Switching to the Saucy Salamander

Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) was released this past Thursday. Normally I jump on the upgrade right away, but I was busy this week and finally got around to it over the weekend. As with my past few upgrades, it was mostly a non-event: ‘do-release-upgrade -d’ from the command-line, answer a few prompts, and wait. I said mostly …

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Release of the Raring Ringtail

Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) was officially released today, although I was able to download and upgrade my server from Quantal last night, avoiding the rush. Upgrading to the latest Ubuntu server release is really becoming a non-event for me, which is great news especially since support for non-LTS releases has been cut to 9 months. Starting …

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Microsoft Surface: RT vs Pro

Four months ago I bought my daughter a Microsoft Surface RT tablet for her birthday as a laptop replacement. Last month I got a Surface Pro to use at work (also as a laptop replacement). Having now used both versions of Microsoft’s first tablet I wanted to jot down a few of my own observations …

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Expired TiVo cookie causes Galleon ToGo transfers to fail

On February 16, 2013, TiVo owners everywhere suddenly found that they were unable to transfer recordings off of their DVRs. Third-party applications like kmttg and even TiVo’s own TiVo Desktop were suddenly broken. The problem was tracked down to an expired server-side cookie which, inexplicably, was hard-coded into the TiVo software to expire on 02/16/13. …

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LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0

For Christmas, Santa brought my daughter and I the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 buildable/programmable robotics kit. Sweet! Of course as luck would have it, LEGO just announced the next generation of the Mindstorms line at CES this week, but that won’t damper our enthusiasm for building robots and programming them to do our will! 😀 My …

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A holiday slice of Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a credit card-sized ARM-based Linux computer that costs just $25. It’s intended to be used as an educational device and instantly appealed to my inner tinkerer (and gadget freak). I ordered the Model B (256mb RAM, 2 USB ports, HDMI/composite video/audio jacks, and Ethernet) from Allied Electronics back in late September …

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Going “all in” with Google

Two weeks ago I came across this post on The Verge that talked about using CardDAV and CalDAV to sync Google information to iOS devices which, along with the new GMail app promised better synchronization and better battery life and a break from the current ActiveSync/Exchange method I had been using. I’ve been using multiple Google …

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Microsoft Surface RT tablet

Last month I picked up a 32gb Microsoft Surface RT tablet as a combined birthday/Christmas present for my daughter. In a bit of pre-planning I upgraded her laptop to Windows 8 so she had time to get familiar with the new OS before she finally got the tablet last week. So far, it’s been a …

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