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Today at the Ice Conference, here was today’s first memorable comment. It was a picture (which I found a link to on the internet) which is a commentary and where man (possibly at least) started from and where he is today.
Evolving from Ape to Man to Computer User
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Today’s good thing was taking some time to get caught up on technology and see what the World Wide Web is turning into and producing. I am very impressed with some of the technologies that are out there. I have been trying to do a good job of looking at some useful sites and making notes about them in delicious.
Anyway, today I got to make a font of my handwriting as discussed in my previous post. It is pretty neat.
The bad thing today was that it was the second day in a row I didn’t get to see Isaac awake and I didn’t see much of Gina because it was Biggest Loser night for her and Jenny.
Tomorrow should be better on that front as we are going shopping and possibly joining the much vaunted Costco. (But that joining may wait until later depending on time.)
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Today I am trying to use two new sites that I heard about on the internet. The first is http://yourfonts.com. This is a site where you can create your own font by downloading a template, filling it out and then uploading the template back to their website. Below is a copy of the template that I filled out.
I also was playing with http://scribd.com. This site is designed to let you post items that you write and display them on what they call iPaper. This is a format that will help protect your content from theft and let you embed it in a web-site as shown below.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Today’s good thing was the acquisition of my new 4 GB mini-SD card for my Blackberry. I have become attached to pod casts (because they download straight to my phone) recently and I needed some more space, so I am pretty stoked that I have room for pod casts and my music now. I was surprised how cheap it was ($18.88). It was actually cheaper at Wal-Mart than at Circuit City, which is going out of business.
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This is an interesting article from a few years ago that finds that children are as likely to encounter a predator waiting for their bus as they will surfing on line. I think that makes a lot of sense and is really interesting. I am glad that somone has done the research to prove this.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/internetprivacy/2006-08-08-kids-online-survey_x.htm?csp=34
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Today I found several websites with information for teachers. This includes curriculum and technology information. You can see them on my delicious page.
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Status
I have been behind on updating my status.
On my main machine I am still running into issues with my monitor. I not had much success in fixing in. I have, after some difficulties, subscribed to the Debian Users list for help and have received some good advice. The most useful things I have learned so far is how to make my floppy drive work. In Linux you have to mount all of the drives manually, so I needed some help to do that. For those that might run into this problem in the future I have included the instructions here.
How to mount a floppy drive in Debian Linux
1. Become root (“su -” should do it)
2. If /floppy does not exist, create it (“mkdir /floppy”)
3. Insert, and then mount the (previously formatted) floppy (“mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /floppy”)
This was stupendously helpful advice.
I needed to do that so I could copy a log file over to Windows and e-mail in for help with the monitors. This has been moderately helpful so far. I haven’t had the ambition to dig into the issue fully just yet. I tried a few times to reconfigure the xserver using “dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86″. Doing that I have tried several different drivers and several different resolutions.
So far the best advice I have gotten was to visit Andrew’s Debian-nVidia HOWTO, but I haven’t gone through all of that yet.
The other computer
On my old Compaq computer that I keep in the living room, I have also installed Debian. It went just fine out there once I connected a wired ethernet card. Apparently the default Debian installed doesn’t find a wireless card by itself. The best thing about the new installation in the living room is that I am using RealVNC. This is neat little free program that lets me control the little Compaq from any other computer. I have only tried it from computers that in my LAN, so I am not sure how well it will work from outside the LAN since my computer gets its IP from the DHCP server.
I do have two irritations with the VNC server. First, I am not sure how to make it start automatically at boot up so that I don’t have to go over to it and start it. Second, when I use the VNC client to log into the Compaq,a pop window opens on the Debian desktop saying that someone is trying to log in. This is annoying because you have to hit allow on the Debian desktop. I would like to set on the Compaq without a monitor or a keyboard or mouse, and this is hard to when I have to manually start the server and click allow.
It is a small price to pay to be able to play MP3′s on my stereo though that computer and control what track is playing from a different computer.
Next steps
I need to follow the instructions given on Andrew’s page to try to get my monitor working. I don’t even really care if I get both monitors working at once at first, I just want the xserver to be working.
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