Just over nine months ago, I got my first Palm Centro, shortly after it came out on Sprint. It was just what I was looking for, and fortunately my phone from work was with Sprint. Unfortunately, I’m now on my fourth.

When I switched jobs back in May, I had to get my own cell account with Sprint. Well, work would have done it for me, but I wanted it in my own name for a few reasons… I don’t want to have to switch again unless I want to (not that I plan on leaving this job in the foreseeable future), and I figured after some of the junk I’ve been through the last couple years it is one way to help re-establish my credit again.

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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 am a bit of a geek. Yea, big shock there. I bought my first digital camera over seven years ago, a camera from before they even measured the quality in mega-pixels. I have a few shots of when my niece and nephew were first born using that camera.There were better ones out there, and it was not long before I upgraded to an 2 mega-pixel HP camera. A camera the same niece and nephew now use as a toy.

I am on my fourth digital camera, an 8 mega-pixel Kodak. Over the last 7-8 years I have taken thousands of photos. Many of which I still have, despite loosing way too many to a hard-drive crash a few years back.

For at least a few years now, I have been looking for an online gallery to use to show off my photos, and in the process Of course being the geek that I am, I want to host my own gallery, not rely on a third party like Flickr. I have looked at dozens and actually tried out about a dozen. I finally have found the one I am sticking with.

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Ok, I have been looking and looking for a movie database program to help me keep track of my DVD collection. I have.. 250 or so. I know, a bit on the small side. Ideally, I have wanted one that is web based, but haven’t found one I really like yet. Originally I used a spreadsheet, then started using a windows based program that was ok - imported from IMDB and moodb.com - it has some quirks I don’t care for.

With the switch to Ubuntu, I looked at a few of the available options and decided to give Griffith a shot. So far… well, back up. First impression was good. You click the Add button, enter a title, search online if you want (default is IMDB, but there seems to be a couple dozen others to try), it brings up possible matches, you pick one and it fills in the blanks including downloading cover art. You can still tweek it from there checking a “seen it” box for example, choose medium, condition, and probably lots of other stuff I will probably never use.

It was going great for the first 40 or so entries.. then suddenly the add button stopped working.

Checked the forums and it seems to be a known - the application repository has 0.9.4 - the latest version is 0.9.5 - installed that and I’m back in business.

It also has a feature where you can enter in friends and such to keep track of who you borrow movies too… (and email them reminders when they forget to bring it back). You can view your movies by all, those lent out, those you haven’t seen, ask the program to suggest a movie you haven’t seen, and the standard backup and restore your data.

One thing I may check in to eventually is switching form SQLite it mySQL, maybe putting the DB online, and if I get around to learning enough create a simple list of my movies online. (This is so when I’m out shopping I can check to make sure I’m not buying a movie I already have a copy of… of course.)

So…. for now, this one does get a good recommendation. I’ll post again if I run in to any issues.

Griffith - A Film Collection Manager [berliOS.de]

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, 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.