Ben Hourigan Writer and editor.

28Nov/052

Back online

I got my Powerbook back on Thursday night, just before work.

Having a computer again has its upsides and downsides: while I’m not going crazy for lack of a writing machine and a way to talk to my friends and family in Australia, I’m also back wasting a lot of time surfing the web. Computers have a rhythm that they can tie you to, and since I got mine back I’ve spent a lot of my free time reading news from RSS feeds and putting my data back in order from the horrible mess that attempting to migrate to Linux left it in. It’s easy to just keep working on such things, and I tend to stay up later than I’d planned. While I was without my laptop, in contrast, I managed to read a book an a half, and get in some early nights and the consequent much-needed sleep.

I am, by the way, back on OS X for a good while yet. Ubuntu Linux has matured a little since I last tried it, but it still doesn’t have the polish and usability that OS X has. One day, I hope, Linux will beat all of the proprietary operating systems at desktop usability, and when that day comes I’ll make the switch for good, but for now, again, I’m afraid not.

20Nov/052

HD Failure

My Powerbook’s hard-disk failed. So I’ll be completely offline for a week or more.

I was attempting to migrate to Ubuntu Linux at the time, so I had thought that all the slow boot-ups and IO errors I was experiencing might have been my own fault, the result of me and gparted messing up my partition table together, but it looks like I was wrong. I wasted a good four days last week trying to move all my data into a new system that was never going to work. I’m out of patience, so when I get my Powerbook back, I’ll be sticking with MacOS.

After a HD failure, I’m keen to go back to something that, famously, “just works.” Being alone in a foreign country, where you don’t speak the language, without email access, the web, Skype, and a computer to write on is just too traumatic. No more fiddling, as I promised Annnette a few days ago.

22Apr/058

Extreme pinkness

I switched to my Windows box for a few hours today while I was backing up my Powerbook’s HD, and I noticed…

benhourigan.com looks very pink when viewed on a monitor that hasn’t been calibrated properly. This was not the intention. The background is meant to be a light tan, rather than salmon.

I blame Windows, for having such shoddy colour control. Of course, I never noticed how bad it was until I started using Mac OS X, and Linux is usually just as bad as Windows.

Since the fact that my uncalibrated readers are experiencing extreme pinkness displeases me, I will soon be changing the background colour. Any suggestions? Colour’s name and RGB values, please.

9Apr/054

Microsoft copies Ubuntu logo

The MSN Spaces service recently passed out of its beta phase. On visiting the service’s home page, regular readers of OSNews will likely recognise a shocking degree of similarity between the Spaces logo and that of distro-of-the-moment Ubuntu Linux. The similarity is obvious when switching between the Spaces and Ubuntu pages in separate browser tabs. In the sites’ favicons, the three circles representing human heads are in the exact same positions in both logos. There is also a blog within MSN Spaces that has been set up to show Ubuntu’s logo side by side with Microsoft’s ripped-off version. Have a look before Microsoft hears from Canonical’s lawyers.