips that I found useful doing this install:

• If you get a message when you try to run something through wine that says “failed to reserve range: xxx-xxx” try following the instructions here. Fixed it for me.
• Since I use Wine a lot, and by default wine is in a hidden folder (.wine) you can create a link for easier access. At the terminal in your home directory simply type “ln -s .wine wine” (without the quotes) and the will create a link to the folder that you can access without unhiding all directories.

Last weekend, I reinstalled my Ubuntu desktop. It had been running well for almost a year, but I had made so many changes that i though it was time to clear out some of the cruft. i used to religiously reinstall Windows every 6 months for the same reason.

Now I know that most of the problems I was having (wireless was flaky, several services started to fail unexpectedly) were fixable with some work, which is one of the great things about Linux. But sometimes giving it a clean wipe can make life alot easier. While doing this, I put together some tips for reinstalling Linux. This is not another hand holding Linux install walk through, but pointers for those who have the basics down.

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I’ve just run across Alltop.com.  It is a handy new sight that aggregates the top sites in many catagories and shows the headlines.  I don’t think it will replace my feed reader anytime soon, but it is a great place to browse what is on the blogs right now.

http://alltop.com/

Just a quick and dirty howto for tiddlywiki

Yesterday, Lifehacker posted a howto on setting up a portable personal wiki. To me (and a good portion of other commenters) it seemed like overkill. It also showed me that alot of people are looking for something light, flexible, and cross-platform. This perfectly describes a tiddlywiki.

A Tiddlywiki is a page that works as a notebook (although it is not limted to this). Generally, the way i use it is when I get an idea I create a new tiddler and add my notes to it. I’ll tag it, revise it, and hopefully do something with it eventually. The easist way to understand all this is to actually create a Tiddlywiki and start using it which I will walk you through.

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I’ve never been a big fan of RhythmBox, the default Ipod management software in Ubuntu. I was getting tired of it popping up every time I plugged in my Ipod. Changing it is pretty simple. I wanted Exaile to start whenever I plugged in the ipod.

The way to do this is go to System->Preferences->Removable Drives and Media. Then just add the program under the Multimedia Tab where it says Portable Music Players.