Ok, next on the list of porting of my stuff to Ubuntu - I have a fair number of recipes, and have stored them in a variety of ways over the years. Most of them are in a MasterCook file at this point. With a bit of digging around I found Gourmet - it had good reviews, so I decided to check it out.

Entering info is pretty easy, you type things in fairly naturally, and it recognizes quantity, unit and ingredient… and on many things it even knows what category to put the ingredient for your shopping list. If there’s special notes, put a semi-colon after the item and add this.

It’s supposed to be able to import a MasterCook file, but I’m wondering if my Version 5 isn’t too old, cause it choked on it. You’re supposed to be able to import from a website too. I tried one from foodtv.com and it choked on it, not recognizing where the recipe is. I tried my site at food.upmykilt.net - and it captures the text fine, then asks you to highlight portions from the page and assign them to title, ingredients, etc… but then it choked again.

So… I’m not sure on this one yet. There any alternatives out there yet? I’ll keep looking.

Gourmet Recipe Manager [SourceForge.net]

Ok, I never understood the concept of ’spare change’. But, what I tend to do is dump the pennies, nickels, dimes and sometimes quarters from my pocket in to a jar on a bookshelf at the end of each day. It’s about a half-gallon in size. It was full. I last emptied it two years ago (I had a note in there) just before I moved in to where I am now. This time it held a tad over $95.00 - that’s what? about a buck a week. Paid for an evening out and present for the friend we had dinner with last night.

Ok, been running Ubuntu most of the day…well, granted, I haven’t done a heck of a lot yet between playing with the screen stuff, going out to dinner and other real like sort of things. I want to start making note of programs I’m using here as compared to Windows. I don’t know if all of them are the best choices, but this will help me keep track of stuff I try. And of course if anyone else actually reads this at some points and has suggestions… by all means, leave a comment.

Ok, let’s start with the easy stuff.

AVG - I don’t have a replacement, cause don’t really need anything that does what it did. What can be easier than that?

OpenOffice, Thunderbird, Firefox, FileZilla - these are all programs I used under XP. I exported my bookmarks for Firefox to the data drive and they imported just fine. I forgot to export my RSS stuff, so once I get Sage and such set up again I’ll have to export my list of feeds from my office computer I suppose. FileZilla, I’ll have to export my settings from my portable version that I use at work and other places, but I otherwise expect the transition to be seamless.

Thunderbird; I had my main account setup as POP before, and checked two others via IMAP. I changed all three to be IMAP on the new setup. I have a local folder called “keepers”, with a subfolder for each account. I used to do a LOT of sorting, and decided it’s not worth it. With the new searching in email and on desktops in general, what’s the point. Basically any email I want to keep gets moved to that local folder. Also, all email I send from all three accounts goes to a ’sent’ folder on the local setup so I keep a copy of every email I send.

AIM - As much as I didn’t care for the AOL software itself (I would often tell friends it is just a couple lines of code short of being a virus), I’ve always liked AIM. I’ve tried others over the years and kept going back to AIM. I’ve been using Pidgin portable off my USB drive at work when I need to get online to check with someone. It’s… good. I think right now my biggest issue is that I really like the side-tab setup for the different IMs in AIM. Pidgin puts them on the top and I can’t find a way to change that. It’s been annoying at times because I often have a dozen or more IMs going in a given evening. I like having the side tabs listing all the conversations out there for me. Get too many in Pidgin, and you have to scroll through the tabs. I’ve missed IMs because of this recently.

Now, I am really liking the multiple desktops in Ubuntu, and the fact that I can have the IM window follow me between desktops is slick. Hopefully that will help minimize missing stuff. There is another IM program I’ve seen posted about that I have to find again and check out.

Ok, so that’s it for starters - that’s bout all I’ve had a chance to get through yet… other than using Rhythmbox for playing music so far. But I hear there are some real good ones out there so I want to check on that some more.