computoman

Happy twentieth birthday Vim aka (Vi improved). Sort of the Linux command line version of Notepad. Vim leaves notepad in the dust for features.  http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2011/11/vim-celebrates-20-years-happy-birthday.html Thank you to Barnes and Noble for having the guts to stand up to Micro$oft.  http://lxnews.org/2011/11/16/microsofts-dirty-patent-tricks/

Free OTA TV is a good thing and maybe I have harped on it a bit much, but soon we plan to go to the next step of Free Satellite Tv. You have to be real careful because there is a lot of misinformation and people who would like to take advantage of you for that. A site called www.ftalist.com has shed light on the right way to get into FTA. We have been using it as a guide on how to set things up. One of the biggest drawbacks to technology is that things are changing all the time. To get into FTA (Free to Air) tv does require and investment of several hundred dollars and if the technology changes that equipment is worthless.  To offset any start up costs of FTA, we have been looking around at resale places for the equipment one might be able to use. So far the investment has been less than twenty dollars for two receivers. The only thing left is the dish and the responder(s).  Updates coming...

I haven’t posted much in the last month as I just went through a move. I ended up going from a small city of 20,000 to a rural town of a 1,000. Lucky for me DSL was available here, I hate the thought that I might of had to use Hughes Net Satellite at home as I do at work. I had cable at the old place because Dish could not install a dish on that house due to extensive tree coverage. Of course Time Warner Cable has great features and is trouble free, except that irritating bill that shows up each month. I have had DSL and Dish for 2 weeks now and the first bill that came was a credit for $42.00. I could use some more bills like that! The whole system for phone, internet, and TV with 2 DVRs is half of what Time Warner charges by the month. So far things are pretty good, the TV line up is not quite as good as cable and the DVR does not have “Start Over” but there is much more HD than on cable. The DSL internet seems to work just as good for me, however I am just a surfer and not a power u...

It is time for the United States to become more inventive. We need to stop depending on other countries for our needs. We also need to stop being bullies about patents and software copyrights. It is killing the U.S. in that it is not allowing the U.S. to compete against the world in the marketplace. In my own situation, there was a tool I needed. I looked everywhere in the stores locally for a brace as I believe it is called. I just call it a hand drill/screwdriver. What I needed was to be able to work late at night building things without making a lot of noise. I also needed a hand tool I could use if the power was out. You still have to be able to work on computer equipment even when the power is down. Ironically, you can get most any other hand tool from a local store. You can get the brace from the web, but most likely it will have been made overseas. Not good enough. Do not know who said it, but I think it makes real sense. If you can dream it, you can draw it. If you can draw...

Resizing desktop icons is a lot easier than it used to be. In this first video, we will see what it took to do it on MSWindows XP. In the last article, Robert showed you how to change the icon size in Microsoft Vista. Now we will look at how to do it with Ubuntu 10.02 LTS with the Gnome desktop. That's all for now.

I have a really bad habit of leaving my computer on all the time, and we have a few cats. Most of the time the cats try their typing skills; that ends up looking like this, This morning my little kitten decided to take a nap on the keyboard and change some desktop setting on my Windows Vista. All the icons ended up getting very very small, after a quick search on Google I found a fast fix. It was as simple as clicking on the desktop and hitting "Ctrl" and using the mouse wheel to increase or decrease the size of all the desktop icons at once. This should also work on Windows 7? I thought this was pretty cool, and it could come in handy even if you don't have a cat/hack.

Adobe haas announced they are discontinuing flash development on mobile devices: Adobe Kills Flash for Mobile . I could not resist posting this link to a web comic commemorating this event. Flash’s Swan Song (Comic)