It’s only been two days since my last blog entry, but it feels like its been much longer. I’ve had a number of posts kicking around in my head, but I’ve been too busy to write them. I still have a few full-length items I intend to post, but for now, I’m going to do a bit of a brain dump.<\/p>\n
Spanish studies are progressing. I’m still really enjoying it. I’ve completed 22 of 30 lessons from Pimsleur’s Spanish I<\/a> course. I should be further, but I ended up repeating around 15 lessons when I switched from the “bait” edition, Pimsleur Instant Conversation Spanish<\/a>, to the full edition. I’ll post more on that later. Meanwhile, I’m about ready to start searching eBay<\/a> for Pimsleur’s Spanish II<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n I’ve been using Firefox<\/a> and its antecedents for over eight months<\/a>. Only in the past few days have I figured out that While typing the prior bullet, I decided to check the spelling of antecedent. I automatically went to dictionary.com<\/a>– it’s where I always go. What’s your favorite online dictionary? Drop a note in the comments.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Speaking of comments, the comment system on this site still<\/em> sucks. I think I’ve finally figured out how I’m going to handle it, I just need to spend a little time on implementation. No hints. Well, maybe one<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Speaking of the ‘Fox, I’m continuing to use<\/a> version 0.8 on my Mac after shunning it<\/a> for two months. It’s mostly working well, but there are a few issues. I haven’t taken the time yet to figure out if these are problems with the browser or the Tabbrowser Extensions<\/a>, but I can no longer drag-and-drop to re-order tabs within an window. Dragging tabs from one window to another continues to work.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n After giving my last spare monitor (20″ trinitron) to my brother a couple of months ago, I’ve been itching to play with some of my old PC hardware that was laying around my basement. Having a clean garage<\/a> complete with a big workbench and tons of shelf space hasn’t helped. I finally broke down this weekend and bought an el-cheapo monitor, so now I’m playing with out-of-date hardware.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n It’s amazing how the price of technology continues to drop. The monitor I bought today, after rebates, cost me about USD 80.00 at Circuit City<\/a>. It’s a 17″ flat CRT, with resolution up to 1280×1024. It looks great. It was only a couple of years ago this would have been an expensive monitor. You can’t even buy a CRT smaller than 17″ at most retailers these days… it’s just not worth it for the retailers to carry them, they are so inexpensive. Flat panels have really taken over the market.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n To help me figure out what kind of hardware I have, I went looking for a Linux live CD (a la Knoppix<\/a>) that featured hardware reporting of some kind. Live CDs already know how to scan your system, but I don’t know how to get a report of what was found. I didn’t exactly find what I was looking for, but I found a list of Linux Live CDs<\/a>, containing dozens of the things. What I did find that met my needs was the Ultimate Boot CD<\/a>, a bootable CD containing images of dozens of mostly DOS-based boot floppies, each containg a different utility. You boot the CD, select the image you want to use, and it boots from it. I was able to inventory my hardware with Navr\u00c3\u00a1til Software System Information<\/a>, or NSSI.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n I pieced together a AMD K6-2 300 MHz system with a 9G hard drive and 384M RAM. Time remaining on my Fedora Core 2 Test 3 installation: 15 minutes. I’ll be blogging more on this later. <\/p>\n<\/li>\nCTRL+TAB<\/code> lets you toggle through tabs in the current window. Boy, have I been looking for that shortcut.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n