Props to Trent

I’m a little late in getting this out, but I want to give props to Nine Inch Nails and headman Trent Reznor on releasing their new CD, Ghosts I, under the Creative Commons – Non-Commercial licensing. This lets anyone copy, alter, and distribute their work as long as it’s not for commercial gain. Reznor himself uploaded the CD to the popular bit-torrent site Pirate Bay. I hope more artists realize that their music will reach more people if they share it under a CC license. NIN is still selling their album on CD and on BluRay disk for the collection of new work (Ghosts I-IV). This is a big step in the music industry and the opposite of what Metallica‘s drummer, Lars Ulrich, is trying to do with the music industry.

I will be downloading from The Pirate Bay tonight. Can’t wait.

Free our music!!

Giving KDE another try

I have been using Linux for about a year now.  I started off using OpenSuse with the KDE desktop environment.  I wasn’t all that impressed with most of the user interfaces in SUSE, so I quickly switched over to Ubuntu, which uses the Gnome desktop environment by default.  I was much more pleased with Ubuntu than I was SUSE and never looked back.  Being relatively new to Linux, I was never relay sure if my preference was from changing desktop environments or from changing distributions.  After feeling conformable with the majority of task I have been doing lately, and hearing about all the great news with KDE 4, I decided to give it another try.  So far I like it, except for on problem, I can’t get KDE 4 to load right.  Worse case scenario, I’ll have to wait for April for Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.04.

Finaly, all my social sites in one place

Today I came accrossPlaxo. It takes all of your social sites including MySpace, FaceBook, Flicker, Pownce (which comes off of beta soon!!), and many more, and puts all the updates into one place. I haven’t played around with it too much yet today, but after I play around with it a few days, I’ll let you know.

Gusty Goblin

Ubuntu 7.10 beta is here!! Code named Gusty Goblin, the new release has me excited (I love new software). I will be trying some of the live CD’s this weekend, I hope. I have wanted to try out Kbuntu, Xbuntu and Edbuntu for some time now, and I think this will be my incentive to try them. Look for my review early next week!!

Opera Mini Beta 2 release

I downloaded Opera Mini 4’s second Beta release. There are some neat things that are working great. On top of all the features that were in the first Beta release, they now have a customizable search page, where you can add search fields from all over the web onto one page (all of which you can access just by pressing #9). One of the features I was looking forward to trying, the land scape mode, is not available for BlackBerries. This disappointed be, but I may soon find it in the third Beta release, we shall have to wait and see. On an upside, the Opera Mini team was able to incorporate the normal selection and back buttons on the BlackBerry, so I no longer have to use my qw and op keys. Anyways, after I play around with it some more, I will have another post for you. I have to get off to work though (doh!).

National Emergency Prepardness Month

August is National Emergency Prepardness Month.  I will have a slight Emergency Prepardness theam this month, which works out because I’ve had some major writers block the last few days.  Today is also National Night Out.  Many communities will be holding events tonight all over the US.  I encurage all of you with kids to contact your town hall and get out tonight.  If nothing else, it will be something free to do with the kids!!

Customizing Firefox

Although this weekend was very busy, I did get to play around with my Firefox. I knew there were a bunch of plug-ins and extensions, but I never got to play around with many of them, and I just discovered all the themes. All of their add-ons can be found on the Firefox web site. Most Firefox users have herd of Greasemonkey which lets users alter the Java programing or upload other’s User Scrips. I also found Stylish, which lets you do the same thing as Greasemonkey, only for CSS instead of. Now, I won’t tell you how, but, but with a few of the above mentioned add-ons, I was able to get my Firefox to look like the screen shot I posted. What are your favorite Firefox add-ons. I have a few others, but I’m going to save those for later posts.

Berry 411

My crackberry addiction just got worse today. I updated Beyond411 to it’s newest version (also changing the name to Berry411. Berry411 now uses my phone’s GPS to find where I am, so I don’t even have to enter my location anymore. This makes it much easier when I’m driving (stoplights are only so long). Berry411 is a free down load and brings together Yellowpages.com, Whitepages.com, Google, and over 200 other plug-ins that are easy to add. I don’t believe Beyond411 is available for other phones, but if you have a BlackBerry, it is a must add piece of software.

On a side note, I also grabbed some wallpaper from Ben Grey’s web site. Being an Umbuntu user, I realy loved the Umbuntu and Linux teamed wallpapers. I need to re-size some of them though, because BlackBerry’s have a larger resolution. Oh well, an other little side project for me.

Pownce

I started playing around with a new site called Pownce today. I’m still finding my way around, but the site seems like it has some potential. Pownce was designed by the people behind Digg and is currently in it’s Alpha phase. I don’t have many friends just yet, so I haven’t got to try the whole site. The only down side I have found is that I use Ubuntu as my primary OS, and they don’t have desktop software for linux yet. I have downloaded it to my Windows partition, and it works well so far. It’s on the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) platform, which they describe as similar to Flash. The one problem with the desktop software I have found is that you need to manually update it. If some one posts a note or replies to you, you’ll never know unless you refresh the software.

I have 3 invites left for anyone that may want one. Just tell me you want one int the comments section. I have already added Nick and my buddy Tore and will be adding another buddy of mine. Just remember, the site is in it’s Alpha phase and does have bugs. The developers need your help reporting these bugs so they can all be fixed before the site goes online open to the public.

Opera Mini Update

So I have been using Opera Mini for about two weeks now. I have few complaints about it. The only major complaint, which may be with my cell provider and not Opera, is that they have 9 different network setups. When the user prompts it to, Opera Mini does an auto optimization test, but I’m not quite sure what that does. For whatever reason, when I’m at work, I have to run this test up to 4 times a day. This will happen when I move from the south end of the building to the north end. I have a feeling that I am between two towers, but I don’t know why I have to keep running this test. If I don’t, the browser will be extremely slow, and sometimes won’t load pages at all, but as soon as I run the test, I’m off and running like normal. But hey, a minor inconvenience for a great piece of FREE software.