Sometime this week, I’ll be upgrading my Toshiba laptop from a 20GB hard drive to a 60GB hard drive. Laptop drives are ridiculously expensive, but I couldn’t stand the 20-gigger anymore. I also bought a conversion kit for the 20GB drive… probably plop it into an older computer or something. Funny how 20GB doesn’t seem like that much space anymore. My first computer’s hard drive was a whopping 212MB and I was really psyched about getting a 2.5GB hard drive when I bought my next computer.
Also picked up a wireless card for my Zaurus. I hope to put that thing to better use. I bought it about a year ago, haven’t been making much use of it.
Sometime in the near future, I also want to upgrade my UltraSparc 10 from 256MB of RAM to 512MB and to boost the hard drive from 9GB to 80GB. I need to find some information about the UltraSparc to see if there are any gotchas.
Just discovered ELOG, which is something like a weblog, but useful in a much different way.
ELOG is a standalone C app that runs its own little webserver and allows you to keep an electronic logbook. Not something really suited for weblogging (at least not as I see it) but it’s great for keeping notes and saving information. Awesome stuff…
February’s Tool of the Month column has been posted over at UnixReview.com. This month, I covered Kuake, XBindKeys and put in a quick plug for WordPress.
Just got (another) email from a PR person asking me to write about a product, without actually giving any link to the company’s website, any real clue as to what the product does or how it works — even any clue as to whether the product even runs on Linux — which is kind of important since the email seems to be geared towards putting the product in my column in Linux Magazine.
No, it’s another email geared to making the PR rep a necessary part of the information chain — thereby increasing my workload and reducing the odds that the program will be covered at all.
Good PR is simple, effective and low-maintenance. Know the reporters, feed them valuable information for their beat (and avoid sending stuff they don’t care about), give everything necessary upfront (if possible) and offer to provide additional information on request, if necessary. Avoid hype, give facts. It’s simple, really.
So, I signed up for Orkut the other day and I’ve spent a bit of time tooling around the system.
First, it’s an interesting concept — though not unique. Basically, you sign up through an invitation and then you can join various “communities” and link up with people you know, and attempt to link up with people they know or that you meet in one of the communities.
I’m not entirely convinced that this is wholly useful, though it may be entertaining. I see a lot of folks I know through the Linux community on the service, and something that enables me to keep in touch with folks I haven’t seen in a few years would be a Good Thing… but email would do just as nicely, if I were able to keep up with email.
The Terms of Service have been described as a bit onerous… since Orkut is in a development stage, though, I expect that they will change shortly. I also tend to have a bit more trust in Google than other corporations… they’ve been a pretty decent company so far, so I’m willing to give them a bit more rope than other companies. Plus, I didn’t give Google any data that isn’t already available, and I’m not posting any content on the site that I wouldn’t post on someone’s blog or whatever.
I dunno… it will be interesting to see how the site grows and whether Google adds any features that make it really useful.
So this is a bit interesting. I got an invite to join the Orkut social network or whatever… tooling around the service I see a lot of people that I’ve met at various Linux trade shows or that I’ve spoken to for interviews and whatnot, but not a lot of people that I could actually call “friends,” even though I’m generally disposed to think kindly of many of them.
I’m not quite sure how useful Orkut is, though it’s certainly a nifty piece of work. Should be interesting…