The Personal Blog of Stephen Sekula

Holiday Tech Picks

As I go into the holidays, with lots of traveling and interrupted internet and phone service, I wanted to reward my faithful readers with my tech pick favorites for 2008. I think these are the things that you should check out in the new year. These are not things that were deployed in 2008 (not necessarily, at least), but things which I discovered in the last year which made living life in an open-source world a lot more fun.

  • VMWare Server: a friend of mine gave me the Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex!) installation CD for Christmas. I realized I wanted to try it, but I like 8.04 so much I didn’t want to upgrade just to test it out. VMWare Server, which is free, is a great way to do just this. After installation, you go to the web interface, add a virtual machine, and boot it up. Point it to the installation CD, and in 10-20 minutes you’ll have a totally isolated installation of your new test OS, operating independent of the actual physical OS and machine. It’s sweet, and free, and I highly recommend this.
  • Amazon MP3 Store: I hate iTunes, because I can’t use it on Linux. Screw them. I have Amazon MP3. DRM-free, a huge catalogue, and even a Linux client for downloading purchased music files. You may not like Amazon, but for mainstream catalogues it’s darn good, darn cheap, and darn possible to use on Linux.
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS: the long-term support version of Ubuntu Linux, if you want to get started with Ubuntu this is a good place to start. 8.04 is supported officially from 2008-2010, even though Ubuntu will march forward with other interim releases. I slapped this on three different machines this past year, with no trouble. I also purchased a Dell machine with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed, then upgraded it over the net to 8.04. This machine was for my in-laws, and so far it seems to be working great.
  • Laconica: the open-source Twitter, I installed this on cooleysekula.net and have been using it for micro-blogging for a few months now. It was easy to install, it’s easy to upgrade (if you’re tech-saavy), and easy to maintain and hack! Can’t ask for more. I recommend this to people who hate putting their thoughts in the hands of third-party server companies, like Twitter. I also recommend this to people with moderate to high Linux or open-source experience, since it requires setting up PHP, some MySQL, and Apache.

If you’re looking for music, a fresh OS installation (even one that doesn’t interfere with your current workhorse), or total ownership of your micro-blogging life, I hope you enjoy the above. Happy holidays!

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