Finally happened. I made the switch to Fedora. I’d been a Kubuntu user since 2006, but since the switch to Pulse Audio I have had serious problems with sound under Kubuntu in 10.10, 11.04, and 11.10 beta. I have no such trouble with Fedora 15.
I’ll likely be moving all systems I manage over from Debian GNU/Linux to Fedora or CentOS in the coming months. (I realize Ubuntu isn’t exactly Debian. I only ran the former on my laptop, not servers, but I prefer to standardize on a single distribution and it looks like Red Hat derived distributions is where it’s at for me.)
For years, holders of Chase’s Business Card earned 3% cash back on meals, gas, and office supplies. No more, according to junk mail just received offering the new and improved Ink card! New card holders — and I’m sure existing holders eventually — are being subject to a new, crap reward program: Worthless rotational joke rewards. Said program is not news to holders of Chase’s new Freedom card, which also sucks the same way. At least Ink is still 2% cash back on gas and dining.
If things continue this way, I might actually find myself back to using my Discover card. I dropped it back in 2008 when Discover decided to cap 5% rewards on gas and ceased offering cash back in $20 increments.
It’s been broken for at least a month, apparently. As long as it lasts, there is apparently a workaround: https://docs.google.com/?action=updoc
I am pleased to see Google Calendar now natively generates a PDF when printing out an agenda. In the past, the print version of an agenda was a clean HTML page. Now it has more colors and clean page breaks. Hooray!
So fail boat on recording my student loan in both Gnucash and Moneydance. Years ago, I had success using Gnucash for this, but was forced to file a bug this time. Meanwhile, Moneydance has had a different issue that causes historical loans to calculate incorrect principal and interest, dating back to 2009.
I cannot express my disappointment forcefully enough. More so as I was migrating my stuff back into Gnucash, which took a while, only to find out I have wasted my time.
Update, September 4th. Ended up using Google Docs to generate my amortization schedule and enter it manually. Ultimately discovered that it does not match the lender’s outstanding balance, so I have some further refinements to do with the handy amortization template I found for Docs.
Today I happened across a couple of packages to test drive in the near future for photo backup, though neither are specifically tailored for said purpose:
- backupninja - lightweight, extensible meta-backup system Backupninja lets you drop simple config files in /etc/backup.d to coordinate system backups. Backupninja is a master of many arts, including incremental remote filesystem backup, MySQL backup, and ldap backup. By creating simple drop-in handler scripts, backupninja can learn new skills. Backupninja is a silent flower blossom death strike to lost data.
- cedar-backup2 - Cedar Backup is a software package designed to manage system backups for a pool of local and remote machines. Cedar Backup understands how to back up filesystem data as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and Subversion repositories. It can also be easily extended to support other kinds of data sources.
In Picasa, each album is a virtual collection of photos, along with a bag of virtually modeled edits not actually applied to the original photos. As each album can have photos from anywhere assigned to it, it’s possible for a given album to be a virtual home to files from all over a hard drive. But what if one wants all those disparate images converged into a single directory in harmony?
The Picasa application offers File - Export Picture to Folder… for abuse in this situation. By selecting an album, all its photos are selected by default. Using the aforementioned Picasa menu selection, one is greeted with a dialog allowing the selection of an export location. Clicking Export will apply the bag of virtual edits to the photos in the album, if any edits were performed, then save the new files in the export directory. (In other words, this is not a route to take if one has done any edits to an album, as the export, which becomes the basis for the reconstituted album, will permanently incorporate any edits to photos; unless that’s okay, of course.)
From there, it’s possible to find the new folder in Picasa’s list of folders. Before adding the photos back to their original album, disable Sync to Web if it is enabled. Hollow out the original album by removing all the photos. Do not check Delete the online copy, too. Create a new album with a name identical to the one just emptied — Picasa will automatically remove an album if you remove the last photo from it — and reenable syncing. Picasa will not reupload if it worked. It may be possible to leave a dummy placeholder photo in the album so Picasa does not think it is empty. (This does not work; A duplicate Web Album is created instead and all files are uploaded again.)
Naturally, it’s better to have the original photos organized appropriately before uploading them to Picasa Web.
I realize this has been going on for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to attempt to list anything since sometime in 2006, back when Ebay first changed its policy to fuck individual sellers. So unsurprisingly, today I find this shit:
Sellers need to say in their listing specifically which payment methods they accept and only offer payment methods approved by eBay. Sellers aren’t allowed to:
- Ask buyers to contact them for additional payment methods
- Offer a payment method to some buyers and not to others
- Discourage buyers from using any payment method the seller specified in the listing
- Ask buyers to pay using a method not mentioned in the listing
This applies to all transaction-related correspondence between a seller and buyer as well as the listings.
I have to say, I’ll be damned if I am upgrading my PayPal account to a premiere account. Ebay gets you coming and going now that it owns PayPal. No wonder they simplified their charge structure on the front end. Seriously, Ebay, go fuck yourself eat a bag of dicks.
Just in case anyone tries to be too cute by half: Uploading photos from an Android phone for convenience while traveling and then assuming later it’s possible to “Import from Picasa Web Albums…” from within the Picasa application does not work quite like you expect. The photos will download, but not into a Picasa Album. Instead, these images will end up in your Folders hierarchy under Downloaded Albums. A Picasa Web Album is not the equivalent of a Picasa Album using the locally installed application. (Particularly noteworthy if you do not upload the original photo, but allow Picasa to resize your photos upon upload!)
In other words, one is rather tethered to a particular computer running the Picasa application when loading new photos from cameras. Picasa Web Albums do not sever that tether, so always remember to use Picasa to backup its local database along with the photos.
Finally decided to aggregate my various photos into a single place. Having moved to Gmail, it’s hard not to exploit other Google properties as well. Picasa Web integrates pretty well with Picasa, even ancient version 3.0, the last version officially available for Linux. (It’s actually just Picasa for Windows and a build of Wine.) It’s only a few bucks a year to vastly increase the provided Picasa storage from 1GB to 20GB, making it worthwhile as an offsite backup for all my photos.
Someone packaged up a copy of Picasa 3.8 for Windows as a Debian package. At some point I’ll install it and see if it works.
Update, 13 August. And so that worked just fine. I now have Picasa 3.8 under Debian GNU/Linux. Starting to aggregate and upload photos as albums to Picasa Web. So far, the integration is quite good, though it comes as little surprise.
Update, 8 December. So I updated up moving over to digiKam instead. It’s native and works pretty well.