So I’m home sick today and I was updating the drivers on my gaming rig. When I went to intall the Nvidia driver, it kept giving me a weird “Not a valid 7-zip archive” error. After looking it up online, it seems like Nvidia’s site has massive issues doling out downloads to non-IE browsers (I was using Chrome to download it). After downloading the driver with IE 8, it worked totally fine. Way to be cutting edge Nvidia…
Happy new years everyone! Hopefully 2010 will be much better than 2009 and so far, it’s starting to look that way. I also want to share a small google chrome tip that I just discovered.
See those small tabs at the top left? Google Chrome lets you “pin” tabs to the navigation bar. This is great for people who have a small subset of tabs that are constantly open. More screen real estate is always good as well 
So I’ve been using pidgin forever now ever since I stopped using miranda-im. A couple months back, I enabled my MSN account which I haven’t logged into for a while. Since then, I’ve been receiving MSN IM spam everyday. EVERYDAY! Sometimes it gets so bad, it’s almost on the hour. Today I finally beat the spim. I could have beaten it on day one, but I was too lazy to check up on pidgin options.
First, go to “Tools” -> “Privacy”. From here, it’s just a matter of selecting your account and the appropriate privacy settings. For MSN, I just changed mine to “Allow only the users on my buddy list” and Presto! I haven’t received any MSN spim since!
chrome os
Ok, so you’re a tech blogger. That doesn’t necessarily mean you actually have a technical degree from an accredited university. It just means that you’re some person who likes to write about techie things. So when you write an article about Google’s Chrome OS in which you completely have no idea what you’re talking about, someone like me has to respond and let you know you’re an idiot.
The article I’m talking about is here. Mr. Bradley mentions that he knows that Chrome OS isn’t for mainstream PC’s, but does he actually understand that? His attitude in the article suggests that Chrome OS will fail because “an operating system that is essentially just a web browser on steroids designed to run on low-end netbook hardware will not be able to fill that need.” The need he’s referring to is to open up an application that benefits from running locally (like Photoshop). I don’t quite think he understands what a netbook is used for. Mr. Bradley, I don’t do video/photo editing on my netbook. I use my netbook for its intended purpose — a lightweight system to use internet apps. Chrome OS sounds perfect for that.
If you live on the east coast, you may be able to see the shuttle launch tonight at 9:20pm (source). As someone I know pointed out, there aren’t many of these left from the current generation of space shuttle, so this may be worth checking out if you haven’t seen one before. Apparently it is supposed to be visible anywhere from about a couple seconds to 2 minutes. Enjoy!
Update: The shuttle launch was scrubbed due to a hydrogen leak. Maybe next time!
So I was trying to update some files at home off the work CVS and I get “Trouble starting the CVS process: The handle is invalid”. I also kept getting these AVG errors on my CVSNT files saying they were infected with a trojan, but after doing some research, it is apparently a known issue with AVG and is just a false positive. All I did was exclude the CVSNT and TortoiseCVS folders from AVG and presto! worky worky =) AVG, you need to fix this. STAT!
So over the weekend, I finally got a lot of housework done. Cleaning the toilet and mopping the floors? Not quite. More like consolidating my home servers and finally getting down to installing linux on my main machine for use as my primary OS. I first narrowed the list down to Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora Core 9 because both offer large support communities and the maintenance releases are fairly frequent.
I tried installing Ubuntu first, but ended up having some difficulties while installing the proprietary Nvidia driver. Then i installed FC9 without a hitch. Everything ran very smooth and I was even starting to like the yum update manager. Then I realized that I had left the power cable to the video card unplugged while installing Ubuntu, so just to satiate my curiousity, I reinstalled Ubuntu and PRESTO! It worked flawlessly.
I’m going to write up an article some time this week that goes into finer granularity concerning my Ubuntu 8.04 install and customization. Until then, I’m still searching around for linux replacements to accomplish all my common tasks and needs…
According to this blog source, Comcast, who has already made the news lately with their anti-P2P agenda is on the warpath again. This time, it is not just against P2P users on its network. No. This time, they’ve broadened their target to encompass almost all high bandwidth users. If you’re reading this and you use Comcast, you’re a sucker. If you want to get the internet access that you’re fucking paying for, switch to Fios. Verizon has said that they actually support Comcast’s decisions in regulating the bandwidth, but so far from what I can tell, the Fios service has been untouched. If Verizon decides to shaft us, we’ll just have to find someone else to get internet access from. I just don’t want to pay a monthly fee for a crippled service. Would you buy a sports car with a speed governor on it? I think not. Boycott Comcast until they stop interfering with our packets.
yea, this topic has been beaten to the ground many times by a lot of bloggers. and yet i still use email every single day. if it’s dying, i’ll be jack kavorkian and help make it as painless and easy as possible. but what are we really replacing email with? instant messages and social networking status changes? could you really do the same thing on aim or twitter that you do using email? i’m going to go with a big resounding “no” here. perhaps email isn’t dying. perhaps online communications are just evolving into more distinctive and customizable forms. so in the end, you have an idea that you wish to convey to the world. depending on the idea content and the scope of social interaction you desire, you can choose a medium of communication that is custom-suited to how you want to interact with the world. whether that be email, instant messenger, twitter, facebook status, myspace status, etc. this reminds me that i wanted to look for a program which could handle all forms of online communication. digsby was an interesting experiment, but was far too buggy and left a huge footprint on my system. anyone else have any ideas?
