The Keyboard Monitor switch is hooked up now.

I have the monitor switch hooked up now. So I can easily the monitor between the Sun machine and the IBM machine.

The memory arrived in the mail and was Desktop RAM not laptop RAM.

So I must have made a mistake because the RAM turned out to be Desktop RAM and I needed laptop RAM. So I must take this RAM back to the store and make an exchange. The RAM chips are still on sale until Thursday. I may though take back the RAM and not do an exchange because I need to pay down debit. I may also take back the LinkSys stream music network device and also get credit for that. The LinkSys device has still not arrived in the mail.

Keyboard, monitor switch.

I have a one PS/2 and Monitor switch I am going to reconnect this evening to run the 17 " ProView monitor with both the Sun Solaris machine and the IBM Thinkcentre. I will cable that up just now.

I am updating Fink

I ran Fink Commander self update just now. This is the first update since Leopard was installed. I am wondering if I should wipe out Fink and get a fresh version. Perl would not upgrade because it would not compile.

1 GB memory upgrade may be this evening.

I think Memory upgrades are rather trouble-less events. I have not had any trouble with them except on old 386's with very used memory. But I suppose there could be issues. I am upgrading my Macbook from 1 GB with two 512 MB PC 5300 chips to 2 GB with two 1 GB chips. These two 1 GB chips should come in the mail in the next few hours. To be on the safe side I will connect the Leopard TimeMachine external backup drive now and make sure it runs a few times before I put the new memory in the machine. I will also follow instructions exactly as I found them at the Apple support pages for installing new RAM into a Macbook. Basically this means taking the battery out and then unscrewing one little metal frame with philips 00 screws. Then I take out the old memory and put in the new. I can then may be sell the old memory.

I bought ink this evening but the buying has to stop now.

I need to stop buying computer stuff now. I have no money and too much debit. That said so there.

I burned the two more 8 GB DVD's.

I have the Desktop of the eMac backed up from the external 250 GB hard drive now to DVD. I do want to burn two more copies of what I have done for the eMac so far. I also have one more DVD to burn for that computer's Desktop folder backups. I will make six copies of that DVD too. So for the above what is required is ten 4 GB DVD's and and two more 8 GB DVD's.

The year end back up continues

I am having less issues with the Finder going into the "not responding" state. I did burn two 8 GB DVD's that backed up all the Desktop copies for 2007. I have two more to burn and I am all out of 8 GB DVD's. I do not plan to buy more of these right now. I did order 100 4 GB blank DVD's for 20 dollars to continue this process.

To continue to clear the hard drive I have deleted all the twenty some CD's of Debian 4.0. I have burned some of these to CD and what I deleted was the original downloads. If I have too I could download these again. I have also not had to use these as my last Debian install was done with a net install disk. I do not have too many other files I can just delete. I have about 51 GB free space now. I need about 85 at present to hold my iTunes library for streaming. If I can meet this goal with this drive I will not need a new drive.

Year end back ups started.

Well needing to clear one of the 250 GB hard drives off of files I began to back up the backups on that hard drive. I started with the Desktop folders for the eMac2 and that took two DVD's for the folders from year end 2006 and all through 2007 except the last year end copy of the Desktop. I still must make one year end Desktop folder. This will be tonight's task. I used 4.7 GB DVD's and made four copies of each DVD. I want to keep three copies here and send two copies to one family member and one extra copy to another family member. So in all I need six copies. So I need to make two more copies of these two DVD's. For now I deleted the two DVD burn folders which were mounted on the desktop. Tonight I will make four 8 GB DVD's of all the 2007 Desktop folders and the year end 2006 folder.

I will want to buy more blank DVD's at the boxing day sales.

I learned to unlock the burn folders after the first burn and it was this locked aspect which was giving me a lot of trouble in the past with burning DVD's and the Finder going into non-response.

iTunes on the Windows box.

I have been having more luck now getting all my music onto iTunes on the PC. I am moving along with this. Also my iTunes is fully backed up on the eMac which holds the master library. The back up took seventeen 4.7 GB DVD's. I have about six of these now transfered to the IBM PC iTunes. Now I feel challenged to transfer them to the Debian side and see what I can use for Debian music. It might be time to convert an old external drive to being a music library. The Macbook has only a smaller part for the library for syncing the Nano. I did order the music bridge and will try it out and if it does not work I will return it. It cost 46$ CND in the end taxes and shipping.

Annual year end backups; getting ready for the end of the year.

I usually make end of the year back ups. I am starting to think of this today. I am learning not to keep external hard drives plugged in all the time but have been doing this with the new Time Machine software on my Macbook with Leopard and a LaCie 160 pocket drive. I will disconnect it now and put it inside its waterproof and dust proof case for a few days.

I am doing things with iTunes.

I have been thinking of buying a Linksys Wireless music streaming network device. It is only because one is on sale now that this has really come up. I am aware that music on computers is expensive and getting a music hard drive might have to happen from this too. The costs would be immense. This would mean I would not need a new iPod. I could use the Harmon Kardon Bridge to my stereo for just the Nano. The new iPod costs too much, It is math of these things as I try to match my iTunes library file size with the newer iPods. Instead, I think the music Bridge would be a good device, if it works. It is only Windows compatible. This means I would need to use my new IBM Thinkcentre.

I have so far started to use the Thinkcentre windows side to sync my Blackberry. Now I will also use it for iTunes and the Wireless Music Bridge. Since I have started to use iTunes on Windows I have had nothing but headaches loading all my music. This past hour I decided to delete everything on that iTunes.

I am also backing up my eMac iTunes to some 4.7 GB DVD's but this has been headache prone too. Right now I am starting again; having ruined three DVD's trying. First, I am downloading a bunch of podcasts. When those are updated, I will back up the iTunes on the eMac.

I also have been using iTunes on the IBM to get my songs from the library of music to my Blackberry. This was the initial reason to put iTunes there. This worked but the Blackberry is troublesome for listening to music while traveling around on the bus. It turns off and on and stuff. I have still have not learned all the buttons or the lock screen function beyond using it once only.

I backed up this blog.

I copied the web pages to word doc files for the months of 2006 and 2007 that had not already been backed up. I then changed the by-line on the top of this blog to reflect the new machines I have now and iPods I have sold off.

We did not get to those paypal and amazon problems with the neighbour.

I did not in the end help my neighbour set up paypal or order books through amazon. Instead I helped her learn to turn on and off her email and helped her read her email for the whole year and replay to some very old email.

I am now home and was playing some computer games and now am back to transferring songs to my new cell phone, the Blackberry.

I am helping a neighbour with Paypal and amazon

I am helping a neighbour with the Internet this evening. We are setting up a paypal account for her and helping her order some books.

How to get iTunes into the Blackberry.

First step as I said two hours ago was to update WinXP on the desktop. After that was done. I installed iTunes. I learned iTunes music store now sells Canadian TV shows. I explored these a little using my eMac iTunes because that computer is right beside the IBM computer on my office desk. I then installed the Backberry software from the CD that came with the Blackberry Pearl 2. I then used back up iTunes DVD's to import my music to iTunes. Then using Roxio media manager I copied iTunes music into the Roxio and then copied to the SD micro card on the Blackberry. I am now listening to Auto Rickshaw a band I have worked with as a volunteer. I am thinking I will only listen to folk based music on the Blackberry as a counter to its placement in culture as a corporate object rather than say a pop object or folk object. So the Blackberry is corp tool rather than a hacker, rocker, nomad, or solo tool.

Desktop PC.

I decided to run my Blackberry off of the new IBM computer while running WinXP. I think I have a tool in Debian for this too but I am not sure. One joke I have heard it case you're interested is to call a Blackberry a crackberry. Certainly there are addicts in my city along with Blackberry users. I am concerned as well to help these addicts more than I would help Blackberry owners and I do help people by volunteering in social services.

But I have not been using the WinXP Operating system much on the IBM desktop so I am having to spend an hour or two downloading updates from Microsoft now. The reason I am needing to use the Desktop PC rather than the Macbook WinXP is that the Macbook Win XP partition is almost full and I need to save that for my SAS install. I use SAS at work and need to have a home copy to learn on and have a school license for SAS.

Email, contacts, address books between Palms, Blackberries, and computers.

Here is what happened after the switch devices function of the Blackberry Desktop Manager did not work to add phone numbers to my address book on the new Blackberry. I tried repeatedly to import an ASCII file exported from the Palm Desktop. It just would not work. So I went to the Blackberry support pages and found I would have to use Outlook Express. My Outlook Express was full of some old email import and had a lot of email addresses which if your email address book looks like mine is hundred of email addresses with out names or phones numbers or even real addresses. So I did manage to import the Palm cell phone address book into Outlook but first deleted all the contacts in Outlook. I then matched up very carefully the columns in the coma delimited file from the Palm. Then the Blackberry Desktop manager did import the Outlook address book alright. I have some mixing of cell phone, fax and home numbers but at least I have some kind of copy of the Palm address book now on the Blackberry. I do not need this until the end of the month so there is time to fix it and add more names and numbers.

I could not find my Palm hotsync cable.

I do not know about all this chasing after technology. I am in a panic looking for my hotsync cable for my palm. My office is fairly disorganized so finding my cable if it is not where I left it or not in the few places I keep cables is not a very good thing. When I find it I am ready on the WinXP side of the Macbook to sync the Palm Treo 600 with the Palm Desktop then transfer everything to the Blackberry. I believe the Blackberry software the Blackberry Desktop Manager can do the transfer with out the Palm Desktop. But both devices need to be connected at the same time.

As I proof read this entry I tried one more time to look around where I usually leave my cables and saw the tell tale end that fits in the Palm. So I have now found the cable and will log off the Macbook Leopard and log into Win XP and try to transfer my contacts and and calendar to my Blackberry which arrived yesterday.

I am already using the Blackberry Facebook application and have downloaded 250 KB so far on the Blackberry of my 4 MB monthly limit. But for now I am ready to sync the two devices. First, I will back up the Palm to the eMac.

Getting ready for the Blackberry.

This Blackberry will be costly for the service almost 70$ a month. But I did buy the MicroSD card just now which was about 51$. It is a 2 GB Kingston MicroSD card. It also has an adapter to allow it to fit in the standard SD slots. I have one USB memory card reader, which I paid 30$ for a year or two ago. I also have an SD card reader on my Brother printer. I will not take the MicroSD card out of the package, in case I need to return it and back out of the Blackberry purchase.

Memory for the Debian Computer would not cost too, too much.

Upgrading the Debian PC to 4 GB would be about 400$ but just upgrading it to 2GB would only be 100$ because I would not need to take out the 1 GB in there now. It takes PC2700 DDR RAM.

Archiving and moving to Linux.

I archived some folders on my Macbook. I am limited on hard disk space and need to clean up the laptop a bit more.

I opened some backup folders in Linux and copied my Old Computer folder and some Mac backups while archiving these to the Linux desktop home folder. I also updated the Linux computer today. I tried out Kate for my dtd file and also opened a school project written in C# with Kate and used the highlighting. Right now the Linux computer is turned off to save power.

I am buying a Blackberry 8130 cell phone/pda.

I decided that I wanted the Pearl model Blackberry a few months ago, in fact, it may have been last winter I decided that it would be a good phone. It is model 8130. I regret not getting a full keyboard as this was the feature I used to buy PDA cell phones by. I had bought a Palm Tungsten W and then Palm Treo 600 based on the little thumb keyboards and had avoided the Blackberry's which, in fact, were making the thumb keyboards famous. But the 8130 has what's called a SureType keyboard and they have a copyright on that name. It has a camera, GPS service, email, web browsing, cell phone functions, and music. It also uses microSD cards. This means I now have to buy these type of flash memories. There is a sale this evening at Futureshop so I may try to buy those memories this evening along with two CD's I am buying family for Christmas.