Shaine Mata Blog

It has been nearly a week since upgrading the old laptop to a solid state drive. The laptop is running Ubuntu 13.10, which was previously lagging using a standard hard drive. Admittedly, the old drive was a 5400 rpm drive. There would be some improvement with a 7200 rpm drive; but, for about a similar cost, why not go for SSD? If you are thinking about switching to SSD to speed up your computer a bit, especially for a version of Linux, there are modifications you can do to minimize wear and tear on the drive. In addition to increasing the longevity of the drive, the modifications also improve the performance of your drive by eliminating unnecessary reads and writes. Each version of Linux has recommendations you might want to Google. I'll be eschewing unnecessary updates too. The performance is a little better than my Chromebook. I think I can keep it that way by not allowing updates to make it crufty. My usage mainly consists of using web services for work.

I picked up a Chromebook some time ago, which my family learned to enjoy. Unfortunately, my son has taken it for his own, leaving me without a "computer". I can do plenty on my tablet; but, for some things you need an actual computer. Sometimes you need to run software that would make Android cry; sometimes you just need a real keyboard. So, I put Ubuntu 13.10 on an old Vostro 1000 laptop. The laptop has seen better days. My first installation was on a standard HDD. It was a bit laggy. So today I picked up a 250 GB Samsung 840 EVO solid state drive that was at a good price locally. There were other drives available with better performance; but, I don't think I would be putting the extra speed to good use given that the laptop itself is pretty old. The result is a noticable increase in performance. I also read up on optimizing Ubuntu for solid state drives, and followed the instructions. Why It's Overkill I was trucking along rather well on the Chromebook with

As the moonlighting computer tech that I am, I've both helped clients and personally experienced hard drive failures. It is a fact of life that within 5 years, a drive will likely die. In my experience, a small chunk fail right away and the rest fail within the 5 years. Beyond that 5 year period, your drive is living on borrowed time. Enter Solid State Drives, aka SSDs. The current market for SSDs is a bit more expensive than your standard platter drives. For the same price as one TB SSD, you can buy several hard disk drives, or HDDs. The price of a 240 GB SSD is comparable to a 2 TB HDD. Solid State Drives have an additional limitation, other than price, in that they have a finite number of writes per cell. You can only store a bit in an SSD cell so many times before it wears out. The drives are smart enough to spread the wear around evenly to avoid burning holes in your storage. But, they also inevitably fail, although for the average user this will take many years. For this

I find myself wondering in which direction entertainment is evolving. Except for the talent shows, my family does not indulge in much reality TV. We prefer things like Doctor Who, Game of Thrones, Supernatural, and other series. But, we also enjoy movies. The Problem With Movies at the Theater The problem we have with movies is that we are a family of five. Therefore, when we go out to the movies, it has to be one we are unanimously dying to see in order to spend $50 on tickets and another $40 on snacks. Economically, going to the theater kills the budget. We have to be very selective about what we watch on first run. Where We Watch Movies To overcome the expense problem, our family watches movies at discount theaters, which were once known as Dollar Cinemas. If we wait a couple months, we can watch movies at the theater for a fraction of the cost. We do this mostly in the summer months to get out of the heat during the daytime.  We also watch movies on Netflix and Amazo

Mrs Mata agreed to pose after putting on makeup to go visit her parents.

I find myself bringing an old computer that we have had since around 2006 back to life. I've had other drive crashes before, and managed to get most of my data back. This time, after the drive died, I decided to forsake Windows and live with a Chromebook and Android tablet. I can get along OK, for the most part, without it. But, there are a few instances where I have no choice but to either have a PC or a Mac in operation. For example, if I want to edit RAW files from my camera, the software is written for PC/Mac. On the occasion that I go around fixing computers for money, sometimes I need another Windows computer to work some magic on client drives. Or to test hardware on a machine known to operate. I can't use my wife's and daughter's computers without risking their computers getting infected or messed up with cruft in the long term. As much as I would like to declare myself free from the traditional desktop, I cannot. Why not buy a new one? Stop it, you'

I finally got around to connecting a keyboard to my Nexus 7 tablet. This comes after spending the last week doing several Ubuntu installations that did not want to take on an old laptop. The ultimate goal was to have a faster way of typing than the touch screen on a tablet. I think it would be cleaner to just spring for a bluetooth keyboard rather than shoehorn a keyboard and mouse in through the USB port. Why the workaround? The laptop is old enough that it lags a bit even running Ubuntu. One grows accustomed to instant on and the speed of a tablet, and to some degree a Chromebook. There are some projects that I have been delaying for want of a keyboard, ones which require writing...such as blogging. Tapping out long text is tedious, and the voice to text feature doesn't work too well when you have other people talking nearby. I will keep the laptop for times when I know that I'll be sitting down to do work for several hours. I'll have the keyboard and mouse on

Io in a concrete box At the end of the work day, public works crews leave the materials roadside. I suppose there are few people with the means to lift and transport them.

I don't know what got into me tonight, I started working on my taxes for 2013. It all started simply enough, I got an email that a 1099 for my stocks was ready for download. Then I started downloading my 2013 Sales reports. Then I started downloading my 2013 Expenses. Before you know it, I have spreadsheets open. I'm categorizing income and expenses, and getting everything ready for my accountant. Hey, wait a minute....why am I doing the work?

Have you ever had a situation where you know the right thing to do, but hesitate to make it happen? This has been my situation with respect to maintaining my several social media profiles. These aren't paid gigs, mind you. I've been weening myself from Social Media; but, don't really want to leave those properties hanging without updates.  Yet, that's exactly what I've done. The proper thing to do would be to create an editorial calendar where I pick themes for certain days, weeks, or months, depending on the site. Basically, you schedule the subjects in advance so that you don't have to break your head thinking about what to write.  So, with the help of Hootsuite, it is easy to schedule posts in advance. It is very easy and preferable to schedule posts because it frees you up to spend your time doing stuff that pays during working hours. You can devote the less busy hours to cramming posts in advance.  Thus, I find myself scheduling posts for March 2014, ton