Matthew McCullough on Wordpress » Desktop

A second stab at Ubuntu

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:55:52 +0000

I’ve recently inherited a once believed to be dead piece of laptop. Honestly it was just a dead AC adapter, but the original owner is long gone and has moved on from it. So intead of leaving it to take up space longer I’ve decided to revive it, and with Ubuntu no less.

The laptop itself is smaller than my main machine, so I intend to turn it into a more portalble machine. But first things first, is getting it up and running with linux. Really this is a total sandbox project for me, but I’m excited to be able to play with Ubuntu and not mess up my main machine at the same time

The true reason for Folding

Matthew McCullough — Mon, 27 Aug 2007 10:10:12 +0000

I used to always leave my computer on over night just to have my IM away message up so that I would catch any messages people tried to send me. But of course, it never happened, and I would feal guilty for wasing all that power it took to run my computer while doing absolutely nothing with it.

But, with Folding@Home, not only do I feel great knowing that my cycles are helping valuable research, I can leave my computer on guilt free, knowing that my power consumption is for the greater good.

Thanks Folding, for enabling my internet addiction!

Floppy Disk Pen Holder

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 03:43:21 +0000

A bunch of people were blogging about this pen holder earlier. I thought It was cool and wanted to try to build one, but never really got the urge to.

But today when we were doing some cleanup at work, I found a whole bunch of unformatted Floppy disks, and knew I had to try it.

The result is not as neat as I would have hoped for, but still functional and cool. You can check out the photos here.

I have enough mats for 2 more, so I might try one with the yellow ties and try to plan it out a little bit better, as well as document it for DIYers.

My experiance with ubuntu

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 09 May 2007 12:32:38 +0000

So I recently installed ubuntu linux on my laptop, and to be honest, I hate it. It’s supposed to be linux for humans, but its far from a replacement to popular operating systems.

Maybe it’s just because my laptop is weird, but it seemed that to do anything with my laptop, I had to google the problem, hunt down the solution, and prayed that it worked for me too. I still never fully fixed my wireless. And the speakers have just been funky, turning the volume all the way down didn’t mute them.

I plan on switching back to XP this weekend. I still think ubuntu looks cool, and would probably put it on a spare computer if I had one, but for now my main OS needs to be something that A) I can easily fix and B) is able to run popular applications natively (WOW, iTunes).

Significant Improvements with campus internet.

Matthew McCullough — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 22:17:27 +0000

We have not only begun campus upgrades of network utilities, But I have also optimized my TCP/IP settings with a piece of windows freeware called TCP optimizer. Below are the new results, and compare them with the results in my old post below. The difference is almost 100x!

Joost Beta

Matthew McCullough — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 02:36:55 +0000

So I just signed up for the Joost beta, which hopefully I will get into. Joost promises to be TV on your computer. Which has been the promise of a few projects lately, and I haven’t been really impressed with any of them. Hopefully this one will change my mind.

Just a quick stab at it, is there anyone reading this with a beta account that can send me an invite? If you can, there will be many thanks.

Ubuntu is here

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 14:15:39 +0000

Although Mike and Manny were making fun of the name last night, I have downloaded and installed the Ubuntu Linux distribution on the old desktop (Dell optiplex 2100) in the den.

Right now its just for testing. The computer was low end even when we bought it (4 years ago), so you can imagine how its running now (crappy).

Not sure what my plans for it are yet. I've heard alot of talk about ubuntu lately, so I figured why not? I put in all the effort to get a 2nd PC in the house up and in running condition, and it never gets any use. so as far as I'm concerned, it's up for grabs.

I figured I can put a wireless network card in it and move it up to my bedroom, but those are running in the $50 range these days. Still looking into options.

Firefox Ads

Matthew McCullough — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 19:55:01 +0000

I Really hope they put these on TV or something. This is by far my favorite.

Yahoo! Widget Engine

Matthew McCullough — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 19:18:52 +0000

Widget Screenie

Originally uploaded by Matt And Bern.

Last night I went to the lounge to study Comp Sci with john, and i noticed he had some widgets on his desktop. I asked him what it was, and he told me that Konfaulator had become part of Yahoo's "Yahoo! Widget Engine"

So last night i downloaded it and gave it a try, and WOW! I love it! All of them for the most part have been seen before of other desktop enhancement programs i've used (See google sidebar, DS sidebar) Except, for a few widgets, my favorite in particular is iTunes agent.

Not only does it display the album art of the song you are listening to, but if there is no album art, it will find it, download it, and export it to iTunes for you! And lyrics too!!!! So now, im letting it play like everysone i own, so i can fill up my album arts and lyrics!

The picture frame is cool too, because it can connect to your Flickr ever since Yahoo bought Flickr. And everything in general is nice and shinny.

Yahoo! Widget Engine gets my Thumbs Up!