More than you really wanted to know…

Ok, with the new laptop I’m thinking there are times I’ll be parked in the living room, but want to access my files on the desktop. I poked around a bit and had to piece together a couple of tips to get things setup right.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron uses Nautilus-share to handle the file sharing. So open a location and right-click on a folder you want to share… towards the bottom you should see “Sharing Options”. If you don’t, try this in the terminal…

sudo apt-get install nautilus-share

If it is already installed, you’ll get a message saying so. If not, you should be good to go… after you do the the following; in terminal run this -

sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf

Then in the Global Settings section add the following line somewhere:

usershare owner only = False

Save, close gedit, and restart everything and you should be good to go. No say you want to share your Pictures folder, open your Home folder, right-click on Pictures and click that Sharing Options menu item.

If you want to just allow read access, only use the top check box “Share this folder”, give it a new name if you want. If you want to allow write access, there’s “Allow other people to write in this folder” check box. They will need a login on the computer doing the sharing to get at this though. If you want to allow just anyone access, there’s the “Guest access” option. You probably don’t want to combine that with write access, but that’s just me.

Anyways, after this… my windows laptop had no problems seeing the folders I shared.

Ok… they’re not THAT kind of chicks… and technically they are ducklings, but hey, got your attention! And don’t worry, I’m 20+ feet away, using the zoom lens. See more!

My new office has windows that are at ground level. Early May I noticed I had a neighbor… a duck, who had fashioned a bit of a nest in the corner of the building near my window. And the nest, we noticed once when the mama duck wasn’t around had an egg in it. Unfortunately, a few weeks later mama was gone, and the egg had gotten… I don’t know what. Maybe a coon or some other critter got to it, hard to say, but it was pretty well smashed.

A couple days later the landlord’s landscaper was cleaning up around the building and the nest was soon gone. We were all kinda bummed around here.

Continue reading →

Ok, as I posted yesterday, I bought a new laptop. An Acer Extensa 4420. The biggest problem with it, it runs Vista.

I’ll deal for now, but there are a number of things that have to be done to make this thing “ready to fly”. First thing I did was download Firefox. I haven’t done a lot with add-ons with FF3 yet, but I’ll have to look in the best way to sync my bookmarks tween work, home and laptop now. Second thing I did was burn the restore DVDs, so if I need to, I can go back to factory fresh. I am debating on taking this thing down the Linux road… we’ll see. I have some programs I need Windows to run, so until I can test them on the desktop with Wine, I won’t be going that route.

Next thing was ditch MacAffe for AVG. Just a no-brainer there. I had to bite my tongue in Best Buy - While waiting for someone to help me, I observed another sales guy talk to a customer about antivirus and spyware, giving him two packages. “They both have anti-virus and spyware, but the spy-ware on this one sucks, and the virus protection this one sucks, so between these two you’ll be covered.”

Next was Open Office. There’s a 60-day trial of Office on here… need to figure out how to get rid of it without messing anything up. I wish I could get Evolution for Vista… I’m using it on my desktop and rather like it, so will probably stick with Thunderbird for now.

I have AutoCad, a mapping program, and some construction related stuff for work I need to get on here, but beyond that I’m not sure that I’ll be putting that much more. I have portable versions of a few things like GIMP, Pidgin and a couple others on my thumb drive that I may use here and there. The whole idea is for me to keep this thing light-weight. The majority of the stuff being done on it will be web based or basic spreadsheet and document writing.

Oh yea, when I unpacked the thing, the battery said 75%, and about 1.5 hours remaining. So I figured.. hey.. 2 hour battery. Not bad. Not great. But now that i’s fully charged, it’s telling me there is just over 3 hours remaining… so that’s better. I may look into a second, or a larger battery… but will wait and see how much I need to work just off battery for a bit first.

I bought a new laptop last night, and yes, I am blaming my sister.

Ok, need to back up. Seven years ago next month, my niece and nephew were born. Waaaaay too early. They were born at like 24 or 27 weeks. Cole weighed a whopping 1lb, 11oz when he was born. His sister came in at 1lb 1oz. Unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with issues every since.

Continue reading →

Sunday Evening: So, I got the standing desk up, and spent a few hours working today. It is a good thing I went and got the stool, I would not have been able to stand the entire time without my back giving me issues.

I was moving around quite a bit, I think part of the problem is going to be the existing “low” desk. I need a high table surface. I had some writing to do and did some of it crouched at the desk, and some with the papers in my lap while on the stool. Hmm… maybe tomorrow I’ll measure the top. I have some plywood here, I could maybe rig something up to go on top of the existing desk for now to see how I like the height.

I probably spent about 50-60% of the time standing. My goal for now is to get that in the 80-90% range.

I may need a small box or something to rest a foot on while standing. I kept wanting to take a posture like if I had one foot up on a step or something. And I’m wondering if I shouldn’t get a pad similar to what cashiers at the store stand on as well.

Monday: Monday went ok… did a mix of standing/leaning/sitting. The desk is a bit short for me though, so I have the keyboard up on a 3″ binder. Gives it a nice slant too though. So may have to rig something more permenant up. My legs/knees were very sore that night though. Need one of those mats like they have at the grocery store registers.

I wasn’t in the office at all Tuesday, visting a job site in WI. (5 hours of driving for a 30 minute meeting… whee!). Wednesday I was only here for a couple hours. The major hurdle is not having a stand-up height writing surface. I had a bunch of writing to do and ended up pulling a chair up to the other side of the bigger desk for awhile.

Shoes. Another key deal here. Stopped and got a new pair last night, Nike. My other ones were Rebok, good, but just worn out. I’m in and out a lot today, so we’ll see how the rest of the day goes…