Saturday, August 25, 2012

down the road apace heels a click'n

Well folks as I said before I was making some changes amid some turbulence. The laptop flop and Ubuntu 12.04 glitches. So here is an update as to where we are at today, even as we speak, err type. Baking the laptop's removable video cards worked, I am still stunned and not happy-danced out yet. Don't try this at home, at least not in an oven used for food. Be cautious and a little leery, it's OK. I want to buy a small oven for art projects anyway, but will have to see if I can get 386 degrees out of a small unit. What about an easy bake oven? LOL! ok, I'll stop.

Then I tried to install XP Pro on the spare laptop, twice I got the BSOD (blue screen of death) during the install. The little sticker that says this unit is designed for Windows XP is iffy. So now Mint 13 (Maya) Linux is on both laptops. The one that I mostly use has 4 gig of RAM so I installed Virtualbox which allows me to run XP as a virtual system inside of Linux. What a laugh to run XP in a window and control it as an application. It runs well so far. I use XP to run Google Sketchup. This worked better than running Sketchup in WINE ( a MS Windows simulator for Linux), which worked till it couldn't find the GL graphics libraries, dang, they are right there!. XP is still good if you need it.

So the laptop displays look solid and stable. Mint is the bomb and real MS WinXP in a window works fine too. Now I am going to tell you the ugly truth. Trouble is exciting, the fixing, the fussing, the explaining, the chest thumping..........getting back to work is kind of flat. Yeah, I'm flat and happy.

Been pushing the pen a lot lately, I am half way through another notebook. I need to push the mouse to get some of the ideas into digital form. My biggest hurdle comes from not having enough ink in my printer. There are 3 colors and 2 blacks. If one of the cartridges are out the printer shuts down. Wouldn't you know it, one black cartridge is out. Why two if one out shuts printing down? You'd think one big honking black cartridge rather than two small ones would suffice and a switch to switch to black ink only........do I have to tell them everything!?! Oh, I should have bought a printer with both bells and whistles. At the time bells were enough. Let that be a lesson to you and me. See ya.

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