Joseph Brower

I’ve been tinkering around with social networking a bit, specifically with Facebook.  It’s nice, nothing amazing, but it is nice to contact some old friends, and to meet new people.  My biggest complaint is that it doesn’t seem to have a focus or a direction, which isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t really a good thing either.  I guess it just makes Facebook unique.  I’ve set up Ubuntu 10.04 to integrate with it, along with Twitter, and it works well.  If it wasn’t for that, I probably wouldn’t use it.  Right now I see it as more of a toy.  The privacy policy doesn’t permit me to use it for much, and most of the notifications I get are about games my friends are playing.  I’ll try it out for a bit longer.  I may end up with a few crazy ideas myself to try to build something similar but with more focus.  We’ll just have to see what happens.

Social networking is really a marvel in and of itself.  It lets you reach a large audience very quickly and, when used responsibly, can promote good ideas and encourage collaboration.  Just like any tool though, I’m noticing more and more that it really can mess up your life.  I keep finding stories of people doing stupid things and then updating their Facebook page to reflect that.  That just doesn’t seem wise.  Oh well, I guess as long as I’m not horribly stupid and not anxious to let the world know, I should be ok.

As many of you already know, Ubuntu 10.04 is slated to be released April 29th.  So I figured I’d grab the release candidate, throw it onto my workstation, and give it a try.  I know that there may be a few bugs and such, but usually by this point, anything major has been fixed.

First off, the only problem that I’ve had thus far is that my webcam doesn’t seem to work in Skype anymore.  It simply isn’t detected.  It worked perfectly in 9.10, but I guess drivers have changed, and Skype doesn’t know where to look now.  The camera still works in Cheese and such, so I’m confident it’s something like that.

Other than that, I’ve found the bootup to be quicker by a few seconds.  Also, the installation was very streamlined and easier to work with.  The updated packages are great.  Even my g15 keyboard has better packages now.  The new theme is nice, but the icons on the left side take some getting used to.  Once you get used to it though, it isn’t all that bad.  This has also been more stable. Before I would get Xorg restarts when using ram intensive applications, that appears to have been fixed now.  Only time will tell though.  Let me know how it works for you.

I’ve been using my Nokia N900 for about a month now, so I figured that the time was appropriate for me to post my review and experiences…

The Good:

It’s very swift.  Rarely do a I have to wait for more than a few seconds for an application to open.  After it is open, I can even switch between concurrently running tasks.  This is something I’ve found to be extremely useful.  I’ve found that a few programs tend to suck more resources and can cause a slowdown, the Ovi Maps being one of them.  Generally though, when using Ovi Maps, you won’t be using any of the other heavier applications.

It has plenty of storage, and I’ve not run into any issues there.  One feature that I really like is that when you plug it in via USB, you can select to have it run as a mass storage device.  Moving my music collection was as easy as drag and dropping my collection onto the phone.  Since I run linux, I did need to show hidden files to really get into it, but it worked well.  I’ve never used the other mode (PC Suite Mode) but that’s because I’m on Linux and they don’t have a version of that software available yet.

I use the phone for my email, but still wanted to have my emails available on the desktop workstation that I use.  I decided to use IMAP.  It has worked swimmingly.  I wish it would place sent items in the sent folder of the IMAP server, but that’s a small complaint since Evolution doesn’t do that either (if someone knows how to fix that, let me know please.)  I have been able to read and open attachments without any difficulty.  The PDF reader and image viewer is powerful enough to handle decent sized files.

The media player is nice, but lacks any sort of ID3 tag editor, which would be quite nice for me.

The messaging service integration is really top notch.  It talks with skype, google talk, and my cell carrier with the same application.  That means they all get treated the same way.  I was also able to do a video call on google without any issues.  That feature is supposedly being brought to skype soon as well.  One thing that I really liked was that the contact manager helped me merge my contacts together across various messaging platforms.  When I go to call someone, I can talk to them on skype, on the cell, or text with google, or whatever.  It is quite nice that way.  It treats SMS the same way.

The only real complaint that I have is more with my carrier than with Nokia.  Everything works well, I have data and such, but “Nationwide 3g” isn’t really nationwide.  It really only applies to more densely populated areas.  Hopefully they’ll get 3g service here in southwest Idaho and we can be happy on all fronts.  Until then, EDGE is what I’ll have to use.

I had the opportunity to go on vacation for a week recently. It was really great to see my parents, and to spend some time getting away. I ended up doing a lot of work while I was there, but not all of it was Nexus related.

I had a great opportunity to present to some of the students at a school I attended when I was younger.   Being a small school, budgets are always tight and technology is always a little sparse.  The current IT administrator for the school (Mr. Osman) has been doing an excellent job and allowed me to present to some of his students.  Everything went great.  I was also able to bring a server with me to donate to the school.  Hopefully they can use it to improve the infrastructure there.  As time passes, I hope to be able to continue donating equipment and possibly give some more presentations about what open source can do for the school.  Apparently, the big thing there right now is GIMP.

Presenting at a small class in Campbell, MN.

I just got my new Nokia n900 ordered. I know it is a bit rough around the edges, but it should work splendidly for what I do. I’ll post a review here once I get it and have used it for a bit.