It's A Binary World 2.0

Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics

Review: Windows 8 Developer Preview

| September 28, 2011

  I decided to check out the latest Windows release to see how much it differs from my Windows 7 install (on my video game/photography computer).  So I installed it into Virtualbox.     At first it wouldn’t install and I couldn’t understand what was going wrong.  Turns out that in the settings under the [...]

Customizing the Look of the OS

| October 25, 2010

I forgot what post online got me thinking about this stuff, but I really don’t customize my computers’ desktop environments much.  Generally, I tend to change the background image and leave it at that.  I took a look over my desktop image gallery here on the blog to confirm my suspicions. Starting at the bottom [...]

Guess What? Linux May Not Be for Everyone

| October 1, 2010

I feel like I may have covered bits of this here and there, but I couldn’t find it after a cursory check through my blog.  Fanaticism is fanaticism, whether it’s religious or technological it follows the same path.  Witness anyone who has just become an evangelical Christian (and it probably extends to other religions) as [...]

A Quick Review: Windows 7

| September 20, 2010

This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows.  I pop the CD in and boot up.  I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”. Nothing here different from a Linux distro.  Then the Windows logo pops up. Wow, I’m impressed that Microsoft finally caught [...]

Photojojo for Late Nov to Early Dec

| December 2, 2009

It looks like the theme is cake.  Along with Kayla and something MS is famous for.  This cake, by the way, was made by Dina. If you like, see the web version of the Photojojo time capsule here.

When Being Proprietary Makes You Do Stupid Things

| December 9, 2008

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over.  We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows.  Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.  When [...]

Moonlight – what’s the big deal?

| October 14, 2008

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t see an article on Linux Today about Moonlight and what a horrible person Miguel de Icaza is. So I thought I’d go ahead and do some exploration of what’s going on with Moonlight and Silverlight. First of all, what’s Silverlight? Check out the Silverlight article on Wikipedia. [...]

System Information for Windows

| September 4, 2008

System Information for WIndows (SIW) is a program you MUST have installed on your Windows computer.  It gives you all the information you could ever want to know about your computer in a nice easy to use interface.  I learned about it in a recent Computer User Magazine.  Here are some examples of the information [...]

Review: openSuse 11.0 (and KDE 4)

| August 27, 2008

I’ve never used Suse or openSuse.  As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been a “loyal” Fedora user since Fedora Core 1 and I have Ubuntu on my laptop since it had awesome laptop support.  I even got some Suse CDs as a prize for the Letter of the Month from Linux Format magazine.  However, I never [...]

64 Studio Review

| August 21, 2008

Many people know the mantra – if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond.  If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac.  Geeks use Linux.  But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or [...]

Microsoft DRM Metldown Redux

| May 15, 2008

As I mentioned here, Micro$oft has provided yet another example of why digital restrictions management does nothing but hurt legitimate consumers.  To remind you, this is when Microsoft turned off the servers for its ironically named “playsforsure” DRM system.  These songs, which consumers would told, would play for sure on any digital media player containing [...]

Operating Systems and Sociology

| May 12, 2008

Penguin Pete has started a very interesting view of what drives people to use certain operating systems. You may find part one a little heavy, especially if you don’t know the history behind it. Basically, Pete has been slammed quite a few times for his blasphemous viewpoint that Ubuntu is a watered down version of [...]

Microsoft Walks Away from Hostile Takeover of Yahoo!

| May 3, 2008

If this story is accurate, then Micro$oft has withdrawn their offer to buy Yahoo!  This is great news because I love the guys at Yahoo and the programs they run, such as Flickr and delicious and I love the fact that they use FreeBSD for their servers.  You can bet that Microsoft wouldn’t have been [...]

Another example of DRM being hurtful

| April 27, 2008

The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to.  This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want.  Some people will decide they got left holding the [...]

The Ego-less Desktop vs The Commercial Desktop

| April 16, 2008

In the most recent LugRadio episode was a feature about how the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) states that applications should be named in the applications menu not as the program name, but as what the program does.  This is something I’d like to explore a little more in another post.  But during the discussions, [...]