Adventures in Nerdville

One of the hardest things I have to tell people when I try to win them to linux is “you are going to need to do some things on the command line”. That about instantly shuts them off. I, personally, love the command line. My home server doesn’t even have a screen, I manage everything through ssh (a remote command line terminal session ). Now for those of you who want to try out linux, once you have installed ubuntu (the best linux to learn on), you will inevitably read online about typing in some kind of command in the shell. When you actually go to the shell, you will be greeted with:

jkorz@lappy486:~$

That’s enough to make most people confused.

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http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

If you don’t have firefox already, tuesday would be a perfect time to get it (provided that their servers haven’t yet exploded).

If you haven’t had the chance to get your mitts on one of the Firefox 3 release clients yet, you are in for a treat next week. Next Tuesday, June 17, the much anticipated Firefox 3 will be released in all it’s IE-stomping goodness. Among the cool new things are: quicker bookmarking, faster loading, easier on system resources, better crash recovery, sleeker download manager, better history viewer and much much more.

Check out the announcement here for more details.

Powerset looks to be a very promising search engine. You have to check it out for yourself to see how truly cool it is. I don’t know if it is a google killer, but it sure is interesting.

I sometimes get up on my soapbox about how ridiculous it is that cell phone companies charge like 10 cents per text message if you don’t have an ‘unlimited text messages’ plan. Although I have never personally done the calculation, I know that the consumer is taking a bath on this one. Well, this site took the time to go through and calculate how much it costs for a megabyte of direct data from the Hubble Telescope and how much it costs to send a megabyte of text messages. You would be surprised with the results if I hadn’t already blown it.

Ya know… my birthday is coming up in January… I want one of these:

Ohhh the thrill as a night’s hacking journey reaches its culmination. It all started yesterday…

I was doing some work on my Preacher’s computer and in the process, set up Mozilla Thunderbird to work with his shiny new GFYD email address, which for him and the rest of the Church staff, will be replacing their old dusty AOL addresses. I had Tbird running like a dream. It started in the tray as a notifier, checked and sent as either his old and new addresses, the works. So yesterday evening I went to drop his computer off and proudly showed him how to work Thunderbird.

So he says… “where are my contacts?” My heart sunk, I hadn’t even given that a thought.

After searching online a bit, it seemed that the only way to get your contacts out of AOL into a CSV is a pay program (unacceptable) or to just manually type them out (double unacceptable).

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After looking at this slideshow entitled Firefox maintains edge over Microsoft in browser wars I thought it would be nice to reflect back on why Firefox is so cool (and why IE …isn’t). So for those of you who haven’t taken the time to download firefox, do so now and follow along. (more…)

Check out Google Sky. This is much more fun than the hubble site.

Here’s a video showing you how to get it working in google earth (another cool program).