After my horrible experience upgrading from Jaunty to Karmic (I skipped Intrepid) I swore I would never again be an early adopter of an Ubuntu release. I had intended to wait about two months before upgrading. However, in the past few weeks since the release since the official release I had read no negative comments on tuxmachines. I had nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon so I decided to take the plunge.

Prior to the upgrade I made sure that my Karmic system and all my installed apps were as up to date as possible. Then I backed up my my installed apps with APTonCD. Fortunately, this was not needed but it gave me comfort in knowing that I had some level of recovery in case something went wrong. The upgrade proceeded without problems unlike the upgrade to Karmic that aborted and left with me with many days of cleanup work. There were a few questions about whether to keep certain configuration files that had been created by third party software. Not being certain on how to answer, I simply opted to keep them believing that I could resolve any problems at a later time.

At the start of the upgrade, Ubuntu informed me that third party repositories would be disabled. I would have to manually re-enable them after the upgrade. This is where I encountered the “bumps”. I have over a dozen third party repositories enabled. The upgrade took a little over an hour to complete. But then there remained the repository update. Simply re-enabling the repositories did not work. The authentication keys were lost in the upgrade. A little research on the Internet taught me how to regain a lost key. This added about another two hours to the upgrade.

I am not criticizing Ubuntu for this upgrade necessity. I am simply calling it to my readers attention. It is part of the upgrade process. The Synaptic Package Manager will inform you of disabled repositories. Go to the Settings tab and click on Repositories. Re-enable them one by one, editing and changing the distribution information to “lucid”. Then “reload” the repositories. It is at this point that you will encounter problems involving authentication keys, missing repositories and other problems.

Ubuntu improves a bit with each release. This release is no exception. I recommend that all Ubuntu users do the upgrade as long as their equipment permits it.

From time to time I receive a text message on my cell phone. Some require a response. There are many people who are quite proficient entering text messages on their cell phone keypad. I am not one of them. I have yet to compose a message without error and damned if I can figure out how to erase. Oh well, with either my Touch or iPad nearby, texting is a simple affair. A virtual keyboard is a godsend to texters.

There is long list of texting apps in the Apple Store. Some are FREE and carry ads. Others have “Lite” versions that carry ads and are limited in the number of messages that can be sent. The ads and message restrictions are removed by paying for the app. All are only “pocket change” so your decision should be based on features and not on cost. I selected three for review and at this point I have spent no money.

Textfree Lite is ad supported and allows up to 15 messages per day. Registering with textfree willow you to choose a user name to which text messages can be sent via email, e.g. user@textfree.us’ Upgrading to the paid version for $5.99 not only removes the ads and restrictions but gives you an actual phone number for friends to use when you are not online. And when you are online, the add features “push notifications” so you get an alert if your running something else.

TextNow Lite will allow 30 messages a day for FREE. If you buy the paid version you can have an email address for texts. The pricing of this app is a bit odd. Buying the app for 99 cents gets you 3 months of service. After that the service costs either $3.99 a year or $7.99 for a lifetime.

Finally we take a look at TextPlus. TextPlus is ad supported until you pay the $2.99 purchase price. There are no restrictions on the number of messages. It has a “group texting” feature that allows you to specify groups of individuals to text simultaneously. This should be very useful to crew leaders and committee chairmen. The app also features an SMS “shortcode”. Friends not using the service or not currently online can send a text to 60611 with YOUR TextPlus user name or the name of one of your groups to begin a dialog. Push notifications are supported.

Do you want a recommendation? For myself keeping TextPlus installed is a no-brainer. It’s a recent entry and might not be free forever. The ads are not annoying. I’m also keeping Textfree Lite installed. I like the ability to have text emailed to me and I don’t need to buy the app to have it.

Happy Texting!

Do you still read newspapers? I certainly don’t. Well at least not the actual printed editions. It’s been several years since my local newspaper started publishing an online edition. I simply read it at their web site. Last year I sold an auto. At the website I was able to place an ad, upload a photo and bill the charges to my credit card. Mobile devices make reading the paper even easier and better. Today I will discuss three FREE apps that you might like to try on your iPod Touch or iPad.

The Fluent News Reader is available for both the Touch and the iPad. Of the three, it is probably the most newspaper-like. The app opens to a list of top news around the world with snippets of information on each. Tapping on a headline brings you to the complete article including its source and photos if available. Alternately, you can browse the paper in sections including Weather, Sports and etc. Articles can be saved for offline reading. This is a good news app if you don’t own an iPad.

If you do have an iPad you will want to take a look at Skygrid. It’s features are similar to Fluent’s however navigation between articles is different. In landscape position either Feature articles or Categories are listed in a column on the left. When an article is selected, it is displayed in a square window on the right. When the iPad is rotated to portrait mode, the articles list disappears and the square window expands to full screen. In my opinion, this speeds up navigation a bit.

The Guardian Eyewitness is officially classified as a photography app and not a news app. Actually it’s a hybrid. The app displays photos of current events around the world taken by local news sources. A brief description of each event accompanies the photo. A photography tip relevant to the photo is also displayed. Photos can be browsed in several ways and saved to your Photos directory if you especially like one. By default they are displayed as a slide show going backwards in time with a limit of 100 photos.

All of these apps integrate with Facebook and Twitter. You can share your articles and photos with friends. Eventually, as my iPad gets crowded, one of the news apps will be deleted. Fluent will stay on the Touch but might be deleted on the iPad as I really do like how Skygrid navigates. Of course the deciding factor may not depend on appearance or navigation but on the news content actually delivered. Only time and use will tell. The only certainty is that it is not likely that I will ever again buy a printed newspaper!

Not many of my readers have pressed the Buy Me A Beer button so I have taken on a temporary job as a 2010 Census Enumerator.

The enumeration activity involves determining how old a person was on April 1, 2010. There are several iPhone/iPad apps that will calculate the days from a person’s birth date until April 1, 2010. Having that number, dividing by 365 will result in the person’s age on April 1. For awhile, I was using one of these plus a simple calculator.

The Date Calculator provides the answer without the need of a second calculator. Simply input April 1, 2010 as the ending date and then as many birthdays as the starting date as you wish. The app will correctly report each person’s age in years, months and days as of April 1.

If you are involved in an activity that involves calendar dates and counting days between or days until or after, this simple app will make your job easier and worth the buck that the developer is asking for it.

Dear Readers,

As mentioned in my previous post, the WordPress IPhone/iPad app seems to be riddled with problems. This post is simply an attempt to find a work-around so that I can blog from the iPad. If successful, it will be soon deleted.

Meanwhile, if a developer should read this, the iPad needs a good blogging client similar to the Linux client Blogilo.

Comments (temporarily) accepted.

I had wanted to compose and post this article from my iPad. Unfortunately, the WordPress app is very buggy and pretty useless at this time. The developers should be ashamed of themselves for releasing this product. This blog can be viewed from the Safari browser but any attempt to make a post simply is not possible. But this post is about Adobe Flash, not WordPress.

Computer hardware is always more advanced than the software running on it. Not too many years ago, before the invention of the Internet there were two competing technologies, Apple machines running on Motorola processors and PC’s running on Intel processors. Apple developed it’s own operating system (now at OS X 10.5) and Microsoft developed Windows (now at Windows 7). The Internet got invented and along came a third OS, i.e. GNU/Linux (Ubuntu is now at 10.04). Adobe Systems was an early software developer for all three platforms. After the invention of the Internet, Adobe Systems developed the pdf document format. The format was very popular and soon nearly every computer manufactured had a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader on it. But, because of it’s popularity, many “third party” developers released software to both read and produce pdf documents. These softwares contain no code developed by Adobe. In 2008 the pdf format became an open standard.

In the last two years a fourth computing platform has emerged. First in the form of “smartphones” including the Apple iPhone, and most recently the Apple iPad. These devices run on a variety of operating systems mostly Linux based such as Google’s Android, but the iPad runs on a mini version of Mac OS X. Apple and Adobe have not been able to reach agreement on how to incorporate Flash into the Safari browser. If you browse to a website with embedded Flash it will not display. How important is this? Is this a “show-stopper” for the iPad? For a few it might be, but for most it is not.

Apple devices come supplied with a YouTube application. YouTube supplies streaming video in H.264 format. Apple devices support this format. You do not need Flash to watch YouTube. NetFlix has provided an iPad app to watch movies and some television. You do not need Flash to use NetFlix. Some sites have implemented third party solutions. For example use your Apple device to browse to cnettv. A Flash-like window pops up allowing you to watch the video. It doesn’t have many controls but it gets the job done.

HTML5 is under development. It has an embedded video tag. I have no idea what codec will drive this but I am certain that every popular browser will support it. Flash is passing technology. As good as it is, in the near future it will no longer be the logical choice for embedded video. Web developers will want their pages to be viewed on as many platforms as possible. Mobile devices and cloud computing are where the Internet is headed now. Apple is a strong leader in the technology. If Apple and Adobe cannot come to terms, I do not see a future for Flash.

What’s your opinion?

There seems to be some controversy over Canonical’s decision to move the windows contol buttons from the right side to the left side of the screen in the next release (Lucid Lynx). Personally, as an occassiol Mac user, it matters little to me where the controls are located, Canonical has clearly stated that over the next few years Ubuntu will evolve to a point where it will be comparable to the Mac OS X. I often tell friends that using Ubuntu is like having a poor man’s Apple.

Apple names Mac OS X releases after wild jungle cats, Jaquar, Tiger, Leopard and etc. A Lynx is a genus of medium sized wild cats. If future Ubuntu releases are to be more Mac-like in look and feel then this is certainly an apprpriate release in which to make that change.

The GNOME desktop is highly customizable. If it happens that you prefer the window controls to remain on the right this click here for instructions on how to use the GNOME Configuration Editor to make that change. Alternately if you have the latest version of Ailurus installed it can make the change for you.

Last September I posted an article about Money Manager Ex. At the time of the post the devolper, Codelathe, promised a “cloud based” version of this great application. They have done that and considerably more. The name of the application is “Tonido”. It is cross platform, you can download versions of it for Windows, Mac OS X, and several popular Linux distros at their website www.tonido.com.

What this clever program does is to setup a web server on your machine. Besides the money manager, there are programs for file and photo sharing, music playing and a bittorrent client. Upon initial use you setup a free account and receive a URL for your server. At this point you can access your data or share it from anywhere on the Internet with a web browser! As remarkable as that is there is more.

Codelathe markets a gadget they call the Tonidoplug. The plug has an embedded Linux distro, specifically Ubuntu 9.04. Besides the electrical plug (available for both European and North American standards) the plug has only two connectors, a USB port and an ethernet port. The idea is that you store data you want available on the Internet on a USB storage device and cable it to the plug. Use the ethernet port to connect to your hub or router. The embedded Linux runs the server so you do not need to be running it on your regular machine or even have your regular machine turned on! The Tonidoplug is priced at $99 (US) and equivalent euros.

With the free server you can access the Tonido App Store to keep the installed programs up to date or to buy new ones as they are developed. This is similar to the concept used by Apple on the iPhone. Do not expect many more free apps from Codelathe but the current free apps are well worth the download. This is a great way to share files. Unlike Dropbox and Ubuntu One, all your shared files are stored on a local device without a limitation on size before additional cost.

Get it today!

A few days ago a customer dropped off a desktop computer that would not boot. It was a Compaq model about three years old and, according to the stickers, it had Windows XP Home Edition installed. I booted the machine and was met by a message saying that a .dll was missing. I rebooted the machine using a Linux livecd. Examination of the Windows partition showed it to be completely empty. Also gone were all installed programs and all personal data. Apparently this person was the victim of some serious Windows malware.

The machine had a recoverery partition so I booted into that. Recovery failed after about 90% complete. The partition was damaged. My final option was to download an XP Home .iso from a bittorrent site. This installed nicely. This is not necessarily illegal as the Windows install now requires activation. Of course. my customer had no knowledge of product keys or activation. I told her that the computer would only work for 30 days without activation and wished her good luck. I also gave her a copy of Linux Mint to install when Windows stopped working.

There are a few Windows utilities that will reveal the OEM install product key. Here is a link to one. If you are still using a legal copy of Windows, I strongly reccomend that you retrieve your product key. It may save you some grief in the future.

Sadly, Apple has chosen to keep the iPhone/Touch devices ‘closed’ which hinders file transfer to and from the device. In fact, they have ordered the removal of USB file transfer abiliity in several apps including Stanza and Air Sharing. Fortunately, users can still sync files via several popular protocols including WebDAV, FTP, email, and syncing to a third party server such as Google Docs. In this post I will discuss two apps that I use and like, however I have tried about five and I’m sure there are a few that I missed.

Air Sharing was an early (September 2008) entry into this arena. Currently the basic version that supports WebDAV is priced at $2.99 and a $6.99 upgrade adds print (to a wireless network printer) and email capabilities. Unfortunately, there seems to be a bug in Ubuntu that is preventing the setup of wireless printing. Once installed, Air Sharing will play or display all file types synced to it and supported by the iPhone platform. I have successfully synced a 350MB movie file and played it.

WebDAV is a file transfer protocol natively supported in both the GNOME and KDE desktops. The iPhone/Touch app will report its assigned IP address on the local network. Typically this will look something like http://192.168.1.101:8080. A GNOME user will go to Places>Connect to Server… and enter the IP and Port into the indicated fields. Depending on the app either a window will open or a folder will appear on the desktop. Files can now be synced to the device via drag and drop. Similarly, KDE users can use Konquerer to open “webdav://192.168.1.101:8080. With documents available locally, printing locally is possible despite the Ubuntu bug.

GoodReader is priced at 99 cents. The basic version supports WebDAV and email and like Air Sharing it will display/play all or most file types. A 99 cent upgrade adds the ability to sync with Google Docs. Again, the printing problem is solved. GoodReader has a free Lite version that will let you try all features before purchase. It is limited to five files. Another upgrade will add FTP ability if you prefer that protocol.

In combination, all the above apps provide you with an office suite for your iPhone/Touch. They will also work on the soon to come iPad. Apple has promised an office suite for the iPad. I can only wonder about what abilities that app will add.