Friday bits and pieces
Had downloaded Puppy Linux 4.00 and burned it to CD last night and booted it up to try it out this morning and am LOVING it! This is the fastest I have ever seen this machine run, and so far everything I have wanted to do just works. I moved my .mozilla folder over and have all of my tabs and passwords and bookmarks and it ALL JUST WORKS! Yea I know I’m not supposed to shout but I’m really liking this and it’s still running from cd, kinda. I told it to save my prefs and file and stuff to the hard drive and then rebooted and it came right back up, really fast too. CD out and it’s back to PCLOS with just a small file on the hard drive. Going to try it for a few days and see how it works long term. I’ve tried it several times over the years but there was always something that irritated me and drove me back to a distro that used KDE but though this isn’t quite what I am accustomed to it works, and is fairly easy to get around in and so far nothing has made me pull any hair out, which is a big +++.
Went out and about today, mailed off a bunch of stuff sold on e-bay, then went down and paid bills. Stopped by the Salvation Army and got a bunch of books then headed to Oxford to go by the library to see what they might have for sale, and they were gone. Library has moved but all the signs just said to go to the new location. No address. Weird. Will check online and see where they have moved to. So went to the mall to look for some cooking stuff but no joy there, so back north to Save-a-Lots and got some groceries and then came back home. Cooked supper, ate and I got to trying to modify a couple of Cue Cats. One would kill the keyboard and the other was different to all the ones that have mod instructions that I could find. Got some more of them around somewhere but can’t find them right now. So decided to do the days post and call it a night. Till tomorrow…
Themocracy
Cue cats???? It’s too late to Google, but I will in the morning. It’s scratching at the back of my mind, but won’t come up.
Had a Friday, been at the high school all week. Was at the other campus (and not really on campus, just the workbuilding and the Central Office) for maybe an hour total today. New construction at KSE took out a phone line, now most of the school and all the CO (and the workbuilding, natch) have no phones for an yet to be specified time. Kaka occurs. Found several new things with the Macbooks today with the help of one of the teachers, just more interesting possibilities every time I look. Yes, I know they aren’t cheap, and Yes, I know it’s a closed system, and Yes, you have to pay for software, but out of the box they do a LOT of things that are major PITAs to get going in Windoze. Or Linux. And ooh, Shiny! (Sorry, just had to throw that in.) I think there is a place for them. It would be nice to have EVERYTHING Mac, but that ain’t happening, but I am looking cautiously forward to a more integrated enviroment.
Well, it’s late, and my eyes are losing focus. I guess that means it’s time to go to bed. Hasta manana.
Sorry about that. I am to be forgetting that others read this drivel that I writes at times… 😉
The Wikipedia entry about the CueCat.
Basically the CueCat is a bar code reader shaped like a cat. Was given away by Radio Shack for use with their catalogs in the late 90’s. The company that made them encoded the output and added a serial # to the data stream out. I’ve managed to get that part removed but the encoding part in the one I have isn’t the same as the ones I have found on line. Still got to find the other 2 that are floating around here somewhere. With the serial and encoding removed they can be used to input standard bar codes which is what I am wanting to do.