{"id":1134,"date":"2008-12-22T21:34:34","date_gmt":"2008-12-23T05:34:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/2008\/12\/22\/holiday-tech-picks\/"},"modified":"2008-12-22T22:22:56","modified_gmt":"2008-12-23T06:22:56","slug":"holiday-tech-picks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/2008\/12\/22\/holiday-tech-picks\/","title":{"rendered":"Holiday Tech Picks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vmware.com\/products\/server\/\"><em><strong>VMWare Server<\/strong><\/em><\/a>: 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&#8217;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&#8217;ll have a totally isolated installation of your new test OS, operating independent of the actual physical OS and machine. It&#8217;s sweet, and free, and I highly recommend this.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/MP3-Music-Download\/b?ie=UTF8&amp;node=163856011\"><em><strong>Amazon MP3 Store<\/strong><\/em><\/a>: I hate iTunes, because I can&#8217;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&#8217;s darn good, darn cheap, and darn possible to use on Linux.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu.com\/getubuntu\/download\"><em><strong>Ubuntu 8.04 LTS<\/strong><\/em><\/a>: 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.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/laconi.ca\/\"><em><strong>Laconica<\/strong><\/em><\/a>: 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&#8217;s easy to upgrade (if you&#8217;re tech-saavy), and easy to maintain and hack! Can&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If you&#8217;re looking for music, a fresh OS installation (even one that doesn&#8217;t interfere with your current workhorse), or total ownership of your micro-blogging life, I hope you enjoy the above. Happy holidays!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,7],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-computing","7":"category-life","8":"czr-hentry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steve.cooleysekula.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}