Hard drive issues caused a failure with installing NT on the Dell.

I was unable to install Win NT on the Dell. Only Win NT and Win 98 will operate the Iomega Ditto drive. May be I will install Win2K and only access the IBM 20 GB secondary drive for now. Yes, I think I will do that now.

I am setting up the Dell computer temporarily with Win NT to help me access some of my computer files from 1999-2003.

I may be missing files from my home computing that occurred between 1999 and 2003. I am not sure I am missing anything but I have two backup sources where these files are stored. These back up sources have not been accessed in a long time. I just need one access to each and a chance to copy off the files. Then the sources can be discarded and I can check all the files I find.

One is an Iomega Ditto Tape Drive. Supports I will use for the drive are here at Iomega's Ditto support site for Win NT.

The second back up source is a difficult IBM 20 GB hard drive. This was my old second hard drive in a Duron system used from March 2002 to late 2003. It is a difficult drive because it has many partitions due to numerous Linux installs on it (done when I was a Linux install Newbie), and some windows repair guys working with it.

So those two sources will be attached to the Dell for offloading. I hope I can network the Dell with my Macs and get the files off. That's plan A.

I have a PS2 mouse, PS2 keyboard, network cable, monitor hooked up the the Dell now. First I will install the hard drive or attempt that. Then I will plug in the Ditto parallel port drive. So those two steps still need to be done and then I will attempt an Win NT install.

The hard drive is now installed as a slave drive in the Dell. I will hook up the Ditto now.

I can not find the Ditto drive so I am cleaning my office more and setting aside this project for today. Everything else mentioned is ready to go. I also need to find my Win NT disk.

I am still making steady progress at backing up the 2007 documents folders for the Macbook1

You could say to quote Marc Smith of Microsoft that, "the internet would be nothing if not for Obsessive-Compulsive users." So I feel obsessive about my backups but they are really needed in case of a hard drive failure or other potential lose of the computer system. I have in business speak added value to home computing.

Back ups continue

I have two documents folders from the Macbook 1 from 2007 backuped to DVD now and have started on a third folder.

The DVD drive in my eMac is still stuck closed

I have not been able to open the DVD drive of my eMac.

Backups continue

I managed to burn one DVD of the documents folder for my Macbook. I made six copies. I call this Macbook, Macbook 1. So this is a 2008 copy of the Documents folder. I also completed burning the 2007 desktops about 6 of them from various months of 2007 of the Macbook. I am now going to make 7 sets of 6 copies of DVD's each of the documents folders from 2007. I have seven folders on a USB hard drive. So this is the next back up run for the Macbook. I am burning these disks at 1 X speed with no errors.

One of these computers I traded for works and is complete.

So I traded away my Sun Ulltra 5 and got two 1U servers, three mid sized towers and one Dell laptop in exchange. I also traded a Peavey Stereo EQ. The stereo EQ cost 99 dollars and was really a mistake as it was a monster and very old. When I can afford it I will buy a proper modern EQ for our music gear set up. So I was testing out these computers and one of the towers seems to be missing a hard drive. One of the towers is a Dell Pentium III 600 Mhz machine and it works and is complete. It has an 80 GB hard drive. I installed Debian 4.0 r3 on it and set it up for someone who I will donate it too.

For the servers I bought a Pentium M processor for one of them and got that in the mail, installed it and it starts up but does not post. The other 1U server is a Sun Fire v120 and for that I bought two hard drives 18 GB models 4177, the right hard drives with caddies. I am waiting for those to arrive in the mail. Other than that I have done no work on the servers. I need to learn more about operating servers.

The Dell laptop needs a power supply and is a Pentium II computer and has one USB port and a Modem.

Back ups at present

I have backed up this blog and my studies blog now. I have not done more work on the bibliography though. I also have the Macbook desktops from 2007 backed up to DVD. Again I have 6 copies of this DVD. I now must move on to backing up the 2007 documents folders from the Macbook. I also have backed up the eMac to DVD but did not label the disks so need to go through a stack of DVD's and load them in the Macbook and then write in magic marker on each DVD what it contains and which copy it is.

I did not back up my studies blog but did start some bibliography work.

I did manually enter the few books from my studies blog from October 2003 into RefWorks and made a rich text bibliography in ASA style. There are a few more books from that month of the blog and a case or two and some newspaper articles. I also downloaded and started to use BibDesk. With BibDesk I manually cited the first two months of the blog. Those files got saved in my studies blogs back up folder on my eMac. But other than that I dropped my bibliography work after the last post.

Back ups of this blog

Here is the path today. I was feeling guilty that I am not reading enough because I am borrowing about 40 books and instead of reading these I am cerfing the Internet. So I started to read some more of the O'Reilly book on PHP and MySQL. I read about MySQL and there is an example of SQL code for adding a book to a database. I get distracted and thought about making a database of all the books I have ever read. I then figured I could grab some books from my studies blog. I of course have to have all the posts to search. I then figured it is time to back up these blogger blogs. So I started with this one which is now five years old. I looked in my directories and found I have about two years of posts not copied and pasted into word processor files. So I have now copied all those approximately 24 months and now every month is copied and pasted from the web into a Microsoft word doc file.

Now I must to do the same for my studies and more studies blog then I can figure a way of scanning it for bibliographic cites. I typically used the McGill legal studies style for my citations. I have many choices now. I can do what the book recommends and use MySQL which is installed on my Macbook and on my Linux computer. I could also install MySQL on this eMac. Or it may in fact already be installed here. I could also use RefWorks but that depends on being a registered student at the university of Ottawa. I could use BibDesk and need to install that on this eMac. I could make a plain text file of the data or use Excel meaning use some tool not especially for books. I could also use Librarything.com. Some of these book specific tools will be able to share the files. So the only problem now is to back up the studies and more studies blog and then extract the citations. From there I will go to RefWorks then download for BibTex and then manually up load to librarything. Also I could use Refworks "Grab it" and may be capture the books right off the blog pages. I may try that now. I am also thinking now before I leap that I should keep a separate list of books that have appeared on my blog only. Once again by writing I have helped solve some problems.

Hard drives for the Sun but thats it for now.

I can not really afford to be buying a lot of parts for the Sun v120 right now. I may buy some hard drives for about 30$ today but that would be it. I am more interested in buying camera gear and groceries at the moment.

This is a DVD for sale right now on ebay.

X8082A 371-0736 8x DVD-ROM/24x CD-ROM Drive.

Swapping computers and parts with someone.

I put the Sun Ultra 5 up for sale for 120$. I have an offer to trade it for some other machines. One machine is a partial Sun fire v120 with Intel 866 Mhz chip and 198 MB PC 100 RAM. Another machine is 1 U rack server with 256 MB DDR but no chip (I did just buy a 1.8 Ghz Pentium M chip for this). Also a foxconn server board again for a Pentium M chip. A few older pentium II's and Penitum III's and one Pentium IV. These older computers are with partial cases and drives.

I researched the Sun Fire v120 and also the Foxconn board which he says is brand new. I will post some of my research later.

tesing posts to blog usng Blog Hud from inside Second Life

posted by Peter Krogstad on Monty using a blogHUD : [permalink]

Documenting some chart making in Open Office and Excel.

This post may be hard to follow but it is for myself to document my techniques and not loose them. If you learn from it you may find it useful for your spreadsheet work. It is also a way for me to practice for work and to push my spreadsheet abilities for data handeling.

I downloaded some data that was free. There were only 5 years covered. I have been using years as my X axis for the past two weeks. The data was divided by age groups and I only downloaded 5 year age bands from 45 to 89 and then 90 and over. It was for cause of death data and is published annually. These vital statistics are free for download. I have around 27 causes picked out. I had the data for both sexes and for men and for women. So for each year I had a column and for each age band and each of the 3 gender categories I had the 27 causes in rows. All in all about 750 rows of data.

I downloaded that data into a spreadsheet. I then created a new sheet in that workbook. Editorial Note: When one downloads data it seems the workbook has only the one sheet unlike when one creates a new workbook with three sheets. In the new sheet I copied totals for cause of death for the same age bands and the same gender categories but from all causes of death in Canada. This was copied from a separate download. These two sheets were then not changed and after this step; data were only copied out from these two download sheets. Then in a third sheet I made my own row labels for the genders and age bands matching the second sheet's row ordering. The labels from the database were lengthy and unreadable in the width of my spreadsheet window and the differences between the labels could not be viewed easily. Editorial note: the labels were so long not even a 30 inch monitor would display them completely I am guessing. These new labels were shorter and after much copy and pasting I had made all some 31 rows labels by age bands and gender categories. They were in the same row ordering as the downloaded deaths by all causes. I then made five year columns after these row labels in the first column and copied the totals deaths by all causes by years data to this sheet.

Then I went back to a copy of the death by specific causes download in separate workbook and saved a copy of that download as a text file or comma separated file. I then closed it and imported it. I imported the data as a text file. This is one of my data handling tricks that could also be done with regular expressions if one was using a programming or scripting language. The picking of the appropriate delimiters is the trick. I chose delimiters during the import that would cut the long row labels in this file so that the specific causes' names, age band's names and gender names, were all brought in to this new spreadsheet in separate columns. Actually I used three columns and then copied these labels into a new fourth sheet in my main workbook. The row order for the 750 rows was preserved.

I then went back to the first sheet in the main workbook with all the cause specific data and copied all the data but not the labels into the new fourth sheet. So sheet four was the same as sheet one, but I now had three columns for labels and the labels were short and readable on the screen. I then made new rows in sheet four at the top of the beginning of each specific gender category (both sexes, males, females) and the beginning of each age band (5 year age bands 45-89 and the age band 90 and over). So when for example, the data for both sexes, 45 to 49,and 27 rows of specific causes of death started in the sheet, a new row started the 27 rows for both sexes, 45 to 49 years old. Then going back to sheet three with the total causes of death by genders and age bands, I added two more columns between the labels and the yearly totals columns to make a proper column alignment with the three column labels in sheet four. Then one at a time, the new rows I had created in sheet four were pasted with the rows from the 31 age and gender specific death by all causes data and short labels for gender and age bands from the third sheet.

I was now ready to calculate some results. I created formulas for counts for specific causes over total causes and then made this number a percent. I used the real number for the total but for the specific cause count I used a cell reference. I then filled down the columns into the 27 specific causes effecting the calculation for all five years and all 27 causes for the first set of data which was 45 to 49 both sexes. This was the only data I worked through today. I still had these 27 cause specific rows by 5 years columns of data highlighted after the fill so I then used format cells to change all the numbers to percents with 6 decimal places.

I then charted all non-zero rows basically following the charting techniques in Excel I have learned at work but I did it in Open Office. Somethings are done differently in Open Office charts. I then also did a counts chart that matched the percents charts but makes no reference to total deaths. After a long break, I spent some time formating the charts for printing and printed the two charts out.

I then saved and closed all the workbooks. I thought it would be a good idea and relaxing and good for my intellectual health to document all my work so I have posted this notes.

I used Disk Utility to Seven Pass erase a USB key.

I am giving a small 256 MB USB key to a coworker. I copied all the files off of it this morning and then did a seven pass erase of the key. I will now bring it to work for her.

I am getting some old SLR lenses

I am very tempted this past year to buy a Digital SLR camera. I have gone about buying old SLR non digital lenses this week. I may have over spent on these.

Hard drive space on the Sun Machine.

I think I ran out of hard drive space on the Sun Machine. I am not using it much so will wait to upgrade the hard drive. The memory I bought for it is may be the wrong type. I have updated a few items now. That was all I did with it last time it was on. I have learned to turn it off now properly.

Sun machine

I am just launching Update Manager on my Sun machine, Crystal-Sun-1. I turned off the machine last time and it might have been during updates so I may have incomplete updates.

Chapter one read now in Solaris 9 for Dummies

I read chapter one in Solaris 9 for Dummies today on a bus ride between cities.

The eMac2 finder is working again.

The fix worked. I had run out of hard drive space but after deleting the two most recent burn folders I have some 8 GB of space back on the eMac2 and the finder is working again.

The eMac2 is having troubles but fixes are being attempted and emergency critical backups have begun for right now in case of further failure.

I was making some backups on the eMac2 using backup files from the 2006 user folder on one of the USB drives. Then a DVD being used as media failed to eject. Then the finder would not respond. The computer has been like this for almost two weeks, without a finder. So the thoughts of backing up the present files were quickly brushed aside as the finder could not be used.

I did think last night to access the folders remotely using the Macbook1. So slowly late last night I have been copying the email folder and mail download folder off of the eMac2. I have shut off the email and the plan is to use the email software on the Macbook now.

Speaking of changing email software, I did loose a little email for about 1 hour's worth of incoming email on the Linux machine when I thought of switching to Linux for a main email computer. But I should learn to copy Mac Mail to Linux and also to Thunderbird email software on Vista. I still do not have a way of transferring email between operating systems other than Netscape email. I am hoping Thunderbird can do this too as Netscape is now closed as a company. This reminds me I need to access Netscape downloads and download some historical copies of the browser.

After my back up I will try to read all this email in the IBM under both Linux and also Vista. If this works I will try to load all the email into Solaris but I doubt there is room on the old Solaris box

I am also remotely deleting the last folder made on the eMac2 which was the burn folder for the backup I was trying to make. I am hoping that when this burn folder is deleted the finder will work again. If this does work out this way the situation will be less critical.

The only follow up may be simply increases the backup frequency for the eMac in future. I guess I would also stop burning disks on the eMac2 and try to avoid a similar problem in the future. I may also continue to follow through on switching some main computer tasks off of the eMac2 and onto a different but newer computer.

I can also just look up how to manually eject the DVD and that may solve the problem too.

Still burning backup DVD's from the 2006 state of the Macbook1.

The eMac DVD drive is not opening so I switched to Macbook for backups and then turned off the virus software and the Macbook is doing fine burning the DVD's of the 2006 end of year files that were on the Macbook1. These are copied off the USB drive they were stored on by LaCie Backup software which backed up the user folder then in 2006.

The email from 2006 is all backed up now to six DVD's and properly labeled. The whole user folder is not being backed up to a number of separate DVD's and I am not sure how many DVD's I will need to split the user folder into. So far I have the folders and files decided for two DVD's and the first disk is now burned to six identical copies. The backups continue.

Buying a Tadpole laptop

I am looking into buying a Tadpole laptop. These run Sun Solaris as the operating system. I also have bought Sun Solaris 9 for Dummies for 13 dollars including shipping through Amazon.ca's network of bookstores.

My final exam was written. I did so so.

I think I only scored B on my final exam. I know I had a few questions wrong. I have no formal classes until the fall now when I will study simulations. I am designing a simulation and have written some code in R to simulate a working week. I have some pseudo code that I can now implement in other computer languages.

I enjoyed a creative person's gathering in Second Life or a creativity meeting in a virtual world

I spent two hours this afternoon in Second Life enjoying a creativity gathering. I met artists from Europe and America.

Slowly installing the media wiki on the Debian Linux IBM Thinkcentre

I have not been using Linux much. I did start Apache2 last week and downloaded Mediawiki and started MySQL. I used KPackage to install all of these. Yesterday before school but after work I followed the instructions to get PHP5 to allow MySQL. I did need again to change permissions to edit a file. I had to go as far as using a root terminal to get chmod to work on the file. I edited with vi and then chmoded the file back. I expanded the media wiki software in the var/www folder and stopped.

I have been using the media wiki quite a bit on the Macbook for my study organisation. I have also been using LATeX much more and have learned to use BibTeX now.

For fun I have been playing Eve Online.

I must focus on school work now so tinkering will have to be put on the back burner for a week or so because it takes a lot of time to do.

Fink is now updated and the Macbook has a fresh install of the X code developer tools.

I updated Fink after following their instructions for update problems. I had to command line delete all my developer tools and then reinstall from the Leopard DVD. I then was finally able to install ImageMagic. I have that name wrong. I now need to adjust both Drupal and Mediawiki to use ImageMagic for handling graphics.

Drupal is up and running with some issues.

I got Drupal running now on my Intranet. This is also running on my Macbook and will only be accessible when hooked up to my router, I think. I need to schedule a cron job for this application. I also need to install ImageMagic or GD image software. Both Drupal and MediaWiki need these image softwares.

I will now install Drupal on my Macbook.

I have MySQL running now and PHP 5 working with Apache2 on the Macbook. So now I will investigate Drupal as I build an Intranet based on my Macbook. If this works out I may run another Intranet server on my IBM machine under Linux.

Mediawiki is installed on my Macbook now

I have Mediawiki installed now. I have started to use it to record my research but at this point I am only sketching out basic main pages. I had installed the 64 bit MySQL by mistake and that is why it would not work. I reinstalled the proper version for MySQL for my Macbook and it worked. I followed the very good instructions at the Mediawiki wiki to install Mediwiki and it is now working.

I am setting up a study wiki on my own computer not to be web based.

I was using Librarything.com and got all excited by messages between grad students about what they use for organising their research. They seemed to have settled on Wiki's. I use blogs and emails and appointments and pen, paper, and ink. I also use a variety of structures and software tools. I have tried using Microsoft Project software but it is not that great.

To use a Wiki I selected I needed to install it on my Macbook. I first had to start Apache which I have done. I then needed to install MySQL 5.0 which I have downloaded and run two installers and then added the preference panel for MySQL. But so far I can not get MySQL started. I have studied MySQL in the past. I also managed to edit the file httpd.conf for apache so that PHP 5.0 will run now. I had to use vi for the edit and also chmod to change the permissions on the file so I could save my edit. I then changed the permissions back too. I had to use Linux for Dummies to use vi and to use chmod. I will leave this note here and report back later. I did take a break at this point to read some books before documenting this. I am now going back to the install of MediaWiki following the instructions for that software. It promises TeX support and images. I am going to run MediaWiki on my laptop and not serve it over the net.

Ice Dove for email

Ice Dove is thunderbird for Linux. I am attempting to transfer all my Mac mail to Ice Dove this morning.

I deleted my Eve Online subscription.

I played the computer game Eve Online for a little more than one month. I was motivated to try out Eve Online by a powerpoint slide presentation by someone who works at IBM. Roo Reynolds who was presenting his slides on computer games (social, massively multi player, virtual world) to a British charity audience shared these powerpoint slides at Slide Share.(Tracy Kennedy introduced me to Slide Share by putting my Slides from my facebook paper there). He was showing the charities what games could do for charities. Sort of like the Second Life Relay for Life event, which I tried out a little last summer with some other students. His main point about Eve Online was that it was cooperative. Players, although strangers would help each other play the game. This could help me understand community based training and collaborative learning of computer operating. About a week ago, I was able to experience this in Eve Online as two other players helped me with a mission. This consisted of clicking buttons to make the play ships shot at other computer played ships until they were dead. So two other players helped me kill these computer ships, or in the language of role playing "NPC's" ships and thus complete the mission. Of course, the whole major theme is space ship battle.

I deleted my subscription because the game was taking too much valuable time from my home life and other activities and was costing money and I have no extra money. Also my main focus both with computers and school work is not in the entertainment gaming field. Yes, I can make connections to other topics like helping strangers and cooperative play but as I said it took too much time and too much money. I have also been able to experience the cooperation at a basic first time experience level. But games have traditionally been used in education to effect cooperation (aka Game Theory).

Enough with that game and information society cash out stream. This will save me 15$ per month as that was going to become the cost of that game. The game Second life is now costing me 33$ a month on a regular fee basis plus costs of buying land and other items. In fact, I am this weekend, buying another 512 basic lot adjoining my present virtual 3D land holdings

SubEthaEdit

I downloaded a trial copy of SubEthaEdit. This software for the Mac allows editing by more than one person and also editing over the Internet. I have not tried it out with someone over the Internet but my brother is willing to try it with me. I have this software on both my Macbook and my eMac.

I downloaded Adobe InDesign to learn.

I downloaded a trial copy of Adobe InDesign to learn for a job at work. The problem now is version conflict. The tutorial book I have from work covers a version and, in fact, the versions of InDesign we use at work are not the same as the latest offering from Adobe. This could cause problems. Oh well I will install this latest version on my Macbook running Leopard. I read too at Adobe's web site that Dreamweaver 8 which I bought for my Macbook may give me problems under Leopard and Adobe will be offering no help with these problems. There is a solution to this and that is to uninstall Dreamweaver from the Macbook and install it on my eMac. But I have not yet found Dreamweaver to be a problem under Leopard. So if I did not have to learn this for work I would not be installing it on the Macbook and learning it. I would be using Open Source software all the way. Then again, this is learning that is work related.

I installed Vista on the IBM Thinkcentre

My school program is part of the Microsoft academic network so we get free Microsoft operating systems. I upgraded the Windows XP to Vista on the IBM Thinkcentre about three weeks ago. Some programs no longer work now. Also when I install a program it does not appear in the programs list. I am not able to use the Linksys Music bridge right now. All that work scrubbed.

Playing Eve On-Line

I started playing Eve On-Line this evening. This space adventure game is played by thousands of persons at the same time. I just created a Character and started to learn to play the game. I am playing a female character named Margarite Liberte and she is a Gallente character. I will get the spelling right and figure out more of the web presence of this game as I go. Game costs look to be twenty dollars per month. Is this the space simulation for me? My total game costs would be about 53$ per month including Second Life membership and land costs. Also this pressures the urge to buy a new monitor or new computer although the Macbook was bought knowing the Macbook would not be good for Second Life. It does seem to manage to play Eve Online with only two crashes so far. I tried Eve on the IBM Thinkcentre too running under Vista and it was fine. I could not install the game under Debian 4.0 Linux because I am missing a python component.

Successful burn of only one disk

I have may be ruined three of the 8 GB disks because they could not be verified by the eMac's burning software. I did get one disk burned and verified though. For the other three disks the data got burned and is on the disks it just has not been verified. I did also manage to get the one 2006 documents folder down to below 8 GB so it would fit on only one of these 8 GB double Layer (DL) dvd disks.

I am preparing the eMac's documents folders from 2006 and 2007 for burning

Again I was deleting movies and burn folders that had been left over on the documents folders I want to back up. I have some new 8 GB DVD's now. I have fifteen so I will use 12 of them to do two back ups. I think I can just back up the one documents folder from the end of 2006.

The backups continue I am moving on to the eMac backups now with the Macbook mostly completed.

I spent this morning preparing the backups of the Desktop folders of the eMac for DVD archiving. I inspected the five dated Desktop folders that go back to December 2006 when I bought the 250 LaCie USB drives. So there are four Desktop folders covering 2007. I also made a folder of the Desktop for now, January 2008.

I took a different approach and an important step I am realising. I went into each Desktop folder and deleted old burn folders and movie files. These were mostly movies I had collected from google that are copyright free . These were downloaded for the PSP or iPod. Most were movies used in Internet research such as Apple computer TV advertisements. Another movie was a documentary on how the Internet came to be. This deleting is important because it will help not only cut down the size I need to archive but it will also clean up the back ups in case someone else has to open them some day. It also cleans them up for my own use and I learned some practical file management this way. I do not need to back up other peoples stuff so much. These movies are only related to me as research sources I have used and will most possibly be still available from the Internet in the future. Also I do not need to save more than one copy; not one copy in each desktop. So for these movies I left one copy in the first Desktop it was found in and then deleted these large files in future desktop folders.

So I now have all these Desktop folders ready for archiving to DVD. The six folders should now fit on one 4.7 GB DVD and I have at least six blank DVD's to use for this. This is a way of clearing up the eMac's LaCie 250 GB backup drive. The other LaCie drive had 80 GB free after the backups last week and it is now back in regular service for the Macbook again but not with Time Machine or LaCie backup software but instead a simple copy of the three basic folders every other month.

These three folders are
1. Documents
2. Desktop
3. Mail and Mail downloads

I am buying fifteen 8 GB double layer DVD's today for 20 dollars and then the next purchase will be 50 or 100 4.7 GB DVD's.

I helped some other poor computer owners to use their computers.

I won't go into great details because I respect the privacy of these persons. But I did try to upgrade the RAM on an old PowerBook Lombard but made the mistake of installing the 512 MB RAM chip on the top RAM slot. I now have to return to try again and this time install the RAM on the bottom slot. This should bring the Lombard up to 576 MB RAM. The only other thing I will do for this person's Lombard is get it a bigger hard drive. But that can wait for now but I will start to look around for a brand new 20 or 30 GB hard drive.

Yesterday, also I connected someone to the Internet. She was paying for the service for about 5 months without using it. This was Rogers Yahoo Internet service that was delivered by a technician but not hooked up. The technician could see that she had only a windows 98 Pentium1 laptop but left her stranded with the bill. I helped her buy an new HP low end desktop as a microloan and gave her my Sony LCD 17" TV monitor for a complete recent system which she has been learning to use. So yesterday we hooked the system up to the net and then I updated a variety of softwares and she now has an email address. She has some basic understanding of what she is doing now but we covered a lot in the two hours of help. I have her using Thunderbird, Firefox and Open Office.

There is one more person to help and perhaps today she will also get some help.

The 160 GB LaCie drive is now working as the Music Library folder on the IBM Thinkcentre

I did in the end just delete the Time Machine back up on the LaCie 160 GB drive. I also in this move decided that I would not be using Time Machine. I was being sour on the Mac and the new Time Capsule drive sold by Apple. So I simply deleted the Time Machine back up folder.

It took a while to get the LaCie drive working with the IBM Thinkcentre running XP. In the end I formatted the drive on the eMac using Disk Utility as a MS-DOS disk. iTunes on XP asked if I wanted to copy my music library to the LaCie when I changed the store folder of iTunes to the LaCie. So this worked fine and it works with the Linksys music bridge. So that is that. Too bad the Linksys bridge does not also handle video.

Configuring the use of external hard drives

I am these past few weeks deciding that I will clear off one of the LaCie USB external drives, the one for the Macbook and then use it as the Time Machine drive for the Macbook. Then I will not need a new USB external drive for the WinXP streaming music library and can not afford a new drive right now. This swapping of Time Machine drives will free the LaCie 160 GB pocket drive for use as a music library. I had started to use the 160 this way when I considered that I might carry it around and loose it. Thus public not personal files like a music library seem to be appropriate for a drive that might be off site and possibly lost.

I do have some very personal voice memos though which I should make sure stay on only the eMac. I used the Griffen iTalk microphone and my first 60GB iPod photo to record these memos and I no longer record voice memos that way. I can now use my Blackberry to record voice memos but have not really recorded any of these yet.

The LaCie 160 drive is all cleared off except the backup from Time Machine which I will try to transfer to the new Time Machine drive. The old 250 Macbook backup drive is being cleared off still and backed up to DVD's in fact six copies of each DVD. Four of these copies will be mailed to family members each person getting two copies of each disk. I have some cardboard boxes for mailing that are filling up with DVD's now. I did buy more blank DVD's and DVD's sleeves. I will use up this new supply of fifty DVD's sometime today. I will not quite finish the back up and clear up but have about 80 GB free now so I can start the Time Machine on the drive today. I have also copied some folders to the eMac's 250 GB external drive.

I am almost done backing up all the 2006 backups which mostly include a variety of dated copies of three major folders for different dates through the year. The folders are the Desktop, the Documents and the user folder.

So now I am almost ready with enough free space on the Macbook 250 external drive to start Time Machine as I said. Then I can start the music drive on the Windows XP computer today too. This means two help files are needed from the Apple Web site. One help file explaining how to transfer or change Time Machine drives and then a second help file or help web page to change the store folder for the music in iTunes on the WinXP computer. This does tie down the iTunes to having the external drive running but it does not have to absolutely use AC power. So this should help with my habit or keeping all devices not in use turned off and not on some sort of on state. All those AC adapters left plugged in produce heat and thus use wasted electricity

The Canon IP Pixma 4300 will not print duplex from the Debian computer.

So although I could select duplex and the printer tried to print duplex it did not in fact work. The pages were printed upside down and right side up alternating as is needed but the paper feed did not grab the first sheet and draw it back into the printer. May be there is a clue in this description as to how to write a better driver. I guess I should write at least one driver to meet Linus Torval's jocular challenge of "real programmers write their own drivers" but I would counter that reality is a myth and anyone can be a real programmer and, in fact, the world is full of real programmers and very few unreal programmers. I am only playing with words here and must get beyond this aggression towards Linus Torvals caused by some negative experiences of Linux geeks in the past.

Returning the RAM and buying more ink.

I will after work today and after doing local errands return the PC 5300 Desktop RAM and get a refund. I will then buy some black ink for the Canon IP Pixma 4300 and further test it on Linux. Apparently I can print duplex with Linux and need to test this. This will mean I do not have to buy an HP printer just for the Debian computer. There was this past week a nice large format HP printer on sale. But I can just not afford this right now. May be in the summer when this particular printer is cheaper I will buy it. The IP Pixma 4300 is now on sale for only 100 dollars and I paid 200 dollars about a year ago.

The Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge streaming music device arrived and I just set it up.

I decided to set up the Linksys Wireless-G Music Bridge model WMB54G streaming music device and see if it worked. It does work right out of the box on the IBM Thinkcentre PC running windows XP. It also can use optical connected digital audio. Thus pleased with this device, I will keep it. Rather than try to clear off my current USB external hard drives, I will buy a new 500 GB LaCie USB external hard drive for just music on the PC. Then I will set the iTunes up to use this external drive for its store library.

The IP 4300 printer works with the Debian computer

I did get the Debian computer to print a test page to the Canon IP 4300 and may be able to print with duplex as well but I am all out of black ink right now.

I am taking back the memory and Linksys streaming music device

I am taking these back to the store for a refund.

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.

One laptop per child

Giving one of this laptops to a child in the developing world(including Afghanistan) makes rational economic sense for buying a laptop for the kids in your life too. Where else does 399$ US buy you a kid proof laptop for younger kids? You could buy a used older laptop I suppose. For the 399$ your kid gets a designed for kids laptop and then another one is donated to a kid in a developing country. Sure they need water and food more than a laptop. But buy someone a meal they eat for one day. Teach them to grow a meal they eat for life. The laptop can be seen as a tool for building communities. Visit www.laptop.org

Memory upgrades.

It will cost about 200$ to buy 2 GB of Kingston PC5300 laptop RAM from Futureshop to upgrade the memory in my Macbook. I have not yet priced the 4 GB of RAM I need for my new desktop to bring it up to Maximum. I may need to reinstall Debian or find some way of repartitioning the hard drive because I want to adjust the swap space on the hard drive. Right now I have 2 GB of swap space and if the desktop can be upgrade to 4 GB RAM I will need to upgrade the swap space to 8 GB of Swap space. Swap space is space on the hard drive that is used like RAM for moment by moment memory needs. It is recommended that swap space be set to double the real RAM size. I think this used to be called Virtual Memory on early to middle aged Macs.

KPhoto

I did get KPhoto to upload photos from my SonyT20 camera. The camera connects as a USB device. I simply used the file browser in Gnome to copy and paste the photos into KPhoto. Or was it import from a folder they were copied and pasted too? So the photos can get into the computer. I have not tried printing them yet and Canon do not have Linux drivers for the printer I own.

Second Life viewer on Linux

I have been using the Second Life viewer successfully under Linux a few times now. It is almost like a new game and very responsive.

Leopard updated this morning

Leopard on the Macbook updated itself this morning. The IBM computer took some getting used to. I am still using Apple keyboard short cuts. I need to relearn or readapt to PC short keyboard cuts I found I could run Second Life under Linux. I also learned to use the Konqueror browser. I do need firefox for some web pages but so far can not install firefox under Debian using the Synaptic package manager. I also have not found K package yet I did just now while writing this post install KDM and may have KDE working soon enough. In fact, as I proof read this I was asked by the computer which default window manager I wanted to use and I selected KDM. I am restarting now and will see what happens.  I did not yet get KDE. I also in this install run/download installed numerous K packages. I also just got a DVD to play apparently violating some law perhaps concerning copyright. I downloaded some package that was a library for decoding DVD's. When I did this K package popped up. So with all of the above I am getting there with Debian Etch.

Only hardware issues so far with new IBM desktop.

The Debian Net install process is just downloading software as it is in the Select and install software phase right now. I updated the Windows XP first and ran Norton. The only issue I had was finding a caddy or really a piece of metal to hold the Western Digital 200 GB second hard drive. The drive is installed and formatted now. There are 30 seconds remaining in this phase. I will update more later.

Leopard is taking a little getting used to.

I have now been using Leopard for about 12 hours. I used it all day today from about 1 PM until now.

The Visual Studio project is done now.

I have a version of the Windows software installer now and just figured out one would make an installer as a sub part of an application. This was done as an exercise for school. I should touch it up a little bit now but I have one version now I can email to our instructor before Wednesday.

The Leopard install is complete now

Leopard is up and running on the Macbook. I have about 5 GB free space on the hard drive now.

The Leopard install has begun

I have placed the Leopard install disk in the Macbook and rebooted and then followed instructions. Everything seems fine as the installer checks the inegrity of the DVD disk. Is this a sexual metaphor "put the disk in"? Then what is integrity checking all about or choosing a hard drive to upgrade? May be gendered interpretations fall short? But may be they are right on!

One last task before install of Leopard is dragging out but that's because I am not working on it right now.

I decided I had better get some school homework done before installing Leopard. Allowing some waiting time is also allowing some build up of excitment here. All the backs up are now done. But I have some school work that I can only do at home on the Macbook. I could complete it at school too on lab computers. But it is much more convenient to complete it at home. It is almost done now. It really is not difficult because the teacher has made a step by step guide to the homework. Only the last step is not given and I have completed that once in the lab where we learned this a few weeks ago. The assignment is to make an installer project in C# using Visual Studio. Then we must add a license agreement. I am almost done the step by step part and when this is done I will log off WinXP on the Macbook and install Leopard.

Then Monday I install Debian 4.0 r1 on an IBM M50 desktop which should arrive that day. I have Monday off of work. I will post details of the Linux install after the Leopard install is done but I am right now also preparing for the Linux install but won't give details right now.

You should back up your computer before installing an upgrade or new OS.

Following the advice to back up my computer before the upgrade to Mac OS 10.5 I am backing up my Macbook.

So far I have burned four DVD's of the Desktop folder as of last night. I burned two of these DVD's on Kodak DVD's and two on Memorex DVD's. I also did this with four disks for the documents folder. All other folders than documents and desktop were considered two large for DVD back up.

I also used one external 250 LaCie USB hard drive to copy these two folders once. I also used my eMac and the LaCie back up software on the eMac to back up the user folder on the Macbook to a second LaCie 250 USB external drive attached to the eMac. These two computers are connected to a router in common which keeps them networked together.

Another step is still in progress and that is to use the LaCie backup software on the Macbook to back up many different folders like the systems folder, the users folder, the library, and the applications folder to a third smaller 160 GB LaCie USB external drive. So far backing up the applications folder this way has not worked so a copy of it was copied to the drive.

Windows XP is also installed on the Macbook so a copy of the major folders was made to the first USB external drive mentioned above and then this was copied to the third drive as well. Some Windows folders on the Macbook could not be copied due to permissions issues.

The last step will be to use the LaCie back up software to make one more copy of the user folder to the third drive. Then the backups will be considered completed.

Installing Leopard on the Macbook.

I will make a series of posts now about intsalling Leopard on my Macbook. I paid 109 dollars plus tax for this Mac OS 10.5 last night.

The community group web site will not close.

So the people in charge of the community group project decided not to close their web site after all. May be there is more paid work in web mastering? I at one time made a goal to earn just a little money making web sites. This I have now done.

Apple updates.

I just updated iTunes to version 4.5 and Quicktime.

New computer ordered.

I am happy to buy an IBM computer now that IBM have settled with thier workers in Italy. They held a strike in the on-line game of Second Life. I ordered a Pentium 4, 3 Ghz hyper threaded certified used desktop. It has Gigabyte ethernet, an 80 GB hard drive and a CD burner with DVD playing ability. I also ordered a Western Digital 250 GB hard drive to have a second harddrive for installing Debian 4.0. So again I will have a dual boot Debian Linux/ Windows XP box.

ProView 17" monitor works with Solaris machine.

I paid only 40$ for a 17 inch monitor. It is an old style CRT monitor not an LCD. But it works fine with the Solaris computer so I now have that machine looked after. The monitor is brand new though. I am still tempted to buy an IBM desktop or Thinkpad to run Debian 4. These certified used IBM machines are fairly cheap right now.

Pain staking hand editing of Moving Type(MT) main index file worked.

I started a new blog for accounting the explorations I do through my Second Life avatar Peter Krogstad. This morning I created an edit in a Moving Type(MT) template. I used Moving Type for the new blog and put it in my cybercitizen web site here
http://cyborgcitizen.org/pkrogstad/index.html.


I used the witty name for the blog Just a Second Life Avatar's Blog. I made a table banner with 40 little Second Life screen pictures of my avatar. This was what took the hand coding. It was tough uploading too. I made a goal to completing this before going out today and I am now done. So I achieved this goal. I worked very hard.

I spent the day at work coding in SAS.

I am happy to report I have been paid to code. I have a job and my duties this week became coding in SAS. I spent almost every minute at work today writing a SAS program. I have proven to be very good at assisting my boss with his database work too. I credit this to clear communication as a nagging goal.

I also have been able to become an obsessive documenter. I wrote a lot of comments in my code today explaining each and every step in SAS comment lines. Being a blogger of my own daily life and other mundane topics has improved my skills in this regard.

Second Life progress update.

I have been studying inside Second Life with the help of Tracy Kennedy and Joanna Robinson. Tracy is writing her Ph.D. with Barry Wellman at the University of Toronto and Joanna is a research associate at Simon Fraser. I joined them at a virtual campus last fall. I have since joined them at a meeting of the Communications, Information and Technology section of the American Sociology Association and wrote a paper on facebook and privacy for that event. I just posted it Thursday night at www.webpagex.org.

I have now learned more about Second Life by reading books. I read just a little of the Offical Guide to Second Life and with that created another account and avatar and went through orientation island again where I better learned to fly. This has really helped me out. I moved my house or should I say my offices to a PG sim and it is more pleasant to see on screen now. I find I am spending more time on-line there now in this virtual reality world that is like photoshop for 3 dimensional stuff. It has cost me close to 400 dollars now in about 1.5 years of use.

I am going to open a blog now for this virtual world and report my progress there. I will post the new blog address here when it is set up.

Closing a web site for a community group I am associated with and worked for on this web site.

Well I had a job as a web master for about 14 months. I did only a few pages at that web site and will be closing it now after October ends. I will send in my last invoice and create a page to keep in place to announce the closing. I will may be now that I am thinking of it move the hosting to a single page at NCF. I have never closed a web site before. I read a little about eGovernment last night. I am mostly working in government these days.

Backups continuing.

I made some backups on my eMac at the beginning of the month and now mid-month. I am no longer backing up blogs with hard copy.

Starting to think my eMac is going to replaced with an iMac.

My eMac is a key tool for using old Pre Mac OS X software. I was thinking I would get an iMac to replace it but am now thinking instead I will wait and save up for a new stand alone monitor and use this for the Solaris computer and also get a Linux desktop computer. I would keep the eMac but also move to more use of Linux desktops. A new monitor will cost about 300$ and that new PC could be anything from an IBM Pentium IV to a more modern dual Intel. I will wait a few years and replace my Macbook with a Macbook Pro.

I am properly "by the book" reconditioning my Macbook battery.

I wonder if when I tried to buy an extra Macbook battery about half a year ago, I helped Apple discovery the flaw in the Macbook battery. They issued a firmware update or software update for that which I applied to my Macbook. They had also issued a firmware update earlier for the fan in the Macbook. At any rate I only have one battery and I am running my Macbook on battery power now and when it sleeps I will leave it off for five or more hours then re-power it. The Macbook might be off line from about 3 am until about 8 or 10 am. I will now update a few blogs and make sure to unplug the Macbook from digital audio and also external monitor so I can move it around this morning when I clean and move furniture. I am also buying a Pelican 1080 case for this Macbook before I carry it on my bike. That way it can be in an accident and if a car runs over it it will be safe.

All computers are working well.

My eMac and Macbook are both working fine. My Compaq Debian system is ok but I don't use it much at all. My Sun Ultra 5 is not being used either and it is now without a monitor. I have an 8 GB Nano which I paid full price for but they are now on sale at half that price. I also have a 30 GB iPod video but I am trying to sell it. My Palm Treo 600 is still working fine too.

The book Windows Vista for Dummies arrived in 3 days from Amzon.ca and in two business days.

Wow that was the fastest on-line order yet with the book I ordered for my partner's friend arriving in two business days. It took only one day to travel after being shipped.

BackUps begun for month end and quarter end time.

I was forced to move my main previous computers back up folder off the eMac onto one of the LaCie drives. This reminded me to back up the two computers. I will start this process now but really for the Macbook I will wait until some school work is done. But blogs and the eMac will be backed up now.

The computer was delivered and my friend gave me an Obusforme backpack for my work.

I helped my friend unpack the computer and guided her through plugging it in and turning it on and off. She will be using Open Office and soon be reading the two books, The Internet for Dummies and Windows Vista for Dummies. These books are coming in the mail from Amazon.ca. She bought a computer desk from Staples Business Depot. With the desk she got a free Obusforme backpack and this is a back support backpack. She gave this to me as she does not use backpacks.