{"id":3989,"date":"2011-02-08T23:21:22","date_gmt":"2011-02-09T07:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/?p=3989"},"modified":"2011-02-08T23:21:22","modified_gmt":"2011-02-09T07:21:22","slug":"misc-computers-books-television-and-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/2011\/02\/misc-computers-books-television-and-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Misc computers, books, television and travel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a few more days with the new Cr-48 and I&#8217;ve really developed quite a fondness for it, but there are a few nagging issues. I switched back to regular mode when I noticed that in developer mode it wasn&#8217;t sleeping properly and I had done most of the poking around that I wanted to do in the shell for now. The shell in regular mode is super basic but it allows ssh so I&#8217;m good to go. I hate the trackpad, when MJ tried it out he commented that it seemed like they were shooting for similar behavior as the Macbook Pro but I really miss having buttons, rather than the whole trackpad being a button. And since I&#8217;m switching between terminal and browser a lot centerclick is super important to me for copy\/paste, and centerclick is supported with a three finger click but it&#8217;s very finicky. Using a little travel mouse alleviates this problem, but I wish it wasn&#8217;t needed, I miss the buttons on my netbook.<\/p>\n<p>The sound issue I mentioned in my other post about the Cr-48 is discussed here: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.google.com\/support\/forum\/p\/Chrome\/thread?tid=0f32d7dcd4bf5743&#038;hl=en\">CR-48 sound is buggy since update.<\/a> I have to admit that it was getting very frustrating, while reloading tabs or playing something else would generally fix it (no need to reboot, rebooting didn&#8217;t even occur to me) this isn&#8217;t fun when you adjust the sound in the middle of a show and your sound gets all screwy. The thread says that this is fixed in the latest build, and that update finally hit my Cr-48, so I&#8217;ve gone from <em>Chrome OS 0.9.128.14 (Official Build ede4cb9c) beta x86-mario<\/em> to <em>Chrome OS 0.9.130.14 (Official Build ce79fb21) beta x86-mario<\/em>. Here&#8217;s hoping.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s been relatively warm here in SF this week (sorry east coast friends) and I&#8217;ve found myself using this more than my netbook because my netbook actually gets hotter than the Cr-48. I also like watching pbs.org shows in bed, and the Cr-48 has a bigger screen than my netbook so it&#8217;s nice for that. It&#8217;s also impressive how well flash videos play full screen. I mentioned that I was sad that I couldn&#8217;t play music from my samba share, but for local content I discovered chrome:\/\/flags\/ which shows some experimental options, including a media player and &#8220;Advanced File System&#8221; which offers USB and SD card support, I have more exploring to do to see how well these work. For now I&#8217;m listening to stations on last.fm.<\/p>\n<p>But I haven&#8217;t just been playing with my new toy these past few weeks! I blogged that the release of Squeeze happened this past weekend (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.debian.org\/News\/2011\/20110205a\">Announcement<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.debian.org\/releases\/squeeze\/releasenotes\">Release Notes<\/a>). We run exclusively Debian at work and two of my systems here at home run Debian, so I immediately dove into the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.debian.org\/releases\/squeeze\/amd64\/release-notes\/ch-upgrading.en.html\">Chapter 4. Upgrades from Debian 5.0 (lenny)<\/a> of the release notes. Perhaps most surprising to me (as someone who doesn&#8217;t keep up with discussions surrounding Debian development) was the change in upgrade policy regarding aptitude vs apt-get: &#8220;<em>The upgrade process for other releases recommended the use of aptitude for the upgrade. This tool is not recommended for upgrades from lenny to squeeze.<\/em>&#8221; Apparently the improvements made to apt-get&#8217;s dependency tracking have made it a player again &#8211; good thing too, since I never did get used to aptitude and I&#8217;ve been happily (stubbornly) been on the apt-get bandwagon all along. I&#8217;ve now done 2 Squeeze upgrades, both of which went relatively smoothly even if the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.debian.org\/releases\/squeeze\/amd64\/release-notes\/ch-upgrading.en.html#update-grub\">Upgrade to grub2<\/a> step in the process still scares me a little (but it has worked well so far&#8230;).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been reading too, and I am totally in love with my Nook. I used to have this crazy pile of books and magazines I&#8217;d haul around when I was in a reading mood, usually some tech book, a serious fiction book, a silly fiction book and some non-fiction book. The pile of magazines hasn&#8217;t changed, but my 4 books has been shrunk into the little Nook, much to my delight. I read <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Wishful_Drinking\">Wishful Drinking<\/a> by Carrie Fisher which was quite the treat. I picked up <a href=\"http:\/\/oreilly.com\/catalog\/9780596805890\">Cooking For Geeks<\/a> (another cook book? Maybe this time I&#8217;ll start cooking more&#8230;) and am finally working on finishing <a href=\"http:\/\/oreilly.com\/catalog\/9780596802004\">Confessions of a Public Speaker<\/a> and am re-reading <a href=\"http:\/\/oreilly.com\/catalog\/9780596007836\">Time Management for System Administrators<\/a> hoping that more useful tidbits will sink in after a second reading. I&#8217;ve also snagged a few titles from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\">Project Gutenberg<\/a> but I have to be honest and say that after the piles of non-fiction and techie and science magazines I read, when I go for fiction I have been tending to prefer fluff rather than classics (I will finish <u>Moby Dick<\/u> some day!).<\/p>\n<p>Television! I&#8217;ve been watching some. MJ and I watch a few shows together (<em>Lie to me<\/em>, <em>Bones<\/em>, <em>House<\/em>, <em>Big Bang Theory<\/em>, <em>V<\/em>, <em>Star Trek: TNG<\/em>, <em>Star Trek: DS9<\/em>, <em>Law &#038; Order: SVU<\/em>) but on my own I&#8217;ve rediscovered <em>Eureka<\/em> and have been enjoying <em>Fringe<\/em>. I have to admit that it&#8217;s certainly more TV than I&#8217;m used to, but it&#8217;s a refreshing break after work, projects and events. Plus, thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/video4fuze\/\">video4fuze<\/a> I have a simple way to convert shows to be playable on my little mp3 player to watch at the gym.<\/p>\n<p>Projects and events! A week and a half ago we hosted <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/UserDays\">Ubuntu User Days<\/a> on IRC &#8211; 20 hours of scheduled chats on various user-facing topics. This was our 3rd event, and in spite of some no-shows (we&#8217;ll have to work better on covering those next time around) much of the day went well. I did a session on <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/UserDays\/01292011\/Desktop%20Environments:%20Gnome,%20KDE,%20XFCE\">Desktop Environments: Gnome, KDE, XFCE<\/a> with Mackenzie Morgan, and then filled in for a missing instructor to do a very fun <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/UserDays\/01292011\/Command%20Line%20Q%26A\">Command Line Q&#038;A<\/a> with Paul Tagliamonte. Tomorrow night I&#8217;m hosting another <a href=\"http:\/\/loco.ubuntu.com\/events\/team\/653\/detail\/\">Ubuntu Hour<\/a> here in San Francisco, hooray for coffee, Ubuntu chat, and meeting new people! I&#8217;ve actually been a bit conservative about events lately though since I&#8217;ve really wanted to spend time at home catching up on project work. I&#8217;ve been working with some folks on Ubuntu Women project goals, we&#8217;re chugging away with website plans and recently launched some efforts to encourage more women to attend the Ubuntu Developer Summit by creating a <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.ubuntu-women.org\/UDS\">UDS page on our wiki<\/a> with some FAQ about the event and a <a href=\"http:\/\/wiki.ubuntu-women.org\/UDS\/Stories\">UDS Stories<\/a> page with several posts written by women in the project who have attended in-person and remotely. UDS also has implemented an <a href=\"http:\/\/uds.ubuntu.com\/harassment\/\">Anti-Harassment Policy<\/a> and the project as a whole is working on a Diversity Statement for the project (Matt Zimmerman has posted a draft in his blog <a href=\"http:\/\/mdzlog.alcor.net\/2011\/02\/07\/a-diversity-statement-for-ubuntu\/\">here<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>What else have I been up to? I&#8217;ve been much more disciplined about going to the gym lately, and am completely ruining that healthy gym-going by continuing to over-indulge in the awesome food and drinks that San Francisco has to offer (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/pleia2\/5374216245\/\">Beer!<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/pleia2\/5429552007\/\">Pizza!<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/pleia2\/5374177659\/\">Beer!<\/a>). The scale is going in the wrong direction. MJ has a friend from back east visiting this week so over the weekend we all went out to the <a href=\"http:\/\/sfzoo.org\">San Francisco Zoo<\/a> on Saturday because the weather was nice and they have a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zooborns.com\/zooborns\/2011\/01\/baby-anteater-clings-tight-to-the-mom-mobile.html\">baby giant anteater<\/a> I was dying to see. Sunday I headed up to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.hocfarmersmarket.org\/\">Heart of the City Farmers&#8217; Market<\/a> for some fresh fruit and bread, spent some time on the roof reading, got caught up on email and the three of us went out to sushi for dinner.<\/p>\n<p>And in case I was getting sad about no air travel since November, MJ and I booked our flights to Los Angeles and hotel room for the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.socallinuxexpo.org\/scale9x\/\">Southern California Linux Expo<\/a> later this month. We&#8217;ll be flying down after work on Thursday the 24th and coming home after the conference wraps up on Sunday the 27th. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu-california.org\">Ubuntu California team<\/a> will be hosting an Ubuntu <a href=\"https:\/\/wiki.ubuntu.com\/CaliforniaTeam\/Projects\/Scale9x\">booth<\/a> at the conference so I&#8217;ve been working with other volunteers to get all the goodies for our table. I am really looking forward to this event, there should be a lot of awesome people there who I haven&#8217;t had the opportunity to meet in person and as always some folks who I&#8217;m looking forward to catch up with. As for other travel this year, my schedule hasn&#8217;t been firmed up but I&#8217;m planning on attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest in May. MJ has some work travel this year that I&#8217;m hoping to tag along with and a (working) trip back to Philadelphia sometime this year will probably happen too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a few more days with the new Cr-48 and I&#8217;ve really developed quite a fondness for it, but there are a few nagging issues. I switched back to regular mode when I noticed that in developer mode it wasn&#8217;t sleeping properly and I had done most of the poking around that I wanted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3989"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3999,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3989\/revisions\/3999"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/princessleia.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}