Clean your Face(book)!

We live in interesting times. I’ve just removed the Superwall app because of that annoying “click forward” crap. Once I’d done that (and there’s a whole paper waiting to be written on the social anxiety engendered by not having the apps that your friends have), I then applied the paring knife to all the other pointless apps I’d tried: no more superpoke, no more stupid pot plants, gardens or fish tanks. No more fucking vampires, zombies or pirates.

I still have the stuff that *I* consider useful and interesting (rather than adding apps just so my friends can send me messages). So I still have useful (and unintrusive) apps like Calendar. And I have feeds from my blog and Flickr into my profile.

Which raises an interesting question: for whom is the Profile page? Is it for me to use as a home page with links and feeds to stuff I’m interested in and find useful? Or is it for my friends to keep up with whatever I’m doing?

I think it can work both ways. I can make use of my profile page — beyond the “look at me” factor. And others can follow what I’m up to (through blog and Flickr feeds) and they still have ample and adequate means of contacting me through the Wall or Inbox. And I can easily share interesting stuff I’ve found with my friends (and others) with the Post option.

So, I’m now looking forward to a more relaxed use of Facebook. We’ll see how that works out in practice.

Blogged with Flock

Facebook SPAM

SPAM alert! Although some people might think that Facebook is mostly spam, some evil genius has found a way to spam using the popular SuperWall and FunWall apps. Those messages with “click forward to see what happens” are spam, and you should NOT respond, ppl. To what end is not clear (I’ve never actually clicked on Forward to see what happens) but it’s still friggin annoying.

For some detail on this problem — which has the potential to kill Facebook — see this article from the NYT.

Personally, I’m ditching Super/FunWall. Don’t need them anyway.

Blogged with Flock

Broken toe? Maybe.

Had a little accident at the weekend. Staying at the wonderful Blue Grape B&B in Willunga, I took it into my head to take some photos of the vines by moonlight. Unfortunately, going down the stairs in the dark, there turned out to be one more step than I thought, resulting in this badly bruised and possibly broken toe.

I went to a private hospital (expecting xrays would be required), where the doc advised that the treatment was the same whether broken or not (a “buddy strap”, where they strap the toe to the next one for support, plus elevation). Which knowledge set me back $175! Now THAT hurts!

Going Ubuntu — success!

Success on all fronts! Woo!

First, I have Wireless working. To be honest, it seems to have fixed itself. I simply used the Network Manager icon thingy to configure wireless and it worked. Probably, my previous attempt was hampered by an excess of knowledge — playing around with ifconfig/iwconfig was maybe a bad idea.

Second, I have Synaptic fixed — following a hint in a forum post which suggested adding the IP of the distro site (au.archive.ubuntu.com) as a proxy server in settings. Slightly bizarre, but … worked!

Once I had that fixed, I could then use the Add/Remove tool to install Thunderbird, which then gave me back my email (and sanity).

As far as I care right now, that’s it. I have everything I need for a functioning system.

Oh, and I also played with F-Spot photo manager, which seems to work well, including an uploader to Flickr, so I really do have everything now.

(Except Flock, which I miss slightly,, but … hey, at least its not Windoze!)

Going Ubuntu — in trouble again

Well, it has been a torrid few days. First, my “other” laptop died with the “Regency Wallpaper screen of death” (followed by a complete refusal to turn on). So this put a slight crimp in my plans. I didn’t really want to wipe my only existing laptop by installing Ubuntu without knowing it would work / I had other means of contacting the world. A friend loaned us a very old but functioning Toshiba, so …

… I did it. I installed Ubuntu. Now I’m in all sorts of strife! Obviously I have a working install (although it took a day to get the networking sorted, and I still don’t have wireless working). Firefox is working well and I can access the world.

But various things don’t work:

• Synaptic / apt-get don’t work. This is a major bummer, since there are many things I want to install, and the bugger won’t connect to sources or update. Forums don’t help here, since the only threads I found just peter out without resolution. If I can’t get this solved, then I guess I’ll have to give up.
• Evolution doesn’t work. OK, it opens, but it won’t connect to my mail server. (Yes, I have checked all the settings, multiple times.)
• Can’t install Thunderbird. See Synaptic above, but even downloading from Mozilla and installing manually doesn’t help, since TB requires libstdc++.so.5 and Ubuntu/Gutsy has libstdc++.so.6
• So I have no email access except through webmail. (Ugh!)
• Wireless doesn’t work. Configures, but doesn’t work. Help suggests I need to make a Kernel change to disable apci, but doesn’t say how. “Boot the kernel with the pci=noacpi option.” WTF? I haven’t had time to research this.

So right now I’m a little overwhelmed with problems!