BEST FISH TANK FILTER SYSTEM

OK, yes Linux h4Xx0r1ng is frustrating from time to time. I was butting my head against a wall trying to get sound working on my Gentoo.

Thanks to Google and the very giving nature of fellow hackers, I got it to work!

I was so stoked.

Yes, it can be challenging, and boy can it be frustrating, but it's these epiphanies that make it so worth it.

Oh yeah, it turned out to be a matter of not having Vorbis decoding compiled into my Gentoo yet. Or something like that. It plays wavs though, and for now, that's good enough.

Looking for some irony?

So yeah, that on the right is my Google-issue MacBook Pro. Yes, I am forced to fall back to that when my Gentoo misbehaves. I took this picture to share my stokedness with you. I plugged my camera in and iPhoto dutifully grabbed the pictures. All I wanted was the jpg to upload to Flickr. Where was it? The shiny UI didn't make it obvious. I fired up Finder and navigated through Pictures and iPhoto Library. Found a whole bunch of meaningless crap. Hmm, I saw Data there. Maybe that's where my jpg is hiding. 2007, Roll 1, ah, some jpgs! Double clicked on the one I wanted, and it's all pixelly, and compressed, and c'mon!

I just want my jpg! What is UP with OS X and its obfuscation of my goddamn data?

Went back to iPhoto, poked at it some more, and finally figured out how to export my pics to the desktop.

I don't know man. I picked the MacBook to give this OS X a whirl. To be a better-informed operating system connoisseur. And so far, it hasn't really grown on me. I find all that command line nonsense on the left there far more powerful and useful. And I get the shiny happy UI too when I want it. Which makes FAR more sense to me than Aqua and its menu bars on top of the screen.

Wednesday, 19 Mar 2008 -- Jessica Twentyman & Sam Hiser wrote about GNU/Linux & Virtualization in the the Financial Times (Digital Business section); Hiser covered their green aspects.