User Blogs

Yesterday I reinstalled my drive shaft. The carrier shaft center bearing had failed, and sidelined the Ford until I got it replaced. This is a non-trivial job that often requires the loving touch of a driveline shop; on some vehicles the bearing can be trivially replaced, but on most (including this one) it must be pressed on and off.

While my experience to date with Ubuntu 10.04 has been mixed, I have found one compelling reason to employ it, at least for owners of laptops based around AMD's Athlon L110 and RS690 chipset, like my Gateway LT3201u: it has working power management support. This processor does not support typical power-saving methods, i.e. manual frequency scaling; instead, it provides support for AMD PowerNow! in the form of multiple idle states.

I've been running Chromium on Ubuntu from the daily-build repository but recently it started failing to reach google when performing searches, so I switched to older builds via the beta builds archive. If your goal is to have a usable browser rather than to perform the valuable service of testing dailies, you should consider doing likewise.

The recent buzz on Steve Jobs' Thoughts on Flash has brought it to my attention too many times to ignore, and so I will take my own turn at stabbing holes in it. The whole thing can be summarized with the following comment I made to a friend: Apple ranting about Openness is too ironic for me today.

Faced with failure from Ubuntu Lucid UNR 10.04 on my Gateway LT3201u "netbook" (11.something" 720p LED LCD makes it more of a subnotebook) I decided to try Lubuntu, a faster, more lightweight and energy saving variant of Ubuntu using LXDE, the Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment. So far it has been an unqualified success; the ati video driver worked correctly and I have so-far-stable 720p, OpenGL-accelerated graphics. Compiz seems a little slower than on Karmic, but I haven't exactly done any benchmarking.