Seagate Barracuda Sata Drives: They recently reported a glitch on some of their drives which required me to update the firmware on two 1 Terabyte Drives I have. One houses Windows XP SP3, and the other is an external drive for my DirecTv HR21. Story on glitch here.

I still like Seagate drives, as lately they've been reliable for me, and now come with a 5 year warranty. I just bought a 1.5 Terabyte (1.34 Terabyte formatted) Seagate drive that was on sale at Frys. It's very fast (its 32 Meg Cache helps there), and quiet. It now hosts Macintosh OS X 10.5.6

Happy 25th Birthday Macintosh:

Apple's 1984 Commercial


Especially fun to watch is Steve Jobs introducing Macintosh
to the world. HERE.
.

How Hamas generates civilian casualties They go and build a Headquarters in the middle of a development of Apartment Mid Rises. The IDF manages a pinpoint airstrike to take out that HQ and not scratch a brick on the surrounding buildings.

Prius gas mileage. If one is gassing up at 6 AM on a Sunday morning, and the roads are basically empty, and one can do some driving at under 20 mph to ensure its mostly done only on electric power, gas mileage in a Prius is better than the rated 48 mpg city. I had to take a picture to prove it.

Windows 7 fun: I now have Windows 7 running nicely on a "Virtual Drive" using Parallels Desktop v.4 Microsoft made a major booboo by releasing it when zero antivirus software was available for it. Windows pointed you to a webpage recommending such, and listing available sources for AV software. Monday there were zero listed. By Tuesday beta versions of Norton, AVG or Kaspersky were linked to.

Symantec has Norton 360 v.3 beta, which works with Windows 7. It warned that it was a beta, expiring March 27. Then one installs it and is told the software expires in 15 days. NOT GOOD.

Next I'll try a 64 bit version of Windows 7

Windows 7: I was unable to get Windows 7 beta 1 installed on my MacPro, either as a clean install or an upgrade to Windows Vista. Hopefully Apple will tweak Bootcamp soon to allow such.

Followup: Jan. 12 = Windows 7 now running on my MacPro under Parallels 4.

Easy Update to Open Office 3 on Ubuntu, My Ubuntu 8.1 comes with Open Office 2.4, but it's easy to update it to Open Office 3.0; Just add Open Office to Software Sources, and uBuntu will just about automatically update it to 3.0 using its Update Manager. Instructions here. I'm start to fall in love with Ubuntu again.

Personal Finance under Linux. Next recommended program: GnuCash and GnuCash is a freebie.

Simple Install Instructions here. One simple Command line instruction does it all:

sudo apt-get install gnucash

More to follow

ubuntu :I finally got around to installing ubuntu 8.04 that came free with a copy of "Linux Format" magazine I bought last summer. Couldn't have been easier. Then it allowed me to install 615 updates. This posting is done using Firefox 3.05, on my ubuntu 8.04 Then I found how to upgrade to ubuntu 8.10 here
Ubuntu figured out what monitor I have, which neither Windoze or Mac OS could.

All in all a marvelously easy task, and free. Best of all is how snappy and fast ubuntu seems, much faster than Windows XP or Windows Vista on my MacPro. Not sure if its a better OS and/or better Ethernet Drivers, but I love it. HP even had pointers to Linux drivers for my LJ 3800n. Now if only there's a MS Money type of program for Linux.

FOLLOWUP So a recommnded home finance program is "Moneydance" which comes in trial versions for most platforms including Linux. Problem is:

1. Ubuntu never setup a root password to allow installing of many apps.
2. After Installing Moneydance, it won't run.
3. Need to install Java. Need to mkdir java directory. Tried version 6u11 of Java
4. Need to Install RPM installer to get Java installed
5. Ubuntu wont download rpm installer.
6. rebooted, got RPM installer, failed Java install due to dependencies.
7. Downloaded bin version of Java.
8, Bin download required a chmod A+X
9. Got Java installed.
10. Moneydance runs....but:

I now have Moneydance running, why so many hoops to jump through? Not a Professional Installer! And the trial is too limited to allow a real world test. Only allows 100 transactions. Why not a 30 day trial of a FULL VERSION ??

So I have a lower opinion of Ubuntu now. If apps aren't easily installable, whats the point. Don't think I'll get a copy of Moneydance. I don't feel like an unpaid Alpha tester today. At least with Java installed, Moneydance's Uninstaller worked nicely (i think).

End of Zune time: Microsoft will have a hard time selling Zune MP3 players to compete with iPods, after what happened on December 31, 2008.

All 30 Meg Zunes stopped working! Turns out Zunes didn't "know" that 2008 was a Leap Year.

Fix: After 4 AM PST on Jan. 1, unplug your Zune, let your battery drain to zero. Recharge your Zune, then power on. Microsoft says it will then work.

Story here.