I became a tablet owner

And no its not an iPad, although I was very tempted since I have a Mac book pro @ work, but I had the iPhone and I was glad to switch over to android.  When the first galaxy tab came out the 7" one I hesitated then, and it was a good decision. The op system on that is the same as my phone, so I though a phone with a huge screen.  It was worth the wait for the Galaxy 10.1 It's not perfect by no means but it is on the right track.  I am waiting for the update to 3.1 or 3.2 with Samsung 's add ons.  As I have managed to get the tab to hang a few times already. 
  So you may ask why a tab,right? After all its a touch screen computer. Well to be honest for what I use my laptop for this tab is perfect,reading news, facebook and emails.  I will still need my laptop for photo editing that's for sure, but for daily regular use the tab will do.  Also its the 3G version, which means I have internet access anywhere I want.  Stay tuned for more info on this little device.  Naturally this won't include a comparison unless I borrow some one else's iPad. But so far I am happy with it.  Check out their page.. http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxytab/10.1v/index.html

Will linux catch up to the hype of iPad?

I've been thinking about getting an iPad, but naturally I looked around at the competition.  From what one of my friends sent me, link to some no name Android based iPad clones, made in china.  Well I think those will cause more harm to the market than good for the Android Tablet sector.  Many of those have the cheapest components, but even the OS is not upgradeable.  The screens are touch screens but not capacitive, I've heard many users complain that when you press an icon it activates the icon next to it.  All these will contribute to give Android based tablets a bad name.  While the big manufacturers such as Samsung are planning to release some really good, higher quality Android tablets, but at 4 or 5 times the price.  Will Apple dictate this sector just because they came out with it first?  Will it be the same like with the iPhone?  Although I was an iPhone user for about a year, I have switched to Android.  What caused me to switch was that I managed to damage the iPhone and it's price in the market is not realistic.  I love my Android based HTC wildfire.  Well see how the tablet market will change.  I see a tablet more and more useful for everyday surfing, reading blogging than a laptop.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

I finally upgraded to the latest release of Ubuntu.  The upgrade went smoothly and with out issues this time.  As the last time I had problems with my graphics card after the upgrade.  At this time I can't tell if it's worth the upgrade or not.  It's stable and running fine, but can't really say it's any faster.

Switched from OpenSuSe to Ubuntu 9.10

Well, I was really satisfied with OpenSuSe, I just had one problem in OpenSuSe. It couldn't handle dual displays well. Not sure why, but I wasn't able to use my External LCD. So I tried the live CD from Ubuntu 9.10 and it worked just fine. So I backed up my files, and did a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 on my Inspiron 1318. And honestly I am more than satisfied with it. VPN setup was a snap, it even automatically identified and installed my WiFi card, which I had to do manually in OpenSuSe with Ndiswrapper it worked but in Ubuntu it was automatic. Which is great. Anyhow, I am glad I switched to Ubuntu.

Sound lost after an update on my Inspiron 1318

I did the usual update using Yast. guess what, my sound was gone. It sounded like the speaker was gone, really low sound, barely hearable. I've had speakers burn on me, and boy this sounded like that. I went to the forums, nothing about an Inspiron 1318 losing sound after an upgarde, but one article mentioned a similar issue, on a dell Studio as well. I didn't follow all the isntructions, just went to the end to verify if the last step would get things fixed, and it did. And the solution was pretty simple, using Yast go to sound, on the bottom right click on other and volume. Make sure PCM is up I had it at 100%, and under other channels front needs to be up. and that's it. What puzzles me is what's the use of the volume control on the taskbar? just decoration or what? Anyhow a simple prolem and luckly a simple solution.

Digital Photography workflow with my NAS

Well, finally after installing the NAS I took some pictures, as it is my hobby.  I wanted to do things the way I did before, copy the card contents to the external HD, which was previously attached to my computer, now it's HD2 of the NAS.  So, I had to adjust my workflow.  I created Folders on the computers HD directly, where I downloaded, checked, and edited the pictures, ofcourse in RAW format, once I was satisifed with them, I uploaded them to the NAS.  This way processing is much faster, I tried doing it over the network, but it's a painfull thing to do specially over a WiFi Connection (laptop).  Listening to music over the network works just fine, even watching movies.  So far I never had a problem or a stream cutting, although many reviews say this Solutions is not suiteable for streaming, in my case it works fine.  Also there are only two uses using this NAS so I on larger installtions I am sure it would behave differently.  So far it woks like a charm, my data is backed up on a weekly bases, and it's all in a centralized location.    I want to make more tests for connection speeds over the network, but I have yet to come up with a good way of doing it.  I was thinking of using iperf, while I have all the computers download some files from the NAS, over WiFi, and wire.  And once I have that data, I will post them here, if someone is interested..

Home IT department

I finally got around and uploaded all my files from my external drive to the network drive. Did not do test the upload speeds, but will do some tests in the near future, I will post those as well.


This is the setup of my little home IT department.



Before purchasing this little Linksys unit, which is a USB Network storage link. I read many reviews. Most of them mentioned speed as being a problem. My network as you can see is wired 10/100 and wireless G 54Mbps, so it actually fits in nicely. And I don't need to upgrade my router, or any of my NIC cards in my computers. Wirelessly, it doesn't make a difference how fast it can server up the files, from my tests, I can listen to music from the NAS. Now the real test will be listening to music, and from another computer watching a video. I did a brief test between the laptop, and my desktop. Over the wireless network, these are the results:

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 25.6 MBytes 21.5 Mbits/sec[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 26.1 MBytes 21.9 Mbits/sec[ 3] 0.0-100.0 sec 253 MBytes 21.2 Mbits/sec[ 3] 0.0-2027.8 sec 5.16 GBytes 21.9 Mbits/sec

Will be doing more test, and and indepth info will be posted.