Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

 

 

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Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 11/04/09

Looking for a simple way for a young child to use your computer without messing everything up? Qimo is a lightweight, kid-focused Ubuntu distribution you can install or boot from a CD or thumb drive.

Qimo was designed by a husband and wife team in Florida, for their charity Quinn Co. The charity specializes in refurbishing donated computers to serve low-income and special needs children. As a result, Qimo is designed to run easily on low end hardware: the minimum requirements are a 400Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 6GB hard drive if you choose to install it instead of booting from the LiveCD.

The included programs are organized on the application dock with large, easy to navigate icons. Included with the distribution are a variety of programs including TuxPaint, eToys, and GCompris. Qimo is an excellent candidate for giving some life to an aging laptop or desktop and helping the kids in your life get comfortable using computers. If you have your own tips, tricks, or operating systems to suggest for turning a computer into a kid-friendly play space, sound off in the comments below.

Qimo [via DownloadSquad]

 

 

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Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

 

 

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Set Up a Computer for Kids with Qimo [Kids]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 11/04/09

Looking for a simple way for a young child to use your computer without messing everything up? Qimo is a lightweight, kid-focused Ubuntu distribution you can install or boot from a CD or thumb drive.

Qimo was designed by a husband and wife team in Florida, for their charity Quinn Co. The charity specializes in refurbishing donated computers to serve low-income and special needs children. As a result, Qimo is designed to run easily on low end hardware: the minimum requirements are a 400Mhz processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 6GB hard drive if you choose to install it instead of booting from the LiveCD.

The included programs are organized on the application dock with large, easy to navigate icons. Included with the distribution are a variety of programs including TuxPaint, eToys, and GCompris. Qimo is an excellent candidate for giving some life to an aging laptop or desktop and helping the kids in your life get comfortable using computers. If you have your own tips, tricks, or operating systems to suggest for turning a computer into a kid-friendly play space, sound off in the comments below.

Qimo [via DownloadSquad]

 

 

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MEN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

MEN ARE JUST HAPPIER PEOPLE

NICKNAMES

If Laura, Kate and Sarah go out for lunch, they will call each other
Laura, Kate and Sarah.
If Mike, Dave and John go out, they will affectionately refer to each
other as Fat Boy, Godzilla and Four-eyes.

EATING OUT

When the bill arrives, Mike, Dave and John will each throw in $20,
even though it's only for $32.50. None of them will have anything
smaller and none will actually admit they want change back.
When the girls get their bill, out come the pocket calculators.

MONEY

A man will pay $2 for a $1 item he needs.
A woman will pay $1 for a $2 item that she doesn't need but it's on sale.

BATHROOMS

A man has six items in his bathroom: toothbrush and toothpaste,
shaving cream, razor, a bar of soap, and a towel .
The average number of items in the typical woman's bathroom is 337. A
man would not be able to identify more than 20 of these items.

ARGUMENTS

A woman has the last word in any argument.
Anything a man says after that is the beginning of a new argument..

FUTURE

A woman worries about the future until she gets a husband.
A man never worries about the future until he gets a wife.

SUCCESS

A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend.
A successful woman is one who can find such a man.

MARRIAGE

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn't.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won't change, but she does.

DRESSING UP

A woman will dress up to go shopping, water the plants, empty the
trash, answer the phone, read a book, and get the mail.
A man will dress up for weddings and funerals.

NATURAL

Men wake up as good-looking as they went to bed.
Women somehow deteriorate during the night.

OFFSPRING

Ah, children. A woman knows all about her children.. She knows about
dentist appointments and romances, best friends, favorite foods,
secret fears and hopes and dreams.
A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in the house.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
A married man should forget his mistakes. There's no use in two people
remembering the same thing!

Build an IKEA NAS On the Cheap [Weekend Project]

 

 

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Build an IKEA NAS On the Cheap [Weekend Project]

via Lifehacker by Adam Pash on 6/03/09

If last week's look at the five best home server software got you excited about setting up a home server but you're not keen on another unsightly PC in your home, check out this DIY IKEA NAS.

Using the stainless steel "Emu" box from IKEA ($7 for a set), Instructable user aarone created an impressive, headless Network Attached Storage system that looks more like decoration than hardware. And since he went with FreeNAS for his operating system, the home server software didn't cost him a dime (and it runs on very inexpensive hardware). It's not a project that just anyone might feel comfortable taking on, but if you are comfortable doing your own case mods, the results are pretty nice. If you're not quite ready to make that jump, check out our first-timer's guide to building a computer from scratch.

Build an inexpensive Ikea NAS [Instructables]

 

 

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Best Home Server Software [Hive Five]

 

 

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Best Home Server Software [Hive Five]

via Lifehacker by Jason Fitzpatrick on 1/03/09

Media files, data synchronization, and remote backups, oh my! Home computing has advanced to a point where it's practical to run your own home server, and we're running down the five best tools for the job.

Photo by Rudolf Schuba.

Earlier this week we asked you to tell us what software you used to power your home servers and add that extra kick of convenience and power to your home networks. After tallying up the votes we're back to share the top five contenders for the home server championship belt. The following server implementations cover a broad spectrum of solutions ranging from install-it-and-forget-it to tinker-your-way-to-perfection and everything in between.

FreeNas

FreeNAS is by the far the most bare bones home server software in the top five. More specifically, FreeNAS is an extremely minimal distribution of FreeBSD. How minimal, you ask? You can run FreeNAS off a 32MB flash drive. Designed to be an absolutely skeletal operating system to maximize the resources devoted to storage FreeNAS is great for when you want a simple operating system that leaves every hard drive bay and disk platter wide open for file storage goodness. Despite being so slim, FreeNAS is still feature packed, including support for BitTorrent and remote web-based file management via QuiXplorer; it even serves as the perfect iTunes music server. You can boo FreeNAS off nearly any media: hard drives, optical discs, floppy disks, and flash-based media. It has support for both hardware and software based RAID, disk encryption, and management of groups and users via local authentication or Microsoft Domains. Even an old dusty Pentium III can become a headless file-serving powerhouse with the addition of a basic $20 SATA PCI card to pack it full of modern hard drives, thanks to FreeNAS's scant 96MB of RAM requirements.

Ubuntu Server Edition

Ubuntu Server Edition shares the ease of use that has catapulted its desktop-edition sibling to popularity. The automated LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) installation makes installing the core components of a robust server a walk in the park compared to manually configuring each component on your own. While configuring Ubuntu isn't going to be as easy as grabbing a pre-configured Windows Home Server off the shelf at your local Best Buy and plugging it in, there are a wealth of applications to help you integrate your Linux based home server with the rest of your network. It won't be as straight forward as using Windows Home Server or a Time Machine backup, but Ubuntu is more than powerful and capable enough to handle all your media streaming, remote back up, and file serving needs. We've covered using Ubuntu as the basis for a home media server before, so if you're considering trying it out check out how to build a Linux media server and build yourself an affordable media server to get an idea of what you're in for.

Apache

Apache is the only entry in the top five that isn't a completely stand alone server package. Apache is, however, open source and cross platform; it support a dozen operating systems; and it's the backbone of many of your fellow readers' home server operations. Because of its widespread adoption and extreme compatibility with a variety of platforms, we're including it here. No matter what operating system you throw on your home server, you're almost guaranteed that you can run Apache on it. Nearly four years ago we covered how to set up a personal web server using Apache, and it's still relevant and worth a look for getting an idea what the setup entails. While you're at it, you may also want to try setting up a home Subversion server with your Apache installation for keeping track of file revisions.

Debian

Why use Debian for a home server? There are over twenty five thousands software packages available for Debian, and the operating system supports 12 unique hardware architectures. There's a a slim-to-none chance you've got a computer that can't run it. Like Ubtuntu—a Debian derivative by the way—you can configure this flexible operating system to do nearly anything you can imagine, from serving media and remote backups to running your own web server with a wiki and running your own mail server. Like other Linux distributions, Debian can be used to run a low-power and headless server when run without a GUI and using remote administration. Along with FreeNAS, Debian is a prime candidate for turning an aging computer into a quiet, tucked-in-the-basement server.

Windows Home Server

If your home is filled with Windows-based computers—which the average American home certainly is—it's tough to go wrong with Windows Home Server. It isn't free, and until recently you couldn't even buy it separately from the home servers sold by Hewlett Packard and others—but even though it has the distinction of being both the only commercial and closed-source software package on the list, that doesn't mean you should dismiss it out of hand. Windows Home Server stands definitively as the most Average Joe-friendly server implementation on the list. Not only is it the only server package you can buy pre-configured and installed in a ready to go off-the-shelf server, but Microsoft has gone out of their way to make the experience of using Windows Home Server as transparent and painless as possible for the end user. In fact, many Lifehacker readers expressed the "It just works" sentiment when logging a vote for Windows Home Server. Once you have all your computers connected to your Windows Home Server, you'll have a centralized backup location that supports up to 10 remote PCs and indexed remote file storage. Printers are shared and there is easy to use remote server access to log into your archives from anywhere in the world. Files are no longer lost in a mass of drives, add a few terabyte drives to a Windows Home Server and you'll never wonder if that movie file is on the F, G, or H drive again. Windows Home Server spans drives using Drive Extender so that files are located in a single folder namespace, sans drive divisions. The most recent update of Windows Home Server even adds an option to backup the server itself to external drives for extra data redundancy. Since the Microsoft site for Windows Home Server is heavy on promotion but low on actual screenshots, check out our screenshot tour for more.

---

Now that you've seen the contestants vying for the title of best home server, it's time to log your votes to see who will go home with the belt—and the task of storing your mountains of media files and remote backups.

Which Home Server Software is Best?
( polls)

If you have tips or tricks for running a home server, sound off in the comments below. Many readers will be considering running a home server for the first time after reading over the top contenders above, so your experience (and accolades) could help them find a home server package that works for them.

 

 

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ON WORDS FROM THE ORACLE

 

 

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ON WORDS FROM THE ORACLE

via *michael parekh on IT* by Michael on 2/28/09

THE LONG VIEW

As a Berkshire Hathaway investor, I like many had been looking forward to Warren Buffett's letter to shareholders, out today.  The news as one might expect in these unprecedented times, was not good, but the long-term perspective as usual, was most welcome and refreshing. 

The Wall Street Journal provides some context of the letter in this report:

"Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc. reported Saturday morning that 2008 was the legendary investor's worst year ever. It also reported a grim fourth quarter, though it eked out a slight gain. (Berkshire's annual letter to shareholders.)

A common metric Berkshire uses to track performance, book value per share, fell 9.6% in 2008, its biggest decline since Mr. Buffett took over the company in 1965.

It was only the second year in more than 40 years that Berkshire posted negative results. In 2001, Berkshire's book value per share fell 6.2%. The company's performance in 2008 still far outpaced the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, which fell 37% last year, including dividends."

If pressed for time, I'd also recommend the WSJ's summary of the Highlights.  A couple of sobering ones that they highlight is the following:

"In poker terms, the Treasury and the Fed have gone 'all in.' Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once-unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome aftereffects..."

"Local governments are going to face far tougher fiscal problems in the future than they have to date. The pension liabilities I talked about in last year's report will be a huge contributor to these woes. Many cities and states were surely horrified when they inspected the status of their funding at yearend 2008. The gap between assets and a realistic actuarial valuation of present liabilities is simply staggering.

• Read more in Real Time Economics"

A highlight I'd add is his current view on how risk is being priced:

"The investment world has gone from underpricing risk to overpricing it. This change has not been minor; the pendulum has covered an extraordinary arc.

A few years ago, it would have seemed unthinkable that yields like today's could have been obtained on good-grade municipal or corporate bonds even while risk-free governments offered near-zero returns on short-term bonds and no better than a pittance on long-terms. When the financial history of this decade is written, it will surely speak of the Internet bubble of the late 1990s and the housing bubble of the early 2000s.

But the U.S. Treasury bond bubble of late 2008 may be regarded as almost equally extraordinary."

One of my favorites from this year's letter was the following:

"Approval, though, is not the goal of investing.

In fact, approval is often counter-productive because it sedates the brain and makes it less receptive to new facts or a re-examination of conclusions formed earlier. 

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns."

Here's to more yawns for all of us, large and small.

The whole letter (PDF) is worth reading in it's entirety, especially this year over all others.

 

 

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Install Windows 7 Beta on Your Mac with Boot Camp [Dual Boot]

 

 

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Install Windows 7 Beta on Your Mac with Boot Camp [Dual Boot]

via Lifehacker by The How-To Geek on 1/15/09

If you're on a Mac but want to know what the Windows 7 Beta fuss is about, the SimpleHelp weblog walks through installing Win7 using Boot Camp, Apple's solution for dual-booting Windows on a Mac.

We've already covered how to dual-boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista, and the good news is that installing Win7 on your Mac is just as simple: All you need is your Leopard installation DVD, the Windows 7 Beta, 10GB of free hard drive space, and a few hours.

What's your take? Are you willing to put a beta version of Windows on your Mac just to see if the eye candy is worth it?

Using Boot Camp to install Windows 7 on your Mac: The Complete Walkthrough [Simple Help]

 

 

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