Random Thoughts

I have owned (and loved) my HP Pavilion zt3340us notebook for the last 3 years. It had taken the excessive use and abuse of some 10+ hours/day without any significant upgrade or repair until about a year ago when it's power adapter started acting up. I promptly bought an after-market (non-OEM) replacement($45) which lasted for some 6 months before dying itself. Following another replacement of the power adapter($30) and the purchase of a brand new after-market battery($50), the power issues persisted in different forms. Particularly, the power jack was getting too loose to charge up the battery or even consistently power the notebook. For a while, I compromised the mobility of the notebook by removing the battery, but soon the loose connection started oscillating so much that it was causing overheating around the power jack connection. The overheating led to some abrupt(thermal) shutdowns and an inability to reboot the notebook for days at a time. That basically deemed the ...

I have not been a fan of Dell as of late and here is why. I have access to a Dell printer(Dell 944 All-in-One printer/scanner/copier) that came in for cheap bundled with a Dell laptop. The printer is basically made by Lexmark, but sold though Dell with minor modifications and a Dell label. This presents two problems: As a Linux user, I like printers for which Linux drivers exist, either through Dell or another party. The irritating thing about these Dell printers is that Dell only provides Windows drivers while Lexmark, the proxy maker of the printer, usually provides at least Windows and Mac drivers and often tries to provide kits for the development of Linux drivers. If one wanted to look for a Lexmark analog of a Dell printers, it is virtually impossible to do because that information does not seem to be readily available. Another way Dell makes it difficult for all non-Dell users and products is in the cartridge business. The ink cartridge can only bought from Dell and no ot...

The 60GB disk on my laptop has become a huge limitation recently and instead of having to burn my movies onto DVDs regularly, I opted to shell out a whopping $65 (thanks to a BestBuy sale and $25 coupon) to buy a 120GB external mini-hard drive. It is not only tiny (weighing 7.2 oz) but it does not require an external power source as it can simply plug into my laptop's USB port. While this hard drive does come with a lot of cool features like one-touch backups and file encryption for Windows and Macs, one would be lucky to just get it to work for Linux. For one, it comes formatted in NTFS format and is not writable initially. I will describe how I got it to work below. For starters, here are some specs of my system: Pentium M 1.5MHz Banias, 60GB HD, 768MB DDR SDRAM, Linux version 2.6.20-15-generic (gcc version 4.1.2 (Ubuntu 4.1.2-0ubuntu4)) #2 SMP Sun Apr 15 07:36:31 UTC 2007 First, power up the external HD simply by plugging it into your computer. Most recent Linux sy...