poudyal blog in words
Achievement: posted my 200th photograph on flickr (well, not really an “achievement” given that I joined in 2005!) BUT
The Catch: Free account apparently only lets you show off the last 200 photographs uploaded AND it suggests I should upgrade!
So: I’m gonna weigh the costs vs benefits of spending a couple of dollars a month on the Pro-Account for a while (like an economist should) - meanwhile, I also show-off my pictures elsewhere anyway!
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Why are you always “online” and “away”? The question I usually had to answer (not much nowadays) if I replied to a ping on IM while on “away” status. We all probably do it. Show our IM status as not available (away, busy, or even invisible) when we want to pick and choose who we would like to chat with and who we would like to avoid/ignore.
“Busy” status is a strange thing (and I don’t keep my status as “busy” anymore). You’re more likely to get into trouble when you’re in a “busy” status than when you’re “away”. I have heard the same accusation again and again, about being snobbish when I used to ignore messages being in a “busy” status. That didn’t really work except to annoy many of my friends.In a way it is understandable as you are really telling them to bugger off.
Continue reading ‘busy, away, invisible… are you really?’
Well, this is not a proper review of either the Parallels Desktop or of running multiple operating systems on MacBook. Its just my experience setting up these “Guest OSes” to run on my MacBook using Parallels Desktop. The reason I opted for Parallels and not Boot Camp are two folds - ONE, I didn’t need the full power of any of the “Guest OSes” that I wanted to install by running them solo on their own partition, and TWO, and more importantly, I really wanted all the OSes to run together, without having to boot on and off to switch to one from the other. And Parallels Desktop fitted me perfectly in that respect [AND fitted my budget perfectly as well as I got it off on sale at John Lewis at half price (£24.95!) with free upgrade to the latest version!]. Anyway, here I present my experience with some screenshots!
Let me start my telling that you really need to have at least 2GB of memory on your Mac (if not more - I started with 1GB and the day after installing WinXP, upgraded to 4GB!) to run these “Guest OSes” smoothly. Anyway, as I said I started with my original MacBook whose specification was Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz, 1GB DDR, 120GB HDD. I installed Parallels, and after a couple of emails to the support was able to get my FREE upgrade to the latest version. In the meantime, I managed to install WinXP Pro, and using this windows installation, was also able to upgrade the OS on my Nokia N800 to OS2008! So far, I was impressed with the performance of my “Guest OS”, which I had set to use 512MB of memory and installed on a virtual HDD with maximum space set at 32GB.
The next day, I installed SPSS on WinXP (reason being that I couldn’t get a mac version SPSS from the computing service at my uni coz they hadn’t received the latest version for mac). I started my data entry on SPSS on XP running on Mac, and started to notice the system getting slower and slower. At the end I was not able to run multiple programs at all when XP was running. Thats when I decided to get memory upgraded - I found relatively good deal at Crucial-UK and got their “4GB Kit for MacBook for under £70! It arrived the next day, and I immediately opened up my 1-week old MacBook (after making sure it wouldn’t void my Apple warranty of course!), removed both the original 512MB pieces and installed two 2GB DDRs in their place. I had no problem booting up my mac after this upgrade, and not surprisingly, Parallels started to run lot smoother immediately.
My MacBook specs with 4GB DDR
I must have mentioned previously that here in Ghana, rationing of water and electricity (load shedding) on most areas are a normal occurrence. Just by good luck, the area of Tamale that I live in doesn’t have scheduled load-shedding nor it has the rationing of tap-water. But this luxury comes at a very heavy price, as I have recently found out - you never know when the electricity supply is cut (and usually the availability of tap-water follows the pattern of electricity supply). Since there is no scheduled load-shedding in the area I live in, when the lights go off, its the “general lights off” as is known here, and it means the whole town is without electricity!
Anyway, coming back to the “heavy price” of this uncertain supply (or more appropriately, the uncertain cut-off) of electricity, I found out what happens to a laptop battery when you have all sorts of power-hungry devices (mostly the USB plug-and-play devices such as external hard drives) are plugged in and the mains power is suddenly cut off - my laptop battery just went dead! It actually happened a couple of weeks ago. I was burning some pictures from my external HD that requires mains power to a CD on my laptop, and suddenly the mains power was off. As soon as the external HD shut off, my computer went dead. Nothing I did to make it come back worked. The power indicator on the battery showed that it was fully charged, but none was getting through to the computer. I thought my laptop HD was gone, which meant a disaster, for I hadn’t backed-up my system (which I do at least once every couple of months normally) since I came to Ghana. I do update the copy of “Documents” on external HD every week or so, so I wasn’t too worried about losing much of my recent work.
Continue reading ‘lights off…lights on…’
copylefT 2008 ♍.
Recent Comments
goesflies by: r u lost somewhere in the jungles of africa!!!!! no… (22 Jul 2008 - 13:41)