I'm outta here!

I just registered my own domain, and what little blogging I do these days will now be located at the powerfully googleable www.adamlaiacano.com/blog. I better not post anything embarassing.

Reading List 2008

My resolution 2008 was to read 25 books. I made it to 23 and might have time for a 24th (Paul Krugman's "Return of Depression Economics And The Crisis of 2008"). Overall there's 1 book of fiction (Animal Farm), a few personal memoirs, and a whole lot about technology and culture. Here's the list, more or less in order that I read them (thanks to VisualBookshelf).


Ken Wells “Travels With Barley”
Chris Anderson “The Long Tail”
David Sedaris “Me Talk Pretty One Day”
Steven Levitt “Freakonomics”
Andrew Keen “The Cult of the Amateur”
Candice Millard “The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey”
Lawrence Lessig “Free Culture”
Steve Martin “Born Standing Up”
David Sedaris “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim”
George Orwell “Animal Farm”
Lawrence Lessig “Code V2.0”
Sudhir Venkatesh “Gang Leader For A Day”
Pauline Maier “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence”
Jonathan Zittrain “The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It”
Malcolm Gladwell “Blink”
Michael Pollan “The Omnivore's Dilemma”
Michael Pollan “In Defense of Food”
Malcolm Gladwell “The Tipping Point”
Richard Florida “Who's Your City?”
Lawrence Lessig “Remix”
James Case “Competition: Birth of a New Science”
Richard Feynman “The Meaning of It All”
John Hodgman “More Information Than You Require”

Let Jared Diamond scare you in two different ways

Here's Jared Diamond's (Guns Germs & Steel, Collapse, etc) talk from TED 2003:



What is pretty scary is when he talks about signs of a society's collapse is sometimes preceded by people of power doing things that are good for them, but bad for society as a whole, and that they do it in ways that most people can't understand or don't have access to.

The second scary thing is the mother of all comb-overs that he has on display. Fortunately, that doesn't have any affect on his research.

Broverdone?

After reading about a newly launched "brocial networking" site earlier today, I just saw these books at Barnes & Noble.



Apparently the time it takes to launch a website a book to get to press is about the same as it took for this joke to peak and become boring. I wonder if the hello, my future girlfriend kid has a book coming out any time soon.

Home Network Outline

I don't know why I did this, but I made a quick outline of MY portion of our apartment's home network. I didn't include my 3 roommates' computers, which only connect to the internet anyway.

Dotted lines are wireless, green lines are for regularly synchronized data (CVS, Time Machine) or mounted drives (Music). I also didn't include the servers at school that I use pretty regularly and sync data with as well.

Anyway, here it is, OpenOffice spelling check squiggles and all.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix on Acer Aspire One

The other day I did a complete overhaul on my new Acer Aspire One mini laptop. I figured I'd post some screenshots of what it's like now. I absolutely love this thing and would definitely recommend them to people who need something small and durable to lug around and do some light computing on.

First off, what I did was replace the original Linpus linux operating system with the "Netbook Remix" version of Ubuntu 8.04.1. The instructions I followed were from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AspireOne. It wasn't too hard for someone with a few months of Linux experience, but it took a LONG time since the laptop doesn't have a CD-Rom drive, so I had to burn an installation CD, boot to that from another computer, then make a bootable USB flash drive to install on the laptop.

So, here are some screenshots of what I ended up with. Click the images for larger versions.

The Home Screen - What it does is take the categories from the Ubuntu Main Menu (like the Windows Start menu) and list them along the left, and then take the commonly used folders and put them on the right. In the center you obviously get all of the programs from the selected category, and they include a really great "Favorites" group which comes in really handy.


Firefox - Here it is running Firefox with most of the recommended add-ons/modifications for the tiny screen size.


Pidgin (IM program) - Nothing too exciting or surprising about an IM program, but the cool thing is that when you have a window open, it turns the home screen mostly transparent and it looks awesome. As part of the configuration, you install a program called maximus or something that automatically maximizes just about every program, so you don't get to see this cool effect too often, but I suppose you could just disable maximus.


Rhythmbox - The great iTunes equivalent program for Linux. I absolutely love this program. Here I am listening to Built to Spill. I'll explain later how I got 7500+ mp3s onto a computer with 8GB of storage.


Open Office - Yup. It comes with OpenOffice pre-installed.


Wi-Fi - This thing has one hell of a WiFi antenna in it. My Macbook Pro, iPhone and the D-Link Wireless-N USB Adapter in my desktop computer only see one or two networks from my office. This picks up 6.


File Browser - The regular Ubuntu file browser... nothing too exciting. You can see that I have the regular File System (8GB SSD), an 8GB SD card in the expansion slot, and a volume called "basement" which is my 500GB external hard drive (holding all of those mp3's), which is plugged into my router (Apple Airport Extreme) and mounts automatically when I boot the laptop.


System Monitor - Resources - Here's the system monitor while running Firefox, Rhythmbox, OpenOffice Writer (with no documents open) and Pidgin. There's only 512MB of RAM, so you can't go too crazy with multiple programs open at the same time. You can also see my Google Reader checking for new feeds every few seconds. I had no idea it updated that often.


System Monitor - Volumes - These are the volumes listed in the System Monitor. I don't really have data on the laptop yet besides the programs that come pre-installed or that I've added (I think just Thunderbird) and that takes up about half of the 8GB SSD.


Matlab/Other Programs - As an engineering student, I'm going to need to be using Matlab and some other computation-heavy software that this wimpy little laptop probably won't be able to handle. So my solution is running them off of the servers at school. It's certainly not very fast, but will work in a jam. Here's the splash screen when I was booting it before switching to Ubuntu.


So far I haven't had any disappointments with this little guy. It's definitely not the greatest computer I've ever used: it's slow, the mouse and keyboard take some getting used to, you can't fit much on the tiny screen, the battery doesn't last long (~2.5 hours, though you can buy a 6-cell battery to replace the 3-cell) and you're limited on how many programs you can run at once. But expecting all of that would be like buying a Mazda Miata and being upset when you can't seat 7 people and tow a camper. This weighs 2lbs, fits in your bag, has no moving parts (except the fan - which is loud, so make sure you do the recommended tweak on the controller), and can handle 90% of your "general computing."

I say you should go buy one if you're interested, and it's worth the half of a day to set up the Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Oh, and if the salesman tries to get you to buy a case for it "so you don't scratch it up," don't bite because it comes with a nice little cover.

I got a new computer.

I got an Acer Aspire One, which is one of those tiny subcompact "netbooks." Here's the Acer (8.9" screen) sitting on my Macbook Pro (15" screen) in front of my desktop LCD (20" screen).



The operating system is Limpus, which is a stripped down version of Fedora linux. It's really good at what it's meant to do out of the box - web surfing, email, office (it has Open Office), IM, and some other stuff. Of course that isn't enough for me, so I started getting other stuff installed on it. I was able to run Matlab on it through the servers at school (or my other computers at home), upgraded to Firefox 3, and do some of the other common tweaks that I found from googling around some. However, I still can't connect to my networked external hard drive (or any other computer via samba), and some of the built in software (email, IM) is less than ideal. So I'm going to check out the Ubuntu Netbook Remix tomorrow. Hopefully that will work out OK.

For $330 (plus another $20 for 8GB SD memory card for the expansion slot), this little thing is a whole lot of computer.