decaturpc.com blog

One fine day I was listening to Swap Shop on my local AM station (stay with me), and the program ended and The Kim Komando Show began. If you’ve never heard of the Kim Komando Show, it’s tailored to the every day user on down to Grandma playing solitaire. It’s not overly technical (I mean who would listen to that?, Shut up… only if I wasn’t really busy.), more for the ipod users and slideshow makers than web developers. Normally, I would only listen to KK subconsiously if I happened to already be in the car and on the radio station. On this day (this fine day) Kim spouted off a really clever tip that really reeled me in. It was simply that you could right-click on a .jpg, sort through the properties and find the camera settings you used to take the picture. I always had problems duplicating shots when I got a really good one. Hey, you cant know everything right?

So anyway, the long and short of it is this: I don’t necessarily listen to the show every Saturday morning, but I did join the Kim’s Club so I could download it. No regrets. I dig Kim’s listing of freebies because I never have to worry about any of it being really bad or chocked full of spyware. I just find what I need and click it because I know it’s going to be reasonably safe. It’s a huge time saver.

I also really like the forum. It’s pretty simple and restricted, which keeps me from being distracted. I would especially recommend the forum to anyone with questions about office suites, backups, and antivirus/antispyware.

More on this later. Here’s a shoutout to AskBud (a KK forum member) as promised, he creates screen videos with narration of commonly asked questions, a great idea. AskBud4computerlessons.com

Like many, my wife and I are longtime users of Outlook (recently Outlook 2003). Once my beautiful wife learns to make a software produce for her, she would only stray from it if it ceased to function at all. I’m a bit harder to please… Outlook does most of what I need it to do, but for every one thing I need it to do, it does 50 things that I don’t need it to do. The things I don’t need it to do must be expensive, because Outlook (depending on how you license it) runs $150-$250. Alternatively, in linux, I have always used Evolution. Evolution is great software, and free. It’s available for windows, but not maintained. So what option does that leave a guy like me who needs everything?

Why it leaves me Thunderbird.

Thunderbird is part of the Mozilla suite, is open source, and free. The mail client alone is simple, convenient, and attractive. There’s really so many nice things I can say about the base program, it makes more sense for you to just have a look yourself here.

Worth noting are the calendar extension ‘Lightning’, and gnupg extension ‘Enigmail’. Also worth noting, is that I’m able to place my Thunderbird profile on a fat32 partition shared between the 2 operating systems and use it from both linux and windows.

My wife recently purchased me a new laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium and I am starting to log some hours on it. I’ve a new list of pro and cons to share with anyone who may be making an OS decision in the near future. Elementally, I would say this… For the coding, file transferring, watch-a-little-tv-or-listen-to-a-little-music-while-I-work, kind of day, I need my Linux workstation. For most anything to do with multimedia, Windows Vista (Home Premium) is king. Elementally…

In the gray area:

Mencode will encode video anyway I want it with no complaint. The Windows Movie Maker included in Vista works like a dream, whereas in Windows XP, it was terrible.

Email in Evolution (linux) is way more comfortable for me. Windows Mail, in Vista, gave me nothing but problems. Outlook 2003 does the best job filtering spam of any client I’ve tried so far.

Networking in windows is more flexible than it has been in the past, but still not as smooth as linux.

Truths that live on:

Linux is the best fileserver hands down.

Windows is still the buttered side of the bread as far as software developers are concerned, although performance of some existing software is somewhat spotty.

If you want to turn your home videos into DVDs, and Vista is available to you, you’d be silly not to use it.

Ubuntu Linux still seems to know my new latop better than Windows Vista on a fresh install. Almost all of the hardware works out of the gate on Ubuntu whereas not much of anything gets figured out by Vista alone.

Without adding third party software to Vista, it’s pretty painful to try and code anything.

New revelations:

Internet Explorer 7 is a pretty damn good browser. I think they’ve taken a number of lessons from Firefox and Opera. Browsers under linux could be better.

Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn is due to be released this month.

If I gave Beryl the resources I’m giving Windows, I could make my linux desktop at least as nice.

Edit: Annoyance– I’ve just tried to fax something from Vista. It turns out Vista home premium doesn’t include fax and scanner utilities. You have to pay up for Business or Ultimate edition for those privileges. Come on Microsoft…