woof woof
Posts tagged software
Jolicloud 1.0
Aug 7th
The other day I got an email from the Jolicloud team stating that my account was ready to be upgraded to version 1.0 of their software. Relatively excited I hopped on my HP netbook and upgraded. It was a quick and easy process however what I was left with was certainly not something I’d have upgraded to if I had known what it was. Upon initial login you’re presented with a nice looking HTML5 driven menu or rather dashboard. Your applications are listed here. At the moment it only seems that “Jolicloud-apps” are listed here and getting to any native system applications requires a bit of extra work. I have yet to actually figure out how to do this without launching them from command line.
While I actually don’t really use many native applications, there is one that is very important to me so not being able to easily access it is definitely an issue. That application is Terminal. Fortunately you can access Nautilus and I ended up searching for the application. There is however a bit easier method to accessing it which is to simply hit Alt+F1. I did do a bit of searching and it looks like native applications aren’t quite integrated into their Dashboard yet, but they’re working on it. However I did notice Google Chrome made it onto my Dashboard somehow, but I couldn’t figure out how to add my own.
To be fair, Jolicloud is certainly a one of the best netbook operating systems. It installs very easily and it’s very simple to use. Heck, I’d even toss this on my parents netbook or laptop (if they didn’t already have a new MacBook). It allows easy access to popular websites and applications. You can easily install applications from Jolicloud’s large list. The social aspect is still there (how I have zero friends so it’s pretty useless to me). Jolicloud 1.0 now supports synching of applications across the computers you’ve attached to your profile, so I thought that was pretty cool.
Overall, the update is not for me. They seem to have simplified things a bit too much and took away some of the Linux. I do however think once they allow native Linux applications to be added into the Dashboard that bit of annoyance will disappear. I really like Jolicloud, but they could have made sure native applications work previous to releasing this update.
Removing WordPress’ Automatic Character Formatting
Aug 4th
While this doesn’t pertain to this WordPress blog, it does apply to another one I use to store notes for my job. As a Linux Server Administrator I store tons of commands and snippets I use often in a WordPress blog. However when pasting from the blog into my PuTTY command window I notice the characters don’t come across correctly. This is because WordPress is formatting them on the fly a bit differently then I’d like it too. Fortunately there’s a quick fix for this. Basically you just disable the function that does it in your theme. What you need to do is open your themes functions.php file and place in the following two lines:
remove_filter('the_content', 'wptexturize');
remove_filter('comment_text', 'wptexturize');
The first line kills the function from running on the content of your blog posts and the second one on the comments for the blog post.
My New iPad
Jul 8th
Today I finally got my hands on my very own iPad. I ended up trading my MacBook for a 32GB WiFi iPad. It was actually from a person on Craigslist and I was happy with the transaction (even though I did get a bit lost meeting up with him). While I did have a bit of trouble getting the iPad to work out of the box it wasn’t something I couldn’t resolve. I guess working for Apple (er a reseller) and being a huge fan of Apple and a complete geek helped. The iPad at first just wouldn’t boot into the system. It was stuck at the Apple logo and refused to move anywhere. I placed the device into recovery mode and just restored the system. This resolved the issue and I then proceeded to install some of my favorite applications. More >
Google Chrome for OS X (in Blue)!
Jun 18th
I’ve really been enjoying Google Chrome on my Windows workstation, so I figured I would give it a shot for OS X. I should also mention it’s my web browser of choice when using Linux as well. I really dig it! Now it’s really simple to install for both OS X and Linux. Google offers up installers for both. You can snag your own copy from the Chrome site.
The one thing I didn’t like about the OS X version is that the default theme is not that blue one you see with the Windows and Linux versions. I guess this is nice, since the default blends in with the OS X UI a bit better, but I much prefer the blue theme. Fortunately you can install this by downloading and opening the downloaded file from this guys website! The result is as below and I love it!
Plants vs. Zombies (iPhone)
Jun 2nd
After playing the little flash version of the game that PopCap has online I went out and spent the $3 on the game. Completely worth it! While there’s a couple frustrating spots in the game which required me to play a level 3 or 4 times to complete them most levels are pretty easy to complete as long as you’ve got your tactics down. The game overall is really simple though. You need to protect your home from the invading zombies. You have a wide variety of different plants which you can plant to protect your home. Plants range from the simple pea shooter to fun plants like the venus fly traps and cat tails. Just as your plants vary, so do the zombies. There’s normal zombies, to zombies driving zambonies, to Michael Jackson zombies and more.
The game also include achievements so I felt a little bit better about having spent all that time playing the game. At least now I can show off some of the achievements I got! When you complete the game you unlock the Quick Play mode which allows you to select between levels and the mini-games. The ability to go back and reply any of these levels is really great as well as choose any of the mini-games. It adds a lot of replay to the game itself. It also makes grabbing some of those achievements a lot easier.
For the $3 I spent on the game, I’d say it was well worth it. I’ve definitely gotten my monies worth and I highly recommend this game to anyone with an iPhone/iPod touch (or PC/Mac). When and if I ever get the Apple iPad I’ll be purchasing the higher definition version of the game as well. Check out the Plants vs. Zombies website if you haven’t already and try out the online version they’ve got up. You’ll get hooked!
New Blog: jimmyhasadog.com!
Apr 20th
After putting some careful thought in what I would like, I’ve come to the conclusion that I would really like to own and train a dog. Of course not just any dog, but a German Shepherd Dog. I’ve put together a small blog which I plan to use to track my or rather our progress. So far it’s just a couple postings and a video or two, but it’ll definitely pick up when I actually get the dog! Check it out at jimmyhasadog.com!
Jolicloud: Netbook OS
Apr 15th
I bought a netbook about a year ago, mostly because of their size but also because with a bit of work you can get Mac OS X running on them. Of course, this article isn’t about OS X, it’s about another operating system which is a bit easier to install and made just for netbooks.
A lot of these netbook OS’ are really just regular distributions of Linux which have had their UI updated for the smaller screens found on netbooks, Jolicloud is no different. It’s based on Debian and has some UI tweaks which makes navigating around the system a bit easier. More >
Apple iPad: Thoughts…
Apr 10th
When the iPad was first announced I wasn’t to thrilled with it. I’d been waiting for Apple to release a tablet product almost 4-5 years. When Steve Jobs pulled out the iPad with a iPhone OS like interface I cringed. I wasn’t impressed at all. I didn’t need an enlarged iPhone. I wanted a tablet running OS X with some tablet-like enhancements. This was far from it. It wasn’t all that attractive looking either. I disliked the large black border around the device and the square (instead of rectangular/widescreen) look to it wasn’t very appealing.
About a week ago, Apple finally released the product into the hands of the public and I’ve seen most if not all positive reviews for the device. I believe the only negative talk about the unit is that some of devices are having issues connecting to WiFi access points. Apple has already submitted a support article on this. More >
Converting MKV to MP4/H.264 in OS X
Apr 1st
When I get anime episodes/movies or even sometimes regular video content it’ll come in a relatively new format (at least to me) called Matroska, file extension .MKV. The format can easily be played on your Mac using Perian or even with VLC. However I do most of my video viewing via my AppleTV on a much bigger screen. Unfortunately iTunes and AppleTV don’t recognize the MKV file format so one needs to convert it into something which it does understand.
For the longest time I had a multi-step process which was a real pain in the ass and resulted in videos that had been re-encoded multiple times. As you can imagine this meant a pretty good loss of quality and time. I basically had to de-mux the subtitle track on my Mac, convert it to an SRT file (sometimes an SSA file is used for subtitles) on a Windows box (using Subtitle Workshop), copy the new SRT file back over, convert the entire MKV file to an MP4. Then I would take my MP4 and the SRT file and combine them using ViddyUp!. Basically it was a real pain in the ass. More >
