Month: July 2010

Ubuntu One Subscribed Folders

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As followers of my blog know, the hard drive in my laptop recently failed, forcing me to reinstall both Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04) and Windows 7. Fortunately on the Ubuntu side, I did have Ubuntu One set up with the free 2GB account, which is a cloud-based backup service. However, I found that once I entered my account credentials and expanded the reach of Ubuntu One’s synced folders a bit, only the new folders were syncing: my Documents, Music, and Pictures had the menu option present to sync them on Ubuntu One, but no matter what I did I could not get them to actually sync.

Then, via the Ubuntu One FAQs, I found the key is the command line tools u1sync and u1sdtool. These are both part of the ubuntuone-client-tools package, not installed by default. (more…)

Hard Drive Saga

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As those following my Twitter feed (on Facebook, here or Twitter) know, the hard drive in my laptop failed a couple days ago. The warning signs when it finally failed were pretty impossible to ignore: I had two operating systems installed on the computer. One (Ubuntu LTS 10.04) would not boot at all (“Could not find /sbin/init”), and the other (Windows 7 x64 Ultimate) would boot but was running extremely slowly. It seemed the damage was much more prevalent in the areas that stored the Ubuntu “disk” (really just a file on the Windows NTFS partition), which was quite maddening because I had just downloaded a bunch of songs from Napster. (more…)

Landlords, Tenants, and Rentals: What Every Colorado Resident Should Know

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Yesterday, I walked into my apartment to find a receipt for services performed by a pest control company. This seemed misplaced to me, since I was never given any notice that anyone would be in my apartment that day, and of course the office was closed by then so I couldn’t go over there to find out what was going on. So this morning I walked over to the leasing office, where the person I spoke to informed me that I was “put on the list” for pest control services, that I had been on the list since last Wednesday (07/07), and could not give me any more detail. I was still a little confused, so I asked her why I would have been put on any list without my knowledge, and she just kept reiterating that I was on the list but I wasn’t on the list for the next week. (more…)

New Feature: Twitter Tools!

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As visitors to my blog may have noticed, my sidebar has an area that shows the last 5 tweets I’ve sent to twitter. Previously, this was handled using the RSS feed from Twitter, and was fairly ugly. For example, it kept the username, and the entire thing showed as a link rather than just the time it was posted.

I’ve just added the Twitter Tools plug-in, which has fixed that. Now, tweets show as regular text, with a link back to their original source on Twitter. Plus, I have a way to publish tweets directly from my blog’s home page, which means I may come here more and actually maintain my blog. Also, news of blog posts will be posted directly to Twitter as they happen, which of course has a ripple effect over to Facebook as well.

This is not the only improvement planned for my blog. In the upcoming weeks, I would expect to see more useful plugins and a new theme enabled, categories consolidated, and possibly more Cool Stuff added. The last time I seriously revisited the theme and plugins of this blog was in 2007, so hopefully something suitable can be found and tweaked to my liking.

Oh, and I plan to post more content as well. I’ve been using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer for the past few months, and I must say this is actually a WordPress-posting client worth its salt. I do have the WordPress client for Android on my phone too, if I want to spend several minutes getting frustrated with the on-screen keyboard… it’s great for short messages, but longer ones just end up being frustrating.