Today's back up the 20GB Iomega USB drive

I am just backing up my USB portable drive to DVD. This might take a few hours. This is just to make certain all these files are backed up. I will make two copies and then delete the burn folders that I am using on my eMac2. Then I will delete everything from the USB drive.

I was able to import my WinNT email to my Intellistation copy of Outlook Express and today imported this email to Netscape 7.0 and have just copied this mail local folder from Netscape 7.0 on the Intellistation to the USB drive. I am going to use the USB drive to transfer this old WinNT email to the eMac and then delete everything from the USB drive.

I imported my Safari book marks as one html page to the iBook.

I am posting this from the iBook to test it out. It seems to work fine.

I was able to win a 60 GB hard drive for the iBook. I had to buy a Torx T8 screwdriver for taking apart the iBook. I also got a 128 MB RAM chip for the Compaq Presario 1210.

I just made the last of my annual back up DVD's and am making a second copy of the movie I made yesterday.

I just made the last copies of three disks for my annual back ups. I now must send 5 DVD's off site to a family member to save them for me until next year. I also accessed one DVD today on another computer running Linux and the DVD is fine and I could open Open Office files on the Linux desktop no problem. I can also do some R code on Debian 3.1 no problem with Open Office. Thus when I get the 6 GB laptop hard drive I bought through ebay I will use it in the Compaq Presario 1210 and this time install Debian 3.1 on the Presario 1210. I also am just making a second copy of the movie I made yesterday. I am also thinking now of buying and setting up another USB external drive for storing music and video and have been window shopping on the web this morning to do this.

Updates

The email from the WinNT machine has been transfered to the copy of outlook express on the Intellistation. I will now transfer this to a netscape email folder and then transfer that to the eMac 2 mail application with an import. I am not sure how I will transfer the netscape mail folder yet.

The movie I downloaded from google video to use on my PSP does not work on the PSP. I need to research this more.

I have not yet backed up the Fedora core 3 user files.

The back up DVD's I made are all done now except the off site copies of the Thinkpad. Speaking of Thinkpads I will be buying a new one in July.

My R talk is not getting worked on yet. But I am starting to practice with SAS using the textbook data for my experimental design course. I am also reading some 1971 book on response surfaces this morning.

My planned book on computer self help for community development and organizing is getting another start. At least I have been encouraged to start to write it again.

iBook cleanup

The owner of the iBook I bought from, left all her files on this laptop. I did not look at them beyond seeing the names of some of the files.

1. The first step in cleaning this iBook was to get the password from the previous owner,
2. and her permission to delete all the files. I then deleted all the files.
3. Then using her password I created a second admin account for myself and deleted her account.
4. I could then set up networking.
5. The next step was software updating. This computer had been set at Unix time zero in other words January 1st 1970. Also it had not been updated from 10.2 at all. I could not update automatically because of hard drive space limitations. So I had to delete Classic versions of outlook express, netscape, and explorer to get some more space. I also had to delete the deleted user account. I needed to reboot a number of times to get the true available free space after emptying the trash.
6. I could still not install updates automatically and still this morning can not do this. So I downloaded the 10.2.8 update to the desktop and then used installer to install it.
7. After this was done I restarted software update again and got about 6 security updates.
8. I then continued to update software like Java, Safari, iCal, iTunes, and Quicktime.

I am now done and will have to do similar updating when I install a new hard drive and install a fresh copy of Jaguar on a larger new hard drive.

I have gotten the new top and track pad on ebay. The power adapter arrived yesterday which is why I could start working on this project today. I now need to find another laptop hard drive that is much larger than the little 3GB drive I have in there now. I will also have to do the replacement which means I need a Torx T8 screwdriver. Then I must upgrade the RAM but I am not sure if I want to spend 100$ on the 512 MB ram or spend less for a 256 MB ram chip.

Success with networking

I was able to get into a Mac running OSX over a network from a windows machine. Before this on my old eMac and my Thinkpad T30 I would have to get into the Thinkpad running WinXP by logging in from the Mac. This time I logged into the Mac on my WinNT box. I was trying to gather all the files off the WinNT box as I retire it. I had gotten all the files off it before using Zip disks and am still set up for zip disks off this WinNT machine. But this time I used the Mac public folder and drop box in this folder to transfer all the files and also the Outlook Express store folder over to the eMac. The Outlook Express folder was slightly too large for a zip disk so I have now solved this problem. Now I can burn this data to CD and store it away.

This started with a plan to delete the Fedora core 4 iso disks on my eMac desktop. First I am going to burn one copy of the four Fedora core 4 iso disks which I am almost finished doing. Then I will delete them. I thought I would upgrade the Fedora core on the IBM PC server and this time wipe out the WinNT. All I really need to do now is back up the old Fedora Core 3 files that I have made and then I can wipe out the Fedora core 3 too. Then I can sell or give away this old IBM PC server.

I also want to restore the email from the WinNT box into my eMac. To do this I will burn the WinNT back up data on the eMac. I will then import the outlook files to my Intellistation copy of Outlook Express. Then I can worry about getting the email to the Mac from there. I also plan to sell the Intellistation at the end of April after my SAS home work is done.

Annual DVD back ups.

I guess this could be called annual DVD backs ups. I made two back up DVD's in three copies of each for the Documents folder on my main computer the eMac2. I will also be making three back up DVD's of my old Thinkpad T30 files. These will also be copied three times each. Then I will be making some back up DVD's for my old eMac by copying folders over ethernet to the new eMac for burning.

I found "secure empty trash" on my Mac does a better job of emptying the trash of my encrypted files. At least, I experimented and found out. I was developing a bit of repetitive stain injury emptying the trash when the process would stop at each encrypted file and ask for a click to continue. My arm is better now although the memory of the pain is still there cautioning my use of the mouse.

I am installing a movie on the PSP. I was told of this movie by Internet researcher Martin Dodge in an email to the AoIR discussing email list. The English wikipedia entry for this movie is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Networks:_The_Heralds_of_Resource_Sharing The cite for the movie is King, Steven. Computer Networks - The Heralds of Resource Sharing (Boston, Mass.: MIT, 1972) Length: 30 min 22 sec, Apr 7, 2006 from google video (cited April 9th, 2006). It is on google video for watching or downloading to PC, Mac, iPod video, or PSP. Although the movie may be of significance it featues only male talking heads with women depicted as computer operators. So it is old school sexism at heart.

I am finally upgrading the parts for my iBook and may be able to restore the top and track pad to mint condition as well. It is a bit costly but I may use my old IBM Thinkpad T30 40 GB hard drive for the upgrade. Other than that the Mac OS 10.2 should cost about 30$ and a 256 MB PC 133 laptop RAM chip will also not cost more than 30$. Not sure what I should pay for the new top; but more than 20$ it will cost.

I am just about to burn some DVD's of the documents folder on my eMac. It may take 2 DVD's to back up everything except the old Thinkpad T30. The Thinkpad T30 will need 3 or 4 DVD's. So my total might be 6 DVD's.

I worked in the SAS software on a large school assignment in experimental design. I worked for about 8 hours straight then rested four hours and then another 2 hours. I got this final term work done on Tuesday. I now have a take home exam in this experimental design course. The exam will last 3 days and I can use any book or other reference but I can not use other people to help me.

Speaking of statistics I am also writing a talk on R the open source statistical software/language. I need to do some more work writing this talk and start testing some code and of course writing some code. I will give the talk at the Ottawa Carleton Linux user group meeting in May if I can get it done.

The iBook blueberry 300 Mhz specs

Well the iBook I got did not come with a functioning power adapter so I have had to buy one of those for it. I did get it working at the Mac Group store wth their power adapter and it is a 300 MHz, 96 MB RAM and 3 GB hard drive. The Mac Group tell me it is very difficult, maybe an hour and half work to replace the hard drive. The memory can be placed in and upgraded with no real problem. So the question is how much money do I want to spend on this beast? So far I have had to cut down my plans for a really large hard drive like 80GB. I am probably limited to 20GB. In terms of RAM I can put in as large as 512 MB but this costs about 100$ almost half of the price of the laptop itself. Whereas a more modest 256 MB chips is only about 30$. So far I have spent about 45$ buying the powr adapter. I can stop here with just the power adapter for now. May be buy the 256 MB RAM. But I might also buy a replacement top and trackpad as the iBook is rather scratched up. But a new hard drive is not an option right now.

The clamshell iBook is finally in my city. I am just going to the UPS depot to pick it up in the next few hours. I will post the specs on this laptop later tonight when I boot it up and see the about this mac details/screen.

My computers are now running well. In terms of RAM my new eMac has 1 GB of RAM. My old eMac has had 768 MB of RAM from the beginning. My new Intellistation now has 768 MB RAM as well.

I backed up iTunes to 4 DVD's. I need to buy some DVD -R disks to make viewable videos. The DVD +R disks don't work for this. I will spend 35 dollars to get 100 blank disks. I made a DVD slide show using iDVD on the eMac.

I was again not able to install Debian on the Virtual PC running on the eMac. But this time I tried using the video settings taken from the system information in Win2K. X worked better but would still not work perfectly.

I did a few hours of paid web master work this past weekend. I am also learning about creative commons licenses for my new web site. I will add one later today or this week.

I am just backing up the documents folder and mail folder on my new eMac to an external hard drive. This is a mid month back up process. There is a 250 GB hard drive one sale right now, I was thinking of buying but my spending is really excessive now on computer equipment I will wait before buying the next external hard drive. I did not buy a 10$ firewire cable today for the new camcorder. I need to temper my spending.

I won the RAM and probably saved 100$ on buying this RAM by buying it on ebay.

I am building a new web space using Dreamweaver MMX and hosting it at yahoo small business web hosting. I also have my own moveable type blog on this site. I made an index page and one internal page now and started the blog. I will use the site for creative design but will stick with a minimalist style both technically and graphically. I might also have time to explore the server side technologies I can use with this hosting deal. But it will also be used for creative academic writing and has a very cute and already creative domain name. It is at http://www.cyborgcitizen.org/. Now isn't that a creative name? Ok may be not but it sure wasn't just my idea for a name. I borrowed it from various scholars of science and technology studies in particular Donna Haraway. I also used the creative commons license to copyright it and this is my first use of this license.

Getting more memory for the Intellistation statistical workstation from ebay.

I did a little surfing of ebay and found an offer of 640MB of PC133 RAM. I would then have about 996 MB of RAM in my statistical workstation. I should stop using this workstation for web mastering and make it a more dedicated machine for only statistics. Speaking of which I have some SAS homework to do for this week and this coming weekend and the beginning of next week. I also was able to install SAS 9.1.3 on my eMac on the Win2K partition. SAS we get for free from school will only work on UNIX or Windows. That is why to get SAS working on my Macintosh I need to install it on the Win2K operating system running in Virtual PC on my eMac. Also in statistics I have to prepare an hour long talk on using R for our local linux users group. I should try to write the basic outline tonight but also have some statistics homework grading to do today.

Setting up regular book marks on a new computer

I booted up the new Intellistation to test web pages I was working on this past week. I started in Debian with Mozilla to add bookmarks to sites I control the content for. In other words I bookmarked my own sites and other sites where I am a web master, web designer, web content writer, etc. etc.. This is routine task I have done many times.

I am posting this on my Presario 1210 running a fresh
install of Debian 3.0 with KDE 2.2.2. I finally got KDE installed again but my screen resolution is 600X800 rather than finer.

I updated the Debian 3.1. I then played an unsuccessful game of GNU GO. I left that machine on.

I messed up the Debian laptop with installing using dselect. The problem was forseeable. I installed to much software and ran out of hard drive space. I am now trying to install Red Hat 9 on this machine for a change. I am just checking the integrity of my two CD's with Red Hat 9 on them. I lost one file from a word processor about email list management I had written on this laptop. In other words I have erased the Debian 3.0 woody on this laptop. While I install I think I will update my WinXP and my Debian 3.1 and also my Fedora core 3. It would be nice to get these done today.

Almost all machines are up to date with the right software

I updated my WinXP with dot net stuff. I also updated my Debian 3.1 software using dselect and apt. These were both on the Intellistation. I also updated my old eMac in its new location in the office. The PSP is running the latest OS. The iPod and the Palm are also up to date. I think only the Fedora and the Win NT mahine may need to be updated at the moment. I believe the Win2k on the eMac is up to date but I wil just check that again. I should also use my new found knowledge of apt directories to up date my Debian 3.0 laptop.

I needed to use SAS so booted up my Intellistation and ran SAS. I quickly wrote some SAS code for some homework. I left the computer running in the other room. I will now save my SAS files, print the output window and turn the machine off.

I did get win2K working on the eMac and am now trying to get Debian 3.1 installed on the eMac.

I am installing fink-0.24.12 on my eMac. I need to update X Code to 2.2 and I now have the gcc 4.0 compiler installed.

My eMac is working fine and the only computer I use constantly everyday.

I did not turn on any of my linux computers today. I read a little of Linux magazine. I also added some GNU software books at Amazon to buy later. I mostly have been working with my iPod using the iTalk microphone. I also have left my eMac on for more than a day now. I did use my Palm with Word To Go and also the Snapper email software. I looked into buying a Jazz drive and stuff for that on ebay.ca. I also looked into getting a new larger 3 GB hard drive for my Compaq laptop also on ebay.ca. I also looked at RAM prices for the Intellistation.

I changed the CD drive in the Intellistation and put in a DVD drive. I was then able to mount the Debian 3.1 r 1 net install disk and now have Debian 3.1 r 1 installed and working fine. I spent the last few hours surfing ebay.ca using this Debian desktop.

I got Win2K installed on the Virtual PC on the Mac and installed Adobe Reader and Yahoo Messenger. I can use voice now on this Mac with Yahoo Messenger by using the Virtual PC Win2K to run Yahoo Messenger Windows version. So that was a success.

I need a 2 or 3 or 4 GB hard drive for my Linux laptop and then I need to install Debian again. But this can wait. It is just that the old hard drive in the Debian laptop is making noises and is likely to fail soon.

I tried to post to my studies blog but because that blog is still considered a spam blog it needs word verification which this laptop could not handle. Or Blogger's word verification uses some none standard type of cookie of something. So I spent the last 45 minutes transfering the post to Kword then a floppy then uploading the floppy to the intellistation and then posting in Internet explorer in WinXP. I also cleaned up under my living room desk.

I am posting this from my Linux laptop. I have had enough installing Linux for the day and decided to use Linux more. So this post is an effort to do one of my daily computer activities in Linux.

I received a copy of Virtual PC for the Mac but so far have not been able to install an operating system inside the Virtual PC. I will make another try this morning after trying three different WinXP disks and Debian 3.1 r1. I am now trying my Win2000 disk. Again this should be a legal copy of Win2000.

My problems with my Linux install are now just X. I need to configure X to work still. I have no useable screens as my error message. I have so far been unable to google a configuration file. I have found some Nvidia drivers but could not install them for this older kernal. I have a 2.2 kernal instead of the current 2.6 kernal. May be even 2.7 is the current kernal.

I now know how to install Woody only and am doing this overnight.

I reached out to the local Linux novice help email list and got some help with my Linux install and I am also doing this over night. My other computers are fine now. My new eMac gets the most use. My new IBM works fine for WinXP and it is this machine I am also trying to install Linux on. My palm is working fine but not getting as much use as my Palms have in the past. My iPod is also working fine. I am not using my PSP much but did try to get further in the Sims 2 game a week ago. I burnt a CD of songs for my wife and we paid for these songs.

All this computer tinkering keeps me from doing my school work. I know this is true because as soon as I sucessfully completed the SAS install and then the Linux install I almost immediately devoted my time to my homework until it got done. So my computter tinkering was keeping me from doing my school homework. It was also highly frustating and now that I have Xandros Linux installed I realise that this free version of Xandors is very limited and I may try to install Debian Woody again or Fedora core 4. Install, install, I am an install junkie and hardly spend much time actually working in Linux. Actually the problems is I like Woody but not sure I can keep it updated with out going into Sarge and I can't seem to install Sarge with net disks and as I said with no DVD drive on the intellistation I can't use the DVD's I made of Sarge.

Success Xandros installs ok

I was able to install a Xandros Linux desktop. I was not able to watch a DVD though because actually this computer does not have a DVD drive installed. I have a spare DVD drive but I am not up to installing that right now.

I was thinking about trying a different flavour of Linux on the Intellistation and am now trying a Xandros install. It is almost done and I will see if it works ok. I went with a swap partition of almost 2 GB so I can install some more RAM on the Intellistation. It needs PC133 RAM chips which I figure must be cheap these days. I will upgrade this system to 1 GB as soon as I can afford the extra RAM. Always upgrading. Just for fun if the Xandros installs with no issues I will watch the third Matrix film on the intellistation using Xandros starting at 3:30 AM.

I am having trouble mounting CD's made on my Mac on the new refurbished IBM Intellistation. I only seem to be able to get the Debian 3.0 woody CD to work. But then when I download newer Debian 3.1 Sarge software the boot proccess stops at Lilo only producing the letters LI in the upper left corner and then freezing. I am re trying this again and again. Right now I am trying it with out a network connection. I should stop this and start again with Debian 3.0 without ftp apt sources just security updates butthe main system just from the CD.

Success installing SAS, finally after about 20 attempts.

I first had an error because the firmware on my new refurbished computers CDROM had not been updated. I updated it yesterday morning or late Thursday night. Once that was solved I found the install mostly worked or got through more of the proccess. But the SAS install as many softwares is an all or nothing process involving 9 CD's. In the end I could not choose extra language support because a file for that option was on a part of a CD that is damaged. After unselecting that language support option the installation worked. I will report the damaged CD to the school hardware services clerk when I take the disks back to school on Monday.

I now have a functioning SAS workstation. I don't have any SAS homework yet but will have some later in the term.

I bought a refurbished IBM Intellistation Pro E. It has a 64 MB video card. I installed WinXP pro on it as soon as I got it. I am still trying to install SAS on the windows. I split the drive in half and am this morning continuing to try to install Debian Linux on the second half. SAS gave me problems as is Linux giving me problems. I have the SAS disks borrowed from school for another two days. I should stop this computer tinkering and get some school work done. But I have been reading all morning while the computer downloads linux software.

I just read half of a study into computer war gaming. I also have been reading about child poverty and statistics and about modern warfare in terms of body hardening and body injury. I finished a book on the rule of law that I started to read this summer after studying public law with Christian Jackel. I also finished a book titled Techno Feminism.

The new computer is basically supposed to be a windows box for doing windows only software. I did need to do some firmware upgrade on the CDROM. I will stop the Linux tinkering now at 3:36 and try the SAS install a few more times. My reason for buying this computer was to be able to run SAS at home for school work.

This is my test post using a blogger widget by June Tate

I am using a blogger posting widget designed by June Tate. it is licenced under the GPL as free sofwtare. I am test posting this as a test of this widget. I have been playing with widgets for a little while tonight.

I made a back up DVD of the Documents folder on my eMac. I am finding the eMac working fine. My Palm is also fine. My fedora computer is fine. My iPod is fine. My new printer is fine.

I am getting an IBM Intellistation Pro E with a pentium IV chip, 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive and CD. This windows computer will be for running SAS. I will also installl Debian 3.1 on this computer and set up things like emacs, R, Octave, GSL and MatLab on the Linux side.

I am using the new eMac and it is working fine. It is also working with the new printer fine.

My palm can download xls files from its wireless phone connection but can not open them right away. I will try some techniques with this palm to open them today. Otherwise I will transfer the files to the eMac.

I managed to get the new eMac working ok now with all the email it received between December 16-January 6th. I still need to migrate some folders, email and files from the old eMac. I also have to reinstall applications. I have installed X11, Neooffice 1.2 beta, Adobe Reader 7.0.2, Adobe Reader for the Plam 3.05 and X-Code. I will now reinstall Chit Chat and then chat at Yahoo.

Success with the new Mac OS X install.

I seem to have all the preferences imported now. All my Safari bookmarks from my old eMac are imported and all my keychain items. Thus Safari logged into Blogspot no problem. I also imported my iCal and Address book from my old eMac. I am of course waiting for my email to be imported. I will now as the next step import my Music folder to iTunes but from the application itself.

I did a rough size comparisom using Get Info on the new eMac and then only needed to re back up the Music folder. I then started an erase and install on the new eMac. This install is going on now and I am writing this from my PC 325 using Mozilla.

I was not yet able to use the new Brother printer with the Fedora machine because the Fedora does not have the drivers for the MCF 420cn.

I will spend the rest of this morning getting the new eMac set up. This time I will not do a Firewire transfer of user accounts. I will in fact only transfer the Documents, Music, and Mail folders using a USB external hard drive. For the Music and Mail folders I will import these via the applications themselves for the documents folder I will do a simple copy operation using the Finder.

About backing up the new eMac and iPod: I lost two or three voice memos from this year. I am satistfied with the rest of the iTunes back up now. I am just using an ethernet connection now from the old eMac to the new eMac to copy the mail folder from the new eMac to the USB drive connected to the old eMac. But this is taking too long so I am going to connect the USB drive to the new eMac and make the mail folder copy that way. But first I have to wait until I have finished using the USB drive on the old eMac where I am duplicating the documents folder for file management reasons. When this is done and the mail folder is backed up, I will reinstall Mac OS X on the new eMac.

After the iTunes is backed up I will copy the Mac Mail folder one more time to the USB external drive and then I will consider the new eMac backed up and attempt a fresh install of Mac OS X. I would like to have the back up done by midnight and the install done by 4 AM Monday. I would like to be using the new eMac again by 8 AM Monday.

The iTunes on the new eMac is backed up to a DVD now. This is only a back up of purchased songs and voice memos. I will attempt one or two more updates of the iPod to get a new voice memo off the iPod then do another back up to DVD. Then I will consider iTunes on the new eMac backed up.

After resetting the IP address for the printer, it is still printing fine. I will check the Fedora computer on it later tonight. Right now the Fedora computer prints to the Epson 440 via a parallel cable which comes out of an Iomega zip drive 100 MB parallel drive plugged into the computer the IBM PC325. After this test if successful I will have two printers for the Fedora computer. I also have two printers now for the eMac. This is robust redundency for printing.

I got myself a new Brother MFC 420CN all-in-one network printer. I did get it working as network printer, a fax, and a copier so far. It is very easy to use although it took me three hours to configure the Lan printing. I did get it last night and got it to work again tonight.

Backing up my new eMac is going well. I was able to sucessfully copy the documents folder where all my personal files are. I copied it to my USB external drive. I have been using this back up on my old eMac to do my daily work. I also backed up purchased songs and was able to burn a DVD of purchased songs on the new eMac. With iTunes on the new eMac I am just worried about backing up voice memos. The new eMac iTunes still works and I will do a final purchased music back up and voice memo back up then the iTunes will be backed up and I can leave the new iTunes as ready for fresh install. I have already backed up the email but will do this once again and then the Mac Mail will be ready for a fresh install. The documents are already for a fresh install. So iTunes and and Mac Mail need to be done again and I will go for the fresh install maybe tonight.

I have three years of Apple Care support with the new eMac. I did call Apple Care yesterday and they recommended a fresh install of the Mac OS X and this time not to transfer over applications to the new eMac from the old eMac but I will try to transfer email settings. I will also try to restore email, iTunes and the documents folder. I should also back up iBlog. Everything else will be a clean install.

My new eMac computer is freezing up. It is not working at a very good rate. It seems I have not gotten an Apple but instead a lemon.

I did pratice some R coding but did it on the eMac so I did not need to start up the Linux laptop this morning. I did need to reinstall R and this time did install the G77 and other parts and am using R 2.2.0 now. All I did was open some school data sets and do a mean calculation. I did have to learn a little about how to write a directory path on the Mac.

I have been using a TV watching widget in Mac OS X Tiger to watch some Chinese TV. It works quite well. No need for a TV card. I am going to give a talk on R for a local linux user group this spring. I may start to write it later this morning.

I did get around to trying to download gsl on the Debian laptop. It was successful so far. I first used konqueror to browse www.gnu.org/software/gsl. Then I used a Konsole window to ftp the software to the laptop from ftp.gnu.org. I then used Archive to unpack it to the Desktop. I read the README file and then the INSTALL file, just clicking them open in Konqueror. I used the cpmmands ./configure and make in the Konsole window when in the gsl-1.7 folder that unpacking made on the Desktop. Now the make is taking a long time, but the gsl-1.7 folder is big tens of megabytes and this is a pentium 1 computer so I am just going to have to wait.

I got side tracked downloading gsl. I instead used fink and updated fink and can't get dpkg working on the new mac. I barely had fink working on the old mac. So I did not download gsl. I may try this on my debian laptop now.

I just deleted a bunch of old pdf's and some old unused apps off the old eMac. I also used the old eMac and old copy of Dreamweaver to update my school web page. I then used sftp to up load the index.html page which was all I updated. I have had some luck using sftp these past few days.

I am now making some back up DVD's of my old computer's files. This includes my Performa 1995-1998. My various IBM's the aptiva 2000-2003 and the Thinkpad 2003-2005. I also am backing up my WinNT 2002-2005 machine files. I can not back up all the Thinkpad files on one DVD disk but will need three or four for this. The other computers can be backed up to only one DVD.

I am just going to download the gsl for the Mac now so am going to visit some gnu pages

I am looking at buying an older Itronix laptop on ebay but this can wait as well.

I got the RSS feed working on the Palm with Avantgo. I still have not gotten RSS feeds working on my PSP. I have done nothing with my PSP web design project for the past month.

I am trying out the new RSS channels beta on the avantgo web site. The avantgo web site loads web pages onto my palm using my computer's internet connection. It could also download these web pages with avantgo and a wireless connection but this would cost more from the wireless company because the downloads from news services through avantgo would change everyday and the size of total downloads are metered at the wireless company. I am limited to about 2 MB per month which is fine for using the Palm for email only and only email from my low traffic school email address. But downloading web pages would be too expensive at 10$ per MB. But I added rss feeds from two of my blogs and put them on the palm with the USB cradle hotsync and so I will test those out on the palm today as I travel around on the bus.

I spent about an hour backing up and configuring my Palm w. I also ordered voice mail service for it this morning as this may be cheaper than my present other cell phone by about 10 dollars per month. Right now I have two cell phones plus my wifes phone. Now I can cut one cell phone off and save 35$ and pay 20$ plus tax for the voice on the palm. I will test the palm voice for now and can cancel the voice plan at any time for no charge. I also spent some time over night trying out some software for the iPod from the missing manual CD for the missing manual book iPod and iTunes from the missing manual web site.

I also gifted some music to family from the iTunes store for a Christmas present.

I was successful at burning one DVD back up of ten years of email.

I was looking at the size of the Mail folder on my new eMac and for some reason it was only around 900 MB. So I deleted my original old eMac email(this import appeared empty) off the new eMac and retransfered it from the old eMac using my Iomega 20GB drive. I then imported all of it but the old Thinkpad email that was stored in a netscape email file. That file has already been imported on the new eMac. So hopefully now I have only about two years or so of duplicates from my dot mac transfer from Thinkpad to the old eMac. My new eMac has ten years worth of email now which is about a year and a half shy of the time I have been using email. The Mail file is 2.5 GB now. I had some trouble transfering it to a DVD to burn. But now I am ready to burn the first back up DVD of 2.5 GB.

I did some usual tasks on the old eMac and then ethernet transfered the files to the new eMac and it worked fine.

I tried turning comments off now.

I was able to run R from the command line and do the same code as I did last winter in my first assignment in my data mining course. I also was able with KWord to open my code files which were kept in word doc format. But I could not copy and paste the code as I was used to with R so needed to retype it. Also the directory in Linux needed to be changed slightly from the windows directory that was in the code for opening the data file. But it works. I think this is R 1.5.1 I am using on this machine.

I reinstalled Debian 3.0 r2 on the old Compaq laptop using only CD's about a week ago. I tried resetting the network environment up with netenv and was successful at getting an internet connection last night. I guessed the IP address for the machine that the DNS server in the router might offer. Anyway it worked.

I also installed, R, R-base, R-latex and R-recommended. This evening I will transfer some school files over from my data mining course and test drive the R. I will also download Ggobi and try that out too. This will require that I access and search for Ggobi on the web.

The eMac is up and running. I still can not get my old eMac user files to function on the new eMac using the firewire transfer but I did get the applications transfered. That is I can not log in as the old user.

I got iBlog working on the new eMac. I copied the folder from application support for iBlog and also copied the peferences file for iBlog. Now iBlog is open with all my old iBlogs there ready to go.

I also used the copied iTunes folder to update my iPod so lost some voice memos (I don't know why) which I am just transfering back.

I used my Iomega huge 20GB portable drive to do these transfers by swapping the USB cable between the two eMacs which are side by side on the living room desk.

I finally cleaned up cables in the office in front of the PC server and the shelves. Most of the cables are now behind the shelves. I also cleared off my desktop space around the IBM monitor, MSN keyboard, and IBM mouse, so I can comfortably and safely use the Fedora core machine in the office. I also after this just minutes ago, cleared up papers and headphones and ear phones off the living room desk.

eMac working fine now

I was able to set up my email by the end of Thursday. It is still a little buggy. I was able to make those back up DVD's so I have reached some safety now with computers and saving all my volumious writing which is largely emails. But this email back up includes most non-spam email I have ever received too in a broken not quite continuous and smooth record from 1996 to 2005 on a variety of different computers. This is all now on two identical DVD's and I will make a third copy still as three copies are recommended by security professionals for back up archives of files.

Open source software installs on new eMac

I installed Neo Office 1.2 alpha late yesterday.

I am reinstalling tex, texshop, R and Grass on my new eMac which means X11 first, from my Mac OS X DVD. Then R which installs G77 the fortran compiler and also tsk(sp?). Then over to tex shop and the i-installer to install X11 apps for teXshop. Then install teX again with i-installer. Then finally texshop itself. Then Grass which might wait until tomorrow. teX2005 includes code for both Mac architectures Mac PPC and Mac Intel which means the open source developers are already designing for the new intel Macs before the hardware is for sale.

I got my new computer an Apple eMac

But this new computer does not work well yet. I am attemping right now to reinstall Mac OS X. I have transfered all the applications and user accounts and network settings from my old eMac. After doing this I was able to open about three applications but once open could not do anything with them. I did a hardware test at my brothers suggestion and the hardware is fine. We both figured that perhaps the file transfer had made the new eMac not work properly. I was also not given the extra 512 MB RAM chip I paid for. It seems either the store was trying to rob me or they forgot to install it. I will have to get the extra 512 MB RAM chip from them and install it myself. I have paid for it already. I guess I could see this as one time when I am giving a store credit rather than them giving me credit.

I have about 30 minutes left in the Max OS X install and then I can see again if the new eMac works. In fact in the time it took me to write this it has rebooted and asked for the Install Disk 2.

This first Mac OS X install didn't work. So I did a clean install and did not firewire transfer anything but instead used my USB back up drive to do things manually. I am taking my usual file storage area on the desktop and moving it to the documents folder.

It seems this blog is no longer considered a spam blog which means I can edit the posts and spell check them again.

I am buying a new eMac

I was able to afford a new eMac. Now I will be able to burn DVD's and have lots of hard drive space. I should be getting it in about a week. I should also be getting the old clamshell iBook soon too.

I borrowed some rock CD's to put on my iPod. It took me about 5 hours to rip 20 CD's but I am not file sharing these mp3's.

I am backing up or copying my Desktop folder to my Iomega portable hard drive which I will again try to take to school and use it on computers there and then burn DVD's of these files.

eMac now running Tiger

I was able to get a copy of Tiger on a family license. So now my old eMac is running Tiger. I had wanted to try widgets and I am trying a TV watching widget, a URL checker widget, and a longfingers World View widget. Longfinger's PSP version of the World View inspired some PSP web mastering by me a few weeks ago.

My computers and gadgets are all running ok except for the Palm but that was only a minor hiccup. My Palm w ran out of power so need to be restored from back up. I also installed Documents to Go on the Mac so now have that functionality between the Palm and the Mac. I am tempted to upgrade the Palm to a Treo 650 this Christmas because my Noikia cell phone contract has almost expired. The Palm w was last Christmas present to myself and the previous Christmas(2003) the cell phone was on a holiday deal from Bell Canada.

I was able open a CD and read pdfs on the Debian laptop. I used KDiskFree to mount the CD ROM drive. I have started to use this laptop for statistics studies.

I repartitoned the external USB 160GB drive on my eMac and made a partition large enough to hold the iTunes folder for the 60GB iPod. I did have to change the iTunes folder location back to the eMac temporarily, so needed to trash about 10 GB of songs to do this. I am now putting my music CD's back into iTunes. I am having trouble because songs I bought recently from the iTunes store are on the iPod but not in iTunes. Apple iTunes support have send me a web link to a help page on how to transfer songs on the iPod so I will read that and see if I can solve my problem.

I was able to find a source for eMacs. So I may buy an eMac from the school computer store. I would get a superdrive model with 1 GB memory and maybe 250GB hard drive. I need some help to afford this.

My eMac is running out of hard drive space. I was looking for a newer model eMac but these are not for sale any longer. My best pic right now in the Apple line up would be an iMac with 20 inch screen. Perhaps this will be my next machine. I would also like an IBM thinkpad with wireless and Gigabyte ethernet and DVD burner. If I get a new thinkpad I will buy it a bigger laptop hard drive and install WinXP and Debian so that it is a dual boot machine. Right now the old compaq is running Debian 3.0 r 2 fine. I still need to take this Debian laptop onto the Internet and need to buy a PCMCIA ethernet card for it.

I was able to buy 64MB of RAM for my Compaq Presario 1210. It works much faster now. I took off Turbo Linux by installing Debian Linux 3.0 r 2 with KDE 2.2.2. It now works not bad and I had no X set up issues. It works fine and even with Octave and R installed has 460MB free on a 1.18 GB root partition.

I am working on the Compaq Presario 1210. I am installing Turbo Linux workstation 6.0.2.

Compaq Presario 1210

I removed Iomega tools from this laptop. I also removed Microsoft money. Parhaps I should have left Iomega tools on until I was sure I could connect to the Internet. I willl try to use a modem connection and also a PMICIA ethernet card now.

I am staying up late to help with the newspapers and then plan to sleep at about 8 AM Saturday. I will also do some research on the Internet over night on fixing up an old model pentium 1 compaq laptop that someone in my family would like to be able to use for email. I will also work on this computer a bit over night uninstalling some software to make space on the hard drive which should speed it up a bit too. It is a Compaq Presario 1210.

I was able to sell my broken IBM thinkpad tonight. We are ordering pizza. That was a very good laptop. I used it quite a lot for two years. My wife had stepped on the screen as I had left it out on the coffee table and it fell off. I got about 25% of the original price but this includes a new Linksys Ghz wireless router that the fellow traded me with some cash. The fellow, a high tech engineer and new Canadian from China is going to use it as a server and he will not use the screen. He gave me this particular router because it can be used with custom Linux software but I will probably just use it as it was originally designed to be used. But I won't set it up tonight as I have marking to do after we eat the pizza.

I am thinking of making a PSP web experience. I would use psp sized web pages and do graphic buttons and basically copy the longfinger map software which exists on the web. The thing is I can understand how they do this. I willl try some stuff tonight using dreamweaver and photoshop.

I paid for the iBlog software. It cost about 25$ Canadian dollars. It was purchased from an Indian software company. I am using this software to keep my statistics graduate school blog.

I designed a very simple web page for the Sony Playstation Portable.

I used dreamweaver to make a very simple links page for viewing on my PSP to use various commonly used web pages at the school web space.

I was invited and today attended a workshop on using SAS Enterprise Guide. We worked on computers in the Sprott School of business Lab E this morning. I found out about a meeting of the Ottawa Area SAS Users Society that is happening tomorrow morning. To attend this tomorrow I will go back to normal days with early mornings and early nights.

I installed SAS 8.1 on the WinXP side of the laptop. I also installed R 1.9 from my data mining course CD and then did a virus scan of the whole machine. That scan was done with Norton so it did not scan the Linux side of that computer. I have been using my iPod regularly and been listening to the Cyberpsych meets the PDA guy podcast from Australia.

After listening to the PDA guy I tried out iBlog. I used it to create a blog for my grad studies. I hosted it at my school web space. School internet? Lets just say this was part of the law and disorder internet in the 1990's.

I listened to some podcasts, which are in this case just spoken radio like entertainment. But the difference is that they are digital and thus can seemingly be saved for later use or reference. I have also listened to two or three albums of music. I have two reasons to listen to more music. One I need to put more relaxation into my schedule because even reading is work for me. And two I am taking up my music career a bit more including giving a free lesson today at about midnight, in blues playing and also major and minor scales on the guitar. In my studies today and in the podcast I was learning about PDA's as well and I mention this here because the applications I installed and tested on my Palm PDA today were artistic tools. One is called Fretboard and is very useful and not bad as an interface for what it does. It is able to show the fretboard positioning for chords, scales, and notes for a variety of fretted instruments and this is really its power is that it has many fretted instruments I have never played on nor have played with players of these instruments. Another music tool for the palm PDA was the software Tuning Fork which played throught the speaker on the palm perfect A notes at 440. I tried it to play 880 which it did but then the palm froze and needed to be soft reset.

The other PDA art tool was Q draw perhaps more in line with my school training in arts and I used it to draw a floor plan of our apartment. I was quicker and did a better drawing, than I have with other softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop. The reason perhaps is because doing this on the palm was more like holding a sketch pad with a pen instead of a mouse. Yet the various drawing tools are similar to other computer drawing programs where there are tools such as shapes and fill and of course text my all time favorite tool as I was trained to techincal drawing and map making. These types of drawings are incomplete without text labels.

Apparently this months Mac World has some stuff on using the PSP with the Macintosh computer. I may pick it up later this month. I just listened to a pod cast by the PDA guy on my new iPod 60GB. I have almost put 4 GB of songs on now. I have some podcasts( I have surfed the health catagory for podcasts at iTunes store so far) and about one thousand photos. The 60GB iPod photo took a price dive this week as the new models came out so I took advantage of this and picked up one of the old models at a reduced price. I also got an open box item from future shop for further savings. I got an Otter iPod case, l as I would recommend for an iPod, as these are water proof, dust proof, and some of their cases are crush proof. I have simple Otter case for my PDA not the full PDA case they make but just a box. I can work the iPod while it is protected in the case.

I am tempted to buy a 60GB iPod but have set a goal of debit repayment for next weekend that if I don't make it I don't consider the iPod further. I got my PSP working with the eMac again.

Talking about confusion I am thinking that emacs(which are not eMacs) are an answer to my computer needs from the 1980's. I wanted a word processor in those days but could not afford one for our Vic 20.

I have been reading these critcal works about the internet recently:

Rose, Ellen. User Error: Resisting the Computer Culture (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003).

Shenk, David. Data Smog : Surviving the Information Glut (San Francisco, Calif. : Harper Edge, 1997).

Stoll, Clifford. High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian (New York: Double Day, 1999).

Ellen Rose makes some interesting comments about hackers and how she can and can not say who these people are and what motivates them. I am curious to see this attempt being made at all.

on emacs: I think Richard Stallman must have been pretty smart of have assessed our needs as hackers in the 1980s and late 1970's by choosing to build a word processor but perhaps given computing needs of programmers this was not such a great move. He needed emacs for programming in other words writing code. But I cant even be sure that is why he made emacs that is just what I have read. Perhaps I should email him about this or check his web site. As opposed to writers and what we needed I am not so sure Richard Stallman the original author of the emacs software was really creating something free for authors and writers.

A sister worker sent me this link but I haven't checked it out yet. How to encourage women in computing
(http://infohost.nmt.edu/~val/howto.html")

I worked with Dreamweaver for about two hours last night. I also did some Perl research on the web and also on a Perl books CD from O'Reilly. I am updating my blogs regularly. I downloaded all my law course outlines as pdf's to my palm pilot. I chatted at Yahoo using both chitchat and yahoo messenger yesterday. I bought some DVD+R's to use at school where they have DVD burners. I will back up my files soon by taking my USB 20 GB drive to school with the files on it and then burn these files to DVD. I did some planning of this back up Wednesday morning. I also made some back up CD's on my eMac of web files and work related files. I tried the wireless internet at school with my PSP but need to use pop up windows on this wireless network for it to work.

I did not yet buy an iPod. I used the T30 Thinkpad to change the songs on the PSP.

I have my first rack now. It is case for 10 U on wheels and is totally covered but not fully weather proof. It is lockable to a limted extent. I now need a good power bar for this rack. A dual pentium III server for this rack would cost about 400$ US or about 500$ CND. A cheap laptop might be a better idea. I am thinking of writing a book about open source music workstations. I know nothing about Linux music workstations so would present it after and as I learned these workstations.

I am just installing pdf's from my eMac desktop to my palm. I would also like to change the songs on my PSP but it doesn't seem to connect to the eMac and let me access the folder. The PSP does not show up in the finder window when I connect it. I almost bought an iPod yesterday. Maybe I will buy a 20GB iPod today.