Bert Garcia^2.0

Santa left us a wireless laser printer for Christmas.

Twas a Brother HL-2170W nicely wrapped up in red paper, with a blue bow.

Everyone wondered what was in the box, we left it for last, drew straws as to who would get the honors. The time came, red paper flew and revealed our new press.

Gone are the days of expensive inkjet cartridges. A quick net price check and for $30, a laser cartridge will yield roughly 1,500 pages, that’s $.02 cost of ink per page. On average inkjet is $.06 per page, with the most expensive inks going as high as $.12 per page.

The printer comes with a USB port, an ethernet port and wireless technology. Setup was easy, I used the ethernet connection to configure the wireless security settings and the residential gateway welcomed the little bro into our home network.

Compared to the parallel port lasers of days gone by, this one is light and whisper quiet when waiting on a print job. Pages spit out quickly, even graphic intensive Google satellite maps. Now we don’t need to buy a navigation system for the car, that Santa thinks of everything.

Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walkin’ home from our house Christmas eve
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe

1,035 days after TerraFirma, a newer design.

TerraFirma2, a design by NodeThirtyThree.

To my surprise, I came across a newer, wider version of my old site’s design at the free CSS templates site I often check.

My only concern was how would my content look, since the old site’s layout was a narrow 800 pixels, but once I programmed TerraFirma2 into Textpattern, the content looked great. Some articles needed tweaking, but overall it was a very smooth visual transition.

Since this new design’s structure is similar to the old one, programming a new Textpattern theme was a snap, and it doesn’t hurt that you’re dealing with the same web designer, who maintains similar HTML and CSS conventions.

The only Textpattern plugin I used on this new theme, and probably the only plugin I’ll ever need, is Jukka Svahn’s rah_function plugin. With rah_function, I can call any PHP function from within the safety of the TxP tag world, oh the possibilities.

Here on terra firma
The fires are raging
The riots up staging
To prove a point to none

Originally called BackRub, it’s home was Stanford University in 1998.

The young search engine, written in Java and Python, ran on the following hardware:

1. Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, 256MB of RAM.
   • Storage boxes included 3 × 9GB drives and 6 × 4GB drives.
2. 2 × 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers, 512MB of RAM.
   • Internal 9 × 9GB drives between the two.
3. F50 IBM RS/6000 with 4 processors, 512MB of RAM and 8 × 9GB drives.
   • IBM disk expansion box with another 8 × 9GB drives.
4. Homemade disk box which contained 10 × 9GB SCSI drives.

• Donated by the Intel ² and IBM ³ corporations.

The mature search engine is now a verb, just BackRub it.

All for freedom and for pleasure
Nothing ever lasts forever
Everybody wants to rule the world

On Wednesday, I took delivery of my new 3.0 Thunderbird. The classic lines I’ve grown accustomed to were still there, just a new engine underneath.

A quick spin around the neighborhood revealed the new archiving and search enhancements, prompting me to bring in all of my mail from the Google cloud.

My Gmail accounts ranged from being strictly web based, to living as POP accounts from time of creation. Web only accounts required the steps below plus a simple sort, purge and archive process, the POP accounts just needed archiving.

1. Sign into each Gmail account, go to Settings, then the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
2. Turn on Enable POP for all mail (even mail that’s already been downloaded) and press Save Changes.
3. Thunderbird’s Add Mail Account wizard helps you setup up your Gmail based accounts, just switch the default of IMAP to POP access.
4. The newly created accounts connect to Google and begin downloading the Inbox and Sent Mail boxes, 200 to 300 messages per request.
5. Set Check for new messages to 5 minutes and leave it idling.

Notes:

• Some accounts, ones that were web based then became pop based or were pop based and later dropped from the rotation, well they required a remove duplicates extension.
• The Archive button seemed a bit jumpy, so I sorted the messages by date and then selected them one year at a time before archiving them.
• With all the importing of messages and moving them around, the new search table grew to 169 megabytes. I swept away global-messages-db.sqlite from my profile and Thunderbird recreated it consuming only 26 megabytes.

IMAP is a wonderful method to keep the web based interface in sync with any device, but I use Gmail as a web archive. I don’t want local changes to affect my lifetime goal of reaching my storage quota.

Put on my CompactHeader add-on and took the Tbird out on the open road.

got Electric Windows
tilt Away Wheel
slide Across The Bucket Seat
for That Sexy Leather Feel

Mozilla Messaging releases its free and open source email application.

Following it’s progress on the mozillaZine forums, I eagerly waited for the release of Thunderbird 3.0. Being a long time user of email clients that share their lineage with Netscape Mail, my many years of email messages would be a great test for the new search features. With 3 alphas, 4 betas and 3 release candidates, the final release of 3.0 landed on 12/08.

Backed up my profile this morning, uninstalled 2.0.0.23 and installed the 3.0 final release. When 3.0 first booted up, it displayed 3 tabs, my Inbox, the Migration Assistant and the What’s New in Thunderbird tabs. The status bar showed the progress of indexing my messages for the new search feature.

The only thing left to do was install the latest nightly of Lightning for my calendaring needs. Dragged and dropped the xpi on the addons dialogue and 1.0b1pre installed and on restart opened up it’s own tab in Thunderbird.

Using the search brought back memories of days gone by, projects I’ve worked on, correspondence from friends and family, all opened up in a neatly displayed tab of results. For now, I’ll keep everything as it defaulted, with the new toolbar and smart folders, though different than what I’m accustomed to, it does appear to have it’s productivity benefits.

My Thunderbird, my Thunderbird
She’s the voice of the future
Baby, have you heard
Tomorrow’s taken wing on my Thunderbird

With YouTube and Hulu viewing far outpacing TV viewing in our household, an old Sony VAIO we’ve had for many years wasn’t providing an acceptable Adobe Flash experience.

We welcome the newest member of our computer family, the Gateway NV5435U, affectionately dubbed the portable cinema. With a dual core processor and 4 gigabytes of ram, it should provide us with many years of great performance. The 6-Cell battery lasts over 3.5 hours and the built in webcam is a plus for carrying on video conferencing in Skype.

The new laptop is an early Christmas present for my Hulu viewing spouse. Her old laptop was handed down to our eldest son, who’s happily watching episodes of his favorite vintage shows on YouTube. Which makes me contemplate, why do we need cable?

Norma Jean has gone with the wind
And we’ll never, never see her no more
Jimmy Dean you drove that machine
Chased a dream, chased a dream

Namoroka is now my primary browser.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been testing the betas using the portable version of Firefox. Today, I decided it was time to take the plunge and upgrade 3.5 with Beta 4 of Firefox 3.6.

What’s not to like about Namoroka, it’s faster and incorporates new CSS and HTML5 technologies. Adobe Flash’s CPU sucking days are numbered.

Never much liked the default theme, Strata, but with Personas, I now have a brushed metal look that makes the browser appear slicker. Another new feature is the squiggly line under misspelled words, easier to spot than the old straight line when I’m typing.

Soon after installing Namoroka, I came upon Google’s Public DNS. I updated the network settings on my laptop and so far, so much faster.

If we ever find it’s true
That we have the strength to choose
Oh, free of all the chains, we have together

Five years of Firefox.

On November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 was released. At the time, Internet Explorer held a commanding 99% market share.

Today, Internet Explorer has shrunk to 65% and Firefox is at 23%. Had Microsoft kept their huge market share, the Internet would be a very different place today, controlled by one company hell bent on domination.

My thanks goes out to the Firefox developers and the community that sprung up to promote and extend this excellent open source browser.

Now we sink into a summer afternoon
Central Park in June
Marveling at the bounty our days contain
And we feel it like the shiver of a passing train

KeePass led me back to PortableApps.

PortableApps has been around for 5 years. The brainchild of John T. Haller, it started out as a way to run Firefox off a USB stick and has evolved from there. Now that John is including freeware apps alongside open source apps, it has become my laptop on a stick solution.

USB sticks have come down in price, I picked up an 8gb Sandisk Cruzer for $20 at Walmart. Every application I use on a daily basis is available as a portable app and running nicely on the Cruzer. Now I don’t need to carry my laptop around with me, just find an available USB slot on any family, friend or hotel computer and I’m productive.

With USB 3.0 around the corner and SSD drives making their way into Netbooks, I envision a time when our personal computer will just be a encrypted thumb drive we stick in our pocket.

You got your pertinent information, or you can tune in to hear the scores
There’s a power in a million stations you can’t ignore

Needed a better way to talk on Skype.

Spent a while researching phones to use with Skype, I wanted a Wi-Fi model but settled on the USB connected Philips VoIP 151 phone.

Philips loads a sound driver, that once properly configured, handles all the sounds coming to and from Skype. The phone sounds fine, I can hear the other party and they can hear me.

The phone rings rather loud, so no more missed calls because the computer speakers are playing music at a low level. There is access to your contacts from the phone, it’s like a remote control to Skype and it works well.

Belkin, Philips, Netgear and IPEVO all had Wi-Fi offerings but no model stood up to user reviews. I’m hoping that 2010 brings new choices, so I can carry my phone around the house and take it with me when I travel.

Hello, how are you?
Have you been alright?
Through all the lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely nights