Random thoughts with no apparent order about technology, life and whatever else comes to mind. You've been warned!
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Turnaround is fair play
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro? tempting
- Free upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1
- $119 for Windows 8.1 installation DVD (not an upgrade)
- $199 for Windows 8.1 Pro installation DVD (not an upgrade)
Wednesday, October 02, 2013
Do I bother putting Flash on?
I think it is a good idea to refresh your computer system every so often and not only to clear out “cobwebs” and remove unused programs and libraries. I think it is good to do a refresh so that you can take a moment and figure out what you have used, and what you haven’t. What should you keep and what to dump.
Take for instance I just installed Fedora 19, Gnome, on my laptop.
This laptop is older (pre-Lenovo deal) IBM Thinkpad with not a ton of horsepower compared to modern devices (Pentium M @ 1.8 GHz, 2GB of RAM), but it is adequate to doing most things. It runs Windows 7 fine, so long as I don’t do too much in the way of heavy compiling or video editing. The good thing is I don’t do that too much already and now I have a desktop to handle some of the heavier tasks.
So now that I have a fresh Fedora 19, Gnome, installation once my updates are done I will be able to start looking at which programs I want to install and actually use, and which programs I usually install but never use.
The first item coming to mind, though, is Flash; do I really need it?
YouTube plays many of its videos using HTML5 instead of Flash and outside of a couple of games I really don’t use Flash all that much as far as I am aware. If I have a need for Flash, I can still use the desktop or switch to the Windows 7 hard drive.
Probably one of the more used, at home, Flash application I use is to listen to Pandora. Pandora has years of my music preferences collected and I have my stations pretty much the way I like them so I am not too interested in trying another music service that allows streaming over the Internet which I need to “teach” all over again. Not to mention, to hope that it will recognize that if like one song flagged with “rap”, that I am not suddenly interested in “gangsta rap” in the middle of my Christmas-themed radio station!
Thankfully I may be able to fulfill this with the use of Pithos.
So between Pithos and HTML5, I am going to see how far can I get without Flash before breaking down and installing it.