Another one of my old high-dollar Memorex CDs has failed and lost me some data. Mental note: never purchase Memorex optical media.
I'm trying to download a file from rapidshare and they're making me solve a CAPTCHA. That's okay, but check out the CAPTCHA they gave me:
I've been using Linux for a long time, and I learned to use it by installing it and using it as my primary operating system — as far as I'm concerned, the year of the Linux desktop was in 1994 or so. Since then I've actually bounced around to a variety of operating systems and even single-booted my primary machine into Windows XP by choice, using Cygwin as a crutch. I've been running Linux solidly since Ubuntu Dapper, using Windows only on inferior (and seldom-activated) computers or in virtual machines to close corner cases like my mobile phone. Throughout that time, I have basically never been satisfied with the default appearance of the system.
This is a pretty simple one: Printing on Linux sucks. Adobe knows more about printing than anybody. Printing PDFs on Linux with Adobe Reader is wonderful. Conclusion: See title. For further discussion, see below.
Today, I tried to buy some DVD+R DL media from Newegg. It's not like it's a major sale, but it was lost because I couldn't use their site. I enabled javascript for newegg.com, but there was no shopping cart button, and when I backed up to the shopping cart page, the cart didn't work. Even the FAQ is Javascript-based and doesn't work here; I was unable to read the FAQ. Because they're on the west coast, I'd have to wait two hours to place a phone order, and I don't want to wait.
I recently visited a garage sale and purchased an old clip art/stock image collection from "Hemera" called The Big Box of Art. While the (windows) software itself provides an index and a browser, I was only interested in using the images and none of the software. Unfortunately, the image files were in a passel of zip files and included two formats I was not sure how to handle; Windows Metafile (*.wmf) and "HPI" files.
Once upon a time, if you RMA'd a Western Digital hard disk and they didn't have the same disk in stock, they would ship you the next better drive. I don't know if this was exactly etched in stone or if it was just the way they did things, but those days are now gone.
If you are using the GNOME interface and have the Serpentine audio CD-producing program installed, try this fun trick. (I'm doing this on Ubuntu Gutsy; things may look slightly different depending on versions and distributions.)
If you want a road sign font, you can pay $800 (for the full set) or you can make your own. You also have several other options like Blue Highway or the roadgeek fonts, although the latter is often criticized for being poorly put together (badly authored.) The creator of that set simply traced the existing fonts. I have no idea why, because you can download the "Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices" which contains all the outlines.
Today, the UPS man brought two packages, as HP made good on their promise of replacements within 24-48 hours. As promised, my replacement battery was in one of the packages. In the other was another incorrect power supply of the same type as the last. I have now spent over two hours (over several days, even) getting a replacement power supply for my warranted, business-class HPQ laptop.