Ten Little Chances to be Free

...you can get 64Gb thumb drives on ebay for twenty-three bucks*?

I mean, I guess I shouldn't be surprised, Moore's law being what it is. Still cool and terrifying though. I saw 1Tb hard drives going for under €100 in Darty the other day, and I know France is a couple years behind the curve when it comes to IT, so I guess I really shouldn't be surprised.

Yeah, I bought one of the flash drives. I've been meaning to get something bigger than the 2Gb thumb drive I have, so that I can fuck around with various flavors of Linux until I find something that'll run on my netbook and then actually put it on the hard disk. Because I hate my netbook's OS. Crippled proprietary Novell version of SuSE Linux that sucks cocks in hell. Trouble is, its video card doesn't have native support in most Linux distros, so you have to tinker with patches and shit, and I'd rather not have an unusable computer while that's going on. (Yeah, I made that mistake one too many times.) Hence booting from flash drive. It also lets me screw around with various distros before deciding on one--am excited to try various flavors of Ubuntu, but it might be that OpenSuSE has the best hardware support, since it's closest to the current proprietary OS.

This is about 50% frustration with the current OS, 50% pure urge to tinker. Because tinkering with laptops just isn't easy. I don't think I'll have a desktop until I've settled down (physically), because lugging them all over creation is a pain in the ass, but when I have one it will be my baby. I will build it from scratch and give it an extravagant name and probably pet it when nobody is looking, and tinker with it until its PCI slots are sore. Until then, I will have to unleash the urge with sixteen different variants of Pendrive Linux inflicted upon my netbook.



* From China. With free shipping. There are cheaper ones but they're all sold by shady users with no selling history, which probably means your shit will never arrive.

So I did it. I sent off emails to eight of the apartment listers asking about availability for the first two weeks of August. Two replies so far. One person sent back an incredibly polite email to say that the apartment--which is the one I secretly wanted most, right in the middle of the Latin Quarter--was taken. Oh well. The other reply was in uncapitalized and mangled French, but said that the flat was still available and (I think) that she could have photos of it on Monday. It kind of made me feel better about my French skills.

Installing software on this computer is turning out to be a royal pain in the ass. I am not sure whether HP (who built the computer) or Novell (who are responsible for this Office-Productivity flavor of Linux) are to blame, but it turns out that a lot of really, really basic programs and libraries were 'included' but not installed. And I put disbelief-quotes around 'included' because the packages apparently live on a DVD-ROM that might or might not have been shipped with the computer. The computer that does not have a CD/DVD drive because it's so tiny. What fucking genius thought of that?

For an idea of what I mean by really, really basic: a lot of Linux software doesn't get 'installed' in the Windows sense. Instead you get an archive with the necessary files and the source code in it, and you compile and run the source code yourself. So one of the things you'd think would be absofuckinglutely necessary is a C compiler. But no. GCC is off on 'DVD 1' and I'm left banging my head on the keyboard.

Also it would be really nice to enable client-side DNS caching, because right now it's looking up the DNS server with every request and adding five or ten seconds onto all of my pageload times. And somehow mouse gestures got enabled, although I'm not sure whether Firefox or the OS is to blame for that--all I know is that at random moments when I'm using the touchpad, it'll take me back a page or two. I've lost a bunch of half-written posts and had to rewrite them. Stupid thing. The good thing is that those two issues--DNS caching and mouse gestures--should be fairly easy to turn off if I can ever find where to do it.

/kvetching

About time I updated, huh? We got back on Sunday and I've been farting around with various other things ever since.

The trip was nice. We took a power catamaran down the Erie Canal all the way from Buffalo to Troy. Things were occasionally tense and snappy given that there were three people and only so much space on the boat, but overall it was very relaxing to have a break from the interwebs. Wake up early, stop in a very hopefully-named town* for coffee, drive the boat for a while, try adventurously to cook breakfast in a tiny galley, go through a lock, veg out with a Patrick O'Brian book, go through another lock, drive the boat some more, reapply sunscreen, eat junk food all afternoon, go swimming, oh look more locks, take a nap, dock in another hopefully-named town, have dinner on shore, joke around with dad and brother over beer and/or rum-and-coke, go to bed at a reasonable hour. Lather rinse repeat for a week.

* We passed through, among others, Albion, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Lyons, Rome, Verona, and Medina. And I'm pretty sure we passed Athens on the drive home. Tour Europe and the Mediterranean without leaving upstate NY!

And what did I find awaiting me when I got home but my brand-new tiny computer. And omg is it ever tiny. About the size of a hardback book, only skinnier than most of the books I read. It's been running a little sluggish, but I still haven't installed the extra gig of RAM, so we'll see how that works out. As for the OS, it came with SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, which I'm ambivalent about so far. I'm kind of poised in the middle between power user and Generic End User, having forgotten most of my *nix skillz but wanting more than the dumbed-down user-friendly interface it comes with. So, the irony: I want more than it's given me so far, but I've forgotten how to configure it to give me what I want. I'm sure I'll learn with time, though, and user-friendliness is at least convenient because it came packaged with Firefox and the wireless pretty much configured, and it claims to auto-mount external storage so I hopefully won't have to kick it and swear at it to transfer files off my external hard drive.

So, big and little things I need to do to it at some point: transfer my files, install the extra memory, set up a crippled guest account that can't modify anything or read my files, muck with the equivalent of the start menu to make it display things I actually use, tweak GNOME to be less of a resource pig or switch to a more lightweight window manager, install various things (GIMP, lj client, a dictionary program that runs off internal libraries instead of the 'net, some sort of sound/music editor à la Audacity, the list goes on), modify the deadkeys on my US-intl keyboard layout so I don't keep typing 'ś' by mistake, start experimenting with scripts to mass-edit little changes to my website, and maybe start messing around with Python because that's the language they teach in Smith's programming-for-dummies course. Which I intend to skip, and might not be able to skip if I don't polish up my rusty coding skills.

Actually, what I need to do after I've done the major things like file transfer and RAM is go back through those O'Reilly books on Linux and refresh my memory. Because the GUI for SuSE Enterprise is slick and it makes most of the everyday tasks nice and easy, but it gives you exactly zilch on getting down into the guts of the machine.

Oh yes, and I got piles of paperwork from Smith in the mail. I'm torn between "this is a pain in the ass" and "...I'm going to Smith! :D"

Also there is a trip to Paris in the works for the first two weeks of August. At the moment it's going to be me and mmejavert, but let me know if you want to be on board with it. Or meet us there. I'm going to try to get a sublet apartment, which will be infinitely cooler than a hotel and probably less expensive. The ones I'm looking at are €250-500 a week, or €35-75 a night, and for that price in a hotel you'd be sleeping in a closet and walking down the hall to go to the bathroom. Much better to sleep in a real flat.

So yes, all is going well right now.

I knew my downloading habits were awful and out of control, but every time I checked my available disk space I thought something fishy was afoot, because surely mp3s couldn't be filling up gigabytes quite that fast.

Well.

It turns out mom was only using her shiny 140-gig external hard drive for transferring files, so she bought herself a flash drive instead and unloaded the external one on me.  I am currently less than 1/4 of the way through transferring all my music onto it, and already it's freed up ten gigs on my laptop's 55-gig hard drive.

Okay, maybe it was the music taking up that much space.  Shut uuuuuup.  Now I have plenty of space for it all.  For now.

I've been doing some elementary housecleaning on the computer lately--scheduling Norton to do weekly scans again, this time not at 8pm on a weekday; uninstalling programs I never use; deleting empty folders; getting rid of archives I've stuck on up-file; doing all those pesky updates I keep putting off because they insist on restarting your computer; moving a bunch of archives and bootleg clips out of a temp folder... if I get around to it I might actually reorganize the bulk of my files into a structure that actually makes sense.  And once my mother gets home from her ten-day vacation and (hopefully) grants me access to the external hard drive, I'm finally backing up all of my files.  All of them.  That will be an immense relief.

Mostly due to lady_iphigeneia's prodding, I've downloaded Trillian and Semagic and switched to Winamp as a default music player.  All are shiny.  I had no idea that Winamp could play m4as, otherwise I'd've switched ages ago.

*shifty look* Cleaning my computer, is, of course, a method of procrastination on cleaning my room.  Which has more to worry about than a couple empty folders scattered about.  But honestly, how am I supposed to put my laundry away when I don't have a dresser yet?  And why bother patching the drywall when the gutters are still clogged and the ceiling still leaks every time we get a good thunderstorm?  Bah. Yes, room is still unfurnished--one of the chief obstacles being that it's funnily proportioned and anything bigger than a twin bed wouldn't go well anywhere, but it's bloody impossible to find a twin bed that's not part of some hokey children's furniture set.  Augh.

And that is (mostly, I think?) it.  This entry is doubling as a test for Semagic.  Oh, and the filthy, kinky Enjolras/artillery sergeant crack!smut is coming along, I promise.

Got my computer back on Saturday. Perfectly intact. And now it can't connect to the network because apparently it's not "registered" even though I registered it last year, and computer services is closed on weekends and I didn't have time to go down there today. So I'm writing from a library computer, but I'll probably have it all fixed up by tomorrow.

In the meantime, I proceeded to have an extremely productive weekend. Including finishing a fic (!), finishing my costume, making a proper grocery run, and forcing my mother to watch the TAC video. ( Details! )

Also, this picture amuses me. And not because of the primal scream either.