Read about Computers
The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.
To Software License Group members:
I agree that it is a noble cause to provide students with access to software at a cost that is commensurate with the resources of the average university student. However, with full-priced office suites and programs running as much as $300 to $700, even discounted software can be prohibitively expensive for this university’s students who are most in need of the discount. In the interest of accessibility, this program should be expanded beyond simple discounts.
In Vista, normal users are not allowed to save the hosts file, so the easiest way to edit it is to run notepad as an administrator.
- Go to start and either search for “notepad” or go to All Programs > Accessories
- Right click “notepad” and select the “Run as Administrator Option.”
- Once Notepad opens go to File > Open and browse to “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc”
- Set the file filter to “All Files”
- Select and Open “hosts”
- Edit it and save it.
If you get an error about it being read only:
- Go to File > Open, right click the “hosts” file and select properties
- Uncheck read-only at the bottom and click OK.
- Click Cancel to go back to notepad”
- Save it
I’m considering splitting this blog into multiple blogs, but before I do that I want to find a good desktop blog publishing program to ease the transition on my end.However, I use Linux almost exclusively and from what I’m seeing and reading "good desktop blog publishing" and "Linux" are mutually exclusive.
It isn’t often that Linux fails me, but all I can find are complaints about how Linux Blogging Sucks. I have a few more programs to test but for right now I agree. I am right now testing Bleezer. Although it looked like one of the most promising, I’m not impressed. I’m able to download my last 15 posts, but not my draft posts nor posts older than 15. In the WYSIWYG interface inserting links is rather irritating and I’ve had to come up with "tricks" just to be able to comfortable add links — sort of a non-issue because I’d never use it.
It continually surprises and impresses me, in a good way. As a little background: I’ve used Linux at a moderate to advanced level for a few years now: I’ve never written a bash script longer than 6 lines and never hacked the kernel, but I’m not afraid of the command line and have no problems editing my xorg.conf, grub.conf or any other system files using nano. The command line is my friend, but I still like a GUI admin panel sometimes. I’ve totally switched to Linux as evidenced by the fact that the last copy of Microsoft office I purchased or used on my own computers was 2000.
Anyway, I recently bought a new laptop and I set it up as a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu (I originally had a triple boot system with Open Suse until I remembered how clunky RPM based Distros are and I have a whole post full of “observations” about Vista, but this is all neither here nor there.) I was testing the battery life, ran it down, plugged it back into the power cord, and, for some unknown reason, I right clicked the battery life indicator.
Bash Script to Set Random XScreensaver as background
This short bash script will randomly select a screensaver and display it in your background window, so you can have a random screensaver background instead of having to select a particular. Obviously you will need to have Xscreensaver installed for it to work.
!/bin/bashfiles=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.
If you haven’t already seen this: the original Star Wars ASCII animation can also be accessed from telnet by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl.
Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl
