Hugh's Worthless Blog

Today I was setting up a Dell laptop someone in our department had purchased and I noticed it came with a very Mac like docking application called Dell Dock. This is apparently a free download you can install on any Dell PC running XP or Vista, but it will supposedly not run on a non-Dell system. It does indeed work a lot like the Mac dock and is fairly easy to configure to your own tastes. Since the vast majority of systems around here are Dell systems that could be quite useful for setting up easy to use desktops and laptops for people. I was curious what free alternatives there are now for non-Dell PC's and ObjectDock currently appears to be the most popular. The one with the best name is Moby Dock , which appears to have stopped development, and others include RocketDock and Aqua Dock. Since I had set up our user's Dell Dock system to launch her limited set of applications, I thought I would try ObjectDock on my Dell Latitude to see how it compared. So I downloaded their...

Another day, another Ubuntu release! Version 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackelope) came out yesterday so I had to see what was new with it. One neat new version is a version created just for netbooks like the Asus EEE pc which you can install on a USB drive. Since the netbook version is not officially released until April 30, the current version did not have a torrent available, so I had to download it via a web link which still took 30 minutes even on Wash U 's speedy Internet connection. Plus since I still help maintain wuarchive.wustl.edu , I put a copy of it there, but I think that will only help people here on campus who want to download it. It seems like EIT in engineering has severely limited off-campus access to the archive, which is sad indeed. Once the official UNR version comes out, I can bittorrent that one down and update our site. In any case, I downloaded the IMG file and copied it over using good, old command line dd to a 1GB USB drive I had. I then rebooted my Dell Lati...

One of my favorite retailers, Geeks.com , is having a free shipping sale (for the next 72 hours they say) if you spend over $49.99 and enter FREESHIP at checkout. I love their free shipping sales! They have quite a few desktops for sale under $100 and a lot of laptops in the $200 to $300 range so you can get quite a bargain. Most come with either no OS installed or with Ubuntu installed. Note that since Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackelope) comes out in just a few days and has been optimized for Netbooks, this is a good time to buy a cheap Linux notebook with the latest operating system available! It is also a good time to stock up on their inexpensive accessories (mice, keyboards, cables, etc.) since if you buy $49.99 worth you get free shipping.

Everybody who knows me well knows that I am a cheapskate and love to find great places to find bargains. There is a new computer shop in Rock Hill called aptly The Computer Resale Store at 9250 Manchester Road (just west of Schiller's Photo, and just across the street from the Trainwreck Saloon). They sell primarily pre-tested, auction purchased Dell Optiplex systems with a monitor for $100 to $200 (they also had one HP and one Gateway there when I visited). They load them up with XP and free software (Firefox, AVG, OpenOffice, VLC Media Player, DeepBurner) and they are ready to take home, plug in and use. They actually have systems set up you can test and take home, so it isn't like EPC where you pick up a cold CPU box with a wiped hard drive where you need to build your own system from scratch. If you want you could take one of their boxes and just throw Ubuntu 9.04 (coming soon!) on it and have a nice home system with everything. They are so new they do not even have a web...

When I titled this posting "The Chinese Express" I did not mean to refer to any local restaurant I frequent here in St. Louis (although I do like to frequent restaurants ). Instead I am referring to riding the Metrolink in the morning and evening. Now that I ride it all the time, I noticed the one language I hear spoken on the train more than any others is not English, Spanish or "Ghetto" talk, it is good old Mandarin Chinese. For one thing, even though the Asian population on the train is substantially higher than the typical St. Louis percentage (maybe 10-20% of the train riding population), it is still definitely a minority of the passengers. However, there are more groups of speaking Chinese people than there are typical groups of communicating English speaking passengers. Even obviously "together" non-Chinese groups often sit there silently, whereas the groups of Chinese passengers are more likely to speak to one another. Why is this? And why does su...

Yeah, I know Microsoft says IE8 is just about ready for prime time, but does anybody really care? For me the real browser war is between Firefox 3.1/Shiretoko 3.5 and Google Chrome with the possible alternates being Safari 4 and Opera 9 . Being an open source geek, one of my biggest complaints about Chrome right now is that it is only native to run Windows (although you can run it using Wine under Linux.) You would think a company like Google could have a Linux or Mac version since you can get Safari for both Mac OSX and Windows, and Opera runs on just about everything (including the Nintendo Wii and DSi ). Firefox has always been my primary browser since it was released in 2004, but after running Chrome on my laptop for a while I have become quite enamored of its clean look and peppier response. Firefox 3.1/Shiretoko 3.5 seems to be taking some hints from Chrome/Opera (such as the blatantly copied add tab "plus" sign) so hopefully it will continue to improve. I even tri...

My son is a middle school boy which means he likes geeky video game stuff, so he just bought himself a Nintendo DSi . Personally, I did not see the $169 value in the device since he already had a DS Lite, but since his DS Lite's touchscreen had a few problems and he loves stimulating the economy, we let him waste some of his own money. The new DSi looks astonishingly like his DS Lite with two cameras added and an SD card slot. I just received my latest free copy of PC World (more on that later) and they spelled out their likes and dislikes on the updated handheld gaming device. I cannot believe it has a built-in audio player that only accepts AAC formatted audio and not MP3. Luckily it is simple to convert from MP3 to AAC using a free utility like dbPowerAmp music converter , but to convert the 400 songs from his iPod Touch would still take a long time using dMC. Since every other device known to mankind uses the MP3 format, why couldn't Nintendo follow suit? One thing I have ...

Well, yesterday we closed on the sale of our old house so we are happily the proud owners of not two but just one house again. It also seems that the one house down the street from our old house is now being leased and two more houses a few blocks away are now under contract. So all the stories you may hear about the housing market being dead are highly exaggerated. One thing to note about all of the local houses I mentioned, however, is that all of those houses were listed for under $250,000. It is definitely the lower end of the market in the nicer, more stable neighborhoods that will see the most sales volume right now, especially ones that would appeal to first time buyers who can take advantage of the $8,000 federal tax credit . I know in the area where we live now where most homes are over $300,000 the houses seem to move a bit slower, although some are still selling. Our agent, Mary Cella , actually has two listings over $300K which have been listed for a looong time, both in ...

Okay, I have been testing the public transportation for one full week now, and I can definitely say that taking the Metrolink to work is just as convenient for me and driving to the garage here. Time for some calculations to see what it will save me to either walk or "Park and Ride" versus simply driving to work. Wash U charges $429 per year for yellow parking, so that is an easy savings right there. Our new house is 4 miles from campus parking so that amounts to 8 miles a day or 40 miles a week. Over the 50 weeks of driving a year that is 2,000 miles at 20 mpg (no highway driving) on my Geo Prizm gives me 100 gallons of gas used. At the current $2/gallon that is $200 in gasoline. The Brentwood Metrolink station is only one mile from our house, so if I use their free Meridian "Park and Ride" garage that amounts to 10 miles a week or 500 miles a year driving or 1/4 the mileage as compared to driving to campus, plus avoiding a lot of wear and tear on my aging ca...

Okay, time for Part II of Adventures in Public Transportation. On Friday afternoon before leaving the university I looked for an alternate Metro route back home. It appeared that there was a bus 58 that actually went west out Clayton Road to a point less than a mile from our house, and all I would have to do is take Metrolink to the Clayton station and then take that bus route west out Clayton just past the Galleria and walk from there. So I jumped on the Metrolink and made it to the Clayton Metrolink stop quickly enough and found bus 58 sitting there and waiting. The first thing I noticed at around 5pm Friday afternoon is that Clayton roads are just packed at that time. What a mess! I was glad I was sitting on a bus that would take me close to my home. So I sat on the bus as it slowly made it's way around the Clayton Metrobus station and inched through the crowded Clayton roads. When we were approaching Forest Park Parkway I noticed the driver was signalling that she wante...

Well, we had the big move and since our new house is only about 1 mile from the Brentwood Metrolink station and the university gives us a free pass I thought I would try it out and save some wear and tear on the car, and help the environment. So yesterday I tested the "Park and Ride" service by driving the 1 mile to the large Meridian parking garage and then taking the Metro to campus. That worked as smooth as silk. You drive up the the fifth floor, and park, take a fast elevator down and walk a few hundred feet to the platform. It could not be much easier. However, it seemed weird to drive 1 mile to travel 3.5 miles, so I thought I would try out my perfectly healthy legs and walk to the station today. The first part of my walk towards Eager and Brentwood was simple and uneventful. However, once I came to the intersection and saw the six lanes of traffic I would have to cross on foot, I decided to at least walk down to Rose and cross there so it was not so massive of a...