[Fri Apr 26 09:16:54 CDT 2013]

I have not run Windows in well over a decade... thank goodness! Since I'm going to move to an apartment on my own pretty soon, I wanted to see if my little Acer Aspire One netbook runs the Netflix software, so I can continue watching movies on it. All other computers I own (except for the smartphone, which runs Android), are Linux machines and the Netflix software doesn't run on them (thank you, Netflix!). So, I fired up the netbook, chose Windows at the GRUB menu and... man, is Windows slow to boot! It took forever. Yes, on the very same system where we run Ubuntu just fine. Mind you, this is not Windows XP we are talking about, but rather Windows 7, which is quite recent (we bought the netbook a couple of years ago, before returning to the USA from Spain). Yet, the slow boot was not the worst part of the experience. There was way worse. Once I entered the password to log into the system, it also took forever to log me in and run the usual myriad anti-virus applications that run on any Windows device these days. Also, as it tends to be the case, as soon as I click on the Firefox icon, the anti-virus app showed up a dialogue warning me that... something "really dangerous" (I don't remember the exact warning right now, and it was in Spanish, but it was something to that effect) was about to happen (?!). So, let me get this straight. I just clicked on the icon to start my browser, so I can browse the web and... something "really dangerous" is going to happen? And I have to click OK on the dialogue before I can move on with my life and browse the Web? And so it went. Aside from being extremely slow (yes, most likely due to those anti-virus apps running in the background), messages kept popping up here and there all the time, sometimes I clicked on the option to close an application and it didn't do so, etc. It was an awful experience with the "user-friendly" operating system. It was slow, bothersome, showing dialogues all the time, I chose to uninstall some anti-spyware software and, once it was done, it announced that I had to reboot the whole system (?!)... Suffice to say that my daughter was looking over my shoulder during part of my "adventure" and, at one point, she said that she didn't like dealing with that, so she always run "the other operating system" installed on the netbook (i.e., Ubuntu). Now, who was saying that Linux was not ready for the desktop? {link to this entry}

[Wed Apr 17 11:50:23 CDT 2013]

Here is an easy one. Synchronize Tomboy across different computers. The easiest way is perhaps to use Dropbox. Simply create a new folder to hold the files, go to the preferences and make sure you select local folder, then browse until you find the Dropbox folder in your file system. It works like a charm. {link to this entry}

[Tue Apr 16 16:14:55 CDT 2013]

Well, until very recently, I didn't realized that Google announced that their Google Reader service would be killed in July. I have relied on it for quite a few years now to obtain my daily dosis of articles and news via RSS feeds, so the news came as a not so welcome surprise to me. In any case, after doing some online research, it looks as if Feedly is the favorite alternative to Google Reader. The only concern, then, is how to migrate from one service to the other. Fortunately, Google, faithful to their motto of "do no evil", makes it really easy and provides the user with all the data that is needed to migrate to a new service (no, I don't pretend that Google execs don't have their own financial interest first and foremost in their minds when they make a decision but, let's be fair, compared to most other companies out there they are quite decent, open and ethical). In any case, this short article on how to migrate from Google Reader to Feedly was a great help, as well as these other tips for Google Reader users migrating to feedlyuuu. That's all that is needed, truly. It worked like charm for me. {link to this entry}