I have 3 GMAIL invites burning a hole in my inbox, if you want one let me know.

The most exciting thing about GMAIL, for me so far, is that it’s still possible to get your desired username without it being taken already. However, I just want GMAIL pop3 style, I’ll take a cut in the storage size for pop3.

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) should come with warnings. Not for the content but for its addictiveness. I propose a dependency scale be made for such games. I wish someone would have warned me. We recently purchased Dark Age of Camelot. We bought the first game, no expansion packs, as I assumed that I wouldn’t like it enough to continue playing, let alone beef up the content. Growing ever so tired of first person shooters, I decided to try a different genre of games and for $10; Dark Age was a reasonable choice.

I never thought I’d see the day when I started using words like questing, guild, leveling, and XP. I’ve even found myself trying to recruit others to play.

At first, I couldn’t understand the fun in doing mundane tasks and slaying monsters. Until I realized that you’re just buffing up your character to participate in a large scale, realm-vs.-realm (player-vs.-player style) war.

I’m completely sucked in and I fear the day I decide to try Star Wars Galaxies.

Try Dark Age of Camelot for 7 days.

My Linux hunt is over and my quest for the perfect distro for my ThinkPad 600e has officially ended.

After a few days of using Fedora, Dave suggested that I try Mandrake. I’ve used Mandrake before, as I found a copy of version 7(?) floating around my desk. I went ahead and downloaded Mandrake 10, even went as far as downloading all three disks that were available for download. The install was blasted 80 minutes, with minimum packages. Install was painless as it was graphical. I prefer text mode, but they both get the job done.

When it was up and running, everything worked, except sound of course. I found Mandrake to be very slow on my machine and didn’t really like the package management. I think I’m just completely biased and Debian won my heart at first install. As I’ve never liked anything since.

I gave Mandrake a whirl for a few days but continued pining for Debian. Once again, I caved and decided to delve back into Debian. This time I downloaded a 110MB copy of the latest Sarge image for a bare minimum install and crossed my fingers and hoped my Nic would be detected during install. It was! apt-get install kde, logged in, apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade, reboot…sound aside, everything was flawless and speedy.

After a few apt-get installs and customizing, I set out to find a sound fix. I came across one of the forums on LinuxQuestions.org, same thread I’d been reading since the beginning of this mission, only this time someone posted a new fix. I’ve already tried every Thinkpad600e fix that I came across, this one, however, was new so I followed the quick one minute directions, and rebooted.

The sound error didn’t pop up but I refused to let my hopes get up. I threw in Sleater-Kinney’s One Beat album and BAM! Sound works perfectly!

Huge thanks go to jhalford for posting the info and even bigger thanks to blissex on the Debian support on IRC for providing the fix to jhalford.

Ah, more of my neophyte adventures with Linux. Debian was working for me for a while but then began to degrade over time. It was annoying enough that I couldn’t get the sound working but then it would refuse to display in 24 bit. Despite all of the changes I made to force a 24 bit display, it wouldn’t stick and I couldn’t take it anymore. So, I went on a hunt for a new Linux distro to experiment with and decided on Fedora Core 2.

Well, I admit, I did try to revert back to Windows one more time, but XP is still boycotting PCMCIA. Instead of fighting with Windows, I continued the search for Linux. With Windows, there isn’t a bunch of fixes you can try, well, in my particular case I mean, with my ThinkPad 600e. I’ve found that, while neither OSs are flawless, Linux gives me the ability to try more than two things to work, if that makes sense to anybody. Moving on….

At first I was going to use Gentoo but decided on Fedora Core 2. I figured if it’s based on Red Hat I’d be able to find a little bit more stability and support for everything that goes wrong with ThinkPads.

The installation was extremely simple using the graphical method. However, the process itself was almost 80 minutes. Whew.

Upon first boot I noticed that it was trying to load the network before it loaded the PCMCIA nic, which resulted in errors and internet access was…well, inaccessible. After a little bit of searching, I came across a fix by removing the ‘alias eth0′ line from the modprobe.conf file. Which worked, but then on my second reboot it no longer worked. So what I did was, remove network loading on boot and now I manually start the network once I’m logged in using the command, “service network start”, which works fine. I’d rather have a permanent fix. Luckily, this problem isn’t uncommon, so I anticipate a solid fix for this soon.

For package management I installed Apt and Fedora comes with Yum, which works like apt. This works okay, kind of slow, and I miss the huge reservoir of packages offered through apt from Debian.

My screen depth and resolution has stayed consistent, which is nice. Of course, there’s always the one thing that just doesn’t seem to work: SOUND. Now, at first, I didn’t care but the more I use the laptop the more I long to listen to music. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a solution for this, until then, I’m satisfied for right now, but being such and OS whore, I’ll probably be installing something new very soon.

If by any chance any of you own a ThinkPad 600(e) and run Linux, I’d love to know which distro you use and which you think works best, as far as getting everything working, including sound.

Since the arrival of our new computer, I’ve been taking advantage of PC gaming. Unfortunately, I’m getting a little burnt out on Unreal Tournament 2004. I recently bought Jedi Outcast but have quickly lost interest. Most of my friends aren’t into PC games, so having light saber battles with 12 year olds just isn’t too appealing any more. So now I’m currently on the hunt for a new game. I’m curious to what others have been playing and looking for some suggestions for something new. Something preferably different, meaning: A game that doesn’t involve the beaches of Normandy or the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

I was browsing through the Sunday ads and CompUSA actually had some decent deals. One being a Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM HD for $130. They also have a 2.2GB External USB 2.0 Hard Drive but it’s a bit pricey. It’s about the same size as most jump/thumb drives, I figure the more models they come out with that have larger storage the cheaper the older ones will be and then I’ll indulge. Just more things to add to my tech wishlist, I’d rather go wireless first. You wouldn’t believe how annoying it is dragging a wired laptop everywhere.

We love teh bittorrent! Here’s the torrent links for the movie Fahrenheit 911.(A legal download, hah!)

In order to download this movie you will have to install BitTorrent. Those of you that prefer P2P programs you can download Shareaza, (works the same as Kazaa) which also handles BitTorrent downloads.

My first experience with Linux was several years ago when I decided to take an old beast of a computer and tranform it into something functional. Which was not possible to be obtained through Windows. It’s ultimate purpose was simply to allow others access to the internet while I hogged the main computer. On a search to find a compact, solid and stable OS that wasn’t performance demanding and easy to use, I came across a Linux distro called Peanut. Which practically turned my relic into a brand new computer.

Fast forward to a week ago when XP cripples and boycotts my PCMCIA slot along with my NIC. After every troubleshooting technique possible, I went through a series of installs and uninstalls down the line of Microsoft OS’s. All of which were too ignorant to work properly.

After a complete waste of time, I tossed out the Windows disks and installed Debian. I traded in my NIC problems for a sound problem. From what I’ve read, it also seems like it’s a typical problem surrounding Thinkpad 600E’s and Linux, so whatever. Hopefully I’ll fix it at some point.

I’ve been engulfed by Debian. The OS itself is built so intelligently. The apt-get feature to install software packages and other goodies is a nice treat. Adding the laptop to my LAN was a breeze, it’s beyond customizable. I did have a problem with upgrading through apt-get, that and my sound problem are the only hardships I’ve encountered. So, if any of you Linux gurus out there have any tips, tricks, software recommendations and the like, feel free to post them.

So much hype surrounding Google’s e-mail service, GMAIL. Gmail is still in beta, though some with accounts receive invites to send out to others to sign up for an account. Which has created a large following of people begging for invites. Invites are being auctioned off on ebay, other invites are randomly given to lucky refreshers who choose to F5 a webpage for hours hoping to be the lucky winner. I’ve also seen sites setup for people to offer something in exchange for an invite and even an IRC channel created for people who are willing to earn an invite by doing a little password cracking of rar files and such.

I was doing a little surfing, looking for good sites to add to my links, when I came across Starbody in a 6-degrees of a Tampa weblog fashion. I happened to be at the right place, at the right time, when someone was willing to hand out an invite to a stranger. Kimberly of Starbody passed an invite my way and I’ve since had the opportunity to test out Gmail. (Thanks again!)

Gmail has a slick new interface and offers 1 gig of storage, surpassing every other popular web based e-mail service. If I recall correctly, I think Yahoo just boosted it’s storage limit in an attempt to compete with Gmail. The layout is smooth and easy to use. I’m looking forward to it’s final unveiling.

There’s only one thing that I’ve been skeptical about: the privacy policy. It’s not so much the fact that Gmail will be scouring the emails. Anybody with a packet sniffer can intercept e-mail, it’s the fact that it’s searching for keywords to be used in target marketing. I hate ads. I’m curious to see how it will incorporate it’s ads to the user, by inbox or embedded ads? Google does use advertising in it’s search engine, which is quite unobtrusive and at times useful, so I guess I’ll wait and see. Beggars can’t be choosers though, how else is Google supposed to dish out a gig of e-mail storage to herds of users.?

All in all, I’ve been impressed with Gmail thus far and look forward to it going public.

Thanks go out to Dave for suggesting WordPress to me. It took me a little while but the switch from Movabletype to Word Press is finally finished. The only thing I wasn’t capable of doing was the dropdown categories without a ‘go’ button. When I used the code to have the page transferred after selection (the same used for the monthly archives) it wouldn’t validate. I got fed up with fiddling with it and left it as is, it works, just not the way I want it to. A task for another time.

In short, WordPress is a breeze to setup. The only minor obstacle I had (aside from the dropdown menu creation) was adjusting to the new tags. Which, after a few minutes, became much easier.

My major reason for switching was NO MORE REBUILDING. If you have tons of entries, archive monthly, daily, and categorically, you know how much a pain rebuilding can be in Movabletype when making even the slightest of adjustments. One click and it’s instantly published.

I like the way, after setting up the main index template, WordPress automatically configured the archives and comment pages by integrating my design. A nice time saver.

WordPress is a powerful content manager, simple in its appearance but bold in functionality. Combined with all of the plugins that are available and a great support community, WordPress is absolutely superior to the other content managers I’ve used.

Thanks to the Subscribe to Comments plugin from ScriptyGoddess it’s now possible to be notified via email when someone replies to your comment.

I’m going to explore and add some plugins. If you’re thinking of switching to Word Press, try it, I promise you won’t look back.