Linux. That's a word that will evoke all kinds of emotions in people. The fact is, Linux is the cheap geek's best friend.
Ok, so what is it?
Linux is an operating system just like Microsoft Windows or like OS X on a Mac. The major difference is that Linux is an open source project that has been developed by many different people. If you are completely lost at this point check out this link to learn what Linux is in detail according to Wikipedia.
What does this mean to me?
To the person with the lean wallet it means this, a total computing experience that is completely free (in more ways than one). In other words, your email, word processing, some gaming (I'll explain later), music, movies, internet browsing, social networking, voip, just about anything that you need to do can be done on Linux.
When I say free, I mean it in more ways than "I don't got to spend a dime on it" type free. I mean like freedom. No need for antivirus or antispyware. No need to type in long strands of random characters and signing your life away every time you install your latest piece of over priced software. No need for a "Genuine Advantage". No need to own a brand new computer just to make it start up. That's the kind of free I mean.
What's the catch? If it's so great why doesn't everyone use it?
I have just one long word to answer that: familiarity. Nearly everyone who uses computers got their start on Windows. People are used to it and don't like change. My wife, who I love dearly, hates Linux. When I ask her why she usually tells me "I like Windows". She told me the other day "It's kinda ugly and looks little kidish" which at the time I agreed. (I fixed it that same night) If you use Windows and it works for you or you have a hard drive with everything on it that makes you happy then you don't need to worry about this. But if you are sick of spyware, viruses, expensive programs, and intrusive end user agreements, then consider at least trying Linux. I am still suck with somethings that I need Windows for (such as instant viewing Netfix movies) so I dual boot my computer with both Linux and Windows. All you need is an old hard drive laying around and some room in your computer. Just install Linux on the old hard drive after Windows has been installed and Linux will do the rest.
What flavor of Linux should I use?
I struggled with this question for a very long time. There are literally hundreds of flavors of Linux to try. I suggest using Ubuntu 7.10 to start with. That is what I am using now. It is very user friendly and will make it a pleasure to use.
I recently came across another blog about converting over to Ubuntu that I think will help the not so convinced. Check it out here
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Heart Stopping Cheap Geek Action!
There are times that being a cheap geek makes me more nervous than it is healthy to be. A few weeks ago while I was at work I was drinking a healthy drink (Dr. Pepper) then as I had done a thousand times before, I set it down next to my MacBook Pro. After about ten minutes of hard work on a different computer I forgot about the Dr. Pepper entirely. As I reached for a ringing phone my hand gracefully bumped the top of it and sent it spilling onto the uber expensive Mac. I manged to prevent most of it from bricking my laptop but enough of it got onto my keyboard to make the space bar stick... Needless to say, the space bar is a very important part of my typing experience, if I didn't have it allofmyblogswouldlooklikethis. I didn't think that my warranty would cover retards spilling soda on the keyboard, but I had to do something, and I did. I waited for about two months hoping that it would correct itself. Strange how hardware doesn't desticky itself. (Maybe Apple should look into developing that.) I looked online to see if were possible to rip keys off the keyboard and have any hope of using them again. I found this great website that shows how to completely tear apart every aspect (almost) of a 17" MacBook Pro. After reading it and then turning my Mac off, I proceeded to do the delicate surgery. I ripped the space bar off and found that this space bar was a bit of a pack-rat. Hair, wirey stuff, and yes Dr. Pepper had found its way into my space bar. Using great care and precision I removed the awful irritants. Then I smashed the key back into place. Strangely enough, it still worked!
In my long and wisdom filled life, I have found that being a Cheap Geek is more than buying junky hardware and putting up with disappointing software, its knowing how to make everything work together like a symphony of middle schoolers. Could have I called up Apple support and tell them that I was using my Mac for a rain gutter of soda? Yeah. Could I have forked out the money to have them fix my Mac? Possibly. But I say why not try to do it yourself and see if you can destroy it better than you have already! But seriously, many of the things that we need done can be done by ourselves for substantially less than someone else would charge us. Being a Geek is not as hard as some would think. The internet has everything that you could possibly need to find a solution to your problem. If you can't figure it out then you can always find someone else who knows how to in a forum or at least find others who have the same problem as you have.
Today's blog has been a little different but sometimes we poor geeks need a little encouragement and a bit of a pep-talk. Next blog I hope to talk about that much loved and too often feared word... Linux!
In my long and wisdom filled life, I have found that being a Cheap Geek is more than buying junky hardware and putting up with disappointing software, its knowing how to make everything work together like a symphony of middle schoolers. Could have I called up Apple support and tell them that I was using my Mac for a rain gutter of soda? Yeah. Could I have forked out the money to have them fix my Mac? Possibly. But I say why not try to do it yourself and see if you can destroy it better than you have already! But seriously, many of the things that we need done can be done by ourselves for substantially less than someone else would charge us. Being a Geek is not as hard as some would think. The internet has everything that you could possibly need to find a solution to your problem. If you can't figure it out then you can always find someone else who knows how to in a forum or at least find others who have the same problem as you have.
Today's blog has been a little different but sometimes we poor geeks need a little encouragement and a bit of a pep-talk. Next blog I hope to talk about that much loved and too often feared word... Linux!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Opensource Office Utilities That Will Make You Smile
Everyone will need to have a full office suite sometime in their life. Whether you use it on a daily basis for school, work, pleasure, or use it once a year it's hard to fork out over $500 for Microsoft Office. Yeah, you could go with the Microsoft "Works" but it is the lamest piece of word processing software I was ever forced to use! I personally skip the commercial software and go open source.
Free. That's enough to get my attention, but when you add quality, usability, and compatibility to it I start to drool. Openoffice is one of the greatest pieces of software that I have had the pleasure to use. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is cross-platform, compatible with Microsoft Word, and able to do anything that an expensive word processor should do. I use a Mac at work. Macs don't come with a word processor and I needed to make up some reports. I was determined not to cave in and use a {shudder} Windows computer. I had heard of Openoffice when I was in college so I thought I would give it a go. After a short and easy install, I started it up and was amazed at its usability. Coming from a background of only using Office, I was afraid that I would struggle to get used to the new format, this was not the case at all. The interface is very similar to Office and all of your old Office docs are compatible with it.
The one down side to Openoffice is that it is a very large program (over 100 mb). On slow connection this could take several hours to download, on dial up it could take several days. For those of you who need a word processor before next week and are on dialup you should consider Abiword. Abiword is just over 5 mb (that shouldn't be more than an hour for you dial up people). It is very cpu friendly and will preform nearly anything you throw at it. I have it installed on several of my computers, including a 133mhz laptop. I have never found a computer that it will not run on.
If you are on a Mac and don't like having to deal with the X11 environment and need more functionality than Abiword, there is hope for you. Check out Bean. No longer just the musical fruit, Bean is a very OS X kind of program. (For those of you who have never used a Mac, just trust me on this) The interface looks very simple with a kind of iWeb thing going on. It is less than a megabyte and has a easy drag and drop install. There is also for Macs a program called NeoOffice. It is a full office suit and is native to the OS X environment. (which means you won't have to use the X11 environment) The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is 134 mb, so be prepared for a long download.
So the next time you get sick about putting out $500 for Microsoft Office and then selling your soul to activate it only to have to deal with security problems, check out these alternatives.
Free. That's enough to get my attention, but when you add quality, usability, and compatibility to it I start to drool. Openoffice is one of the greatest pieces of software that I have had the pleasure to use. The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is cross-platform, compatible with Microsoft Word, and able to do anything that an expensive word processor should do. I use a Mac at work. Macs don't come with a word processor and I needed to make up some reports. I was determined not to cave in and use a {shudder} Windows computer. I had heard of Openoffice when I was in college so I thought I would give it a go. After a short and easy install, I started it up and was amazed at its usability. Coming from a background of only using Office, I was afraid that I would struggle to get used to the new format, this was not the case at all. The interface is very similar to Office and all of your old Office docs are compatible with it.
The one down side to Openoffice is that it is a very large program (over 100 mb). On slow connection this could take several hours to download, on dial up it could take several days. For those of you who need a word processor before next week and are on dialup you should consider Abiword. Abiword is just over 5 mb (that shouldn't be more than an hour for you dial up people). It is very cpu friendly and will preform nearly anything you throw at it. I have it installed on several of my computers, including a 133mhz laptop. I have never found a computer that it will not run on.
If you are on a Mac and don't like having to deal with the X11 environment and need more functionality than Abiword, there is hope for you. Check out Bean. No longer just the musical fruit, Bean is a very OS X kind of program. (For those of you who have never used a Mac, just trust me on this) The interface looks very simple with a kind of iWeb thing going on. It is less than a megabyte and has a easy drag and drop install. There is also for Macs a program called NeoOffice. It is a full office suit and is native to the OS X environment. (which means you won't have to use the X11 environment) The suite includes a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation similar to PowerPoint, and a drawing program. It is 134 mb, so be prepared for a long download.
So the next time you get sick about putting out $500 for Microsoft Office and then selling your soul to activate it only to have to deal with security problems, check out these alternatives.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Freeware Gaming Weekend
So, this weekend the wife is out of town. I decided to take this opportunity to waste some time fragging some poor 14 year old kids without jobs. I didn't do so well. I think that I finally realized that I'm not at the top of my game anymore!
Of course, like the name of the blog explains, I don't have the money to go out and throw $50 at a new cool game. (let alone even own a computer that is able to play them at acceptable frame rates!) I was tired of hearing about Halo 3 and how cool it was and seeing the three at once kills on youtube so I decided to see what I could find for free. Open source has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread! Right next to it in the online community of web 2.0ers is wikipedia. I did a quick search on Google for free fps games and I came across this wikipedia entry I'm not sure how complete the list is but there is something there for every FPS lover. Now of course it isn't going to be as awesome as some of the new Direct X 10 games that are coming out but for free they are very addictive and sometimes have much more original game play. One of the best things is that most of these games will play on lower end machines. My home PC is a lightning fast AMD Athlon 1.3 ghz, 768 mb pc133 ram, a PCI (not express) 128mb Radon 7250, and a 80 gb hd all thrown together in a hp tower that has the worst over heating problem I have ever seen! But, most of these games will play on it with no problems running at higher resolutions.
A few that I tried this week end are the classic Cube series, Tremulos, Openarena, and a copy of Call of Duty that I picked up for $10 at Walmart.
The game I enjoyed the most was Tremulos. It has nice graphics, and the game play is very enjoyable. You can choose to play as an alien or a human. Upgrades for your character have to be earned through fragging people on the other team. Humans can buy upgrades (i.e. better guns more armor etc...) from the armory and aliens can evolve after fighting well. This is a challenging yet fun game to kill a few hours on. The Cube series was the first open source fps game I had ever played. The single player has much to be desired still. The AI is... well.. not very intellegent. They have no self preservation abilities and sometimes they will fight and kill each other. The mulitplayer version is much better. It is a classic grab a gun and kill anything that moves as well as some capture the flag and team deathmatch. Openarena was built on the Quake 3 game engine. It has a kind of cartoonie feel but is fun to play still. Its capture the flag mode is very fun and runs well on even my computer.
For a list of all free games (not just fps) you can CLICK HERE
Of course, like the name of the blog explains, I don't have the money to go out and throw $50 at a new cool game. (let alone even own a computer that is able to play them at acceptable frame rates!) I was tired of hearing about Halo 3 and how cool it was and seeing the three at once kills on youtube so I decided to see what I could find for free. Open source has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread! Right next to it in the online community of web 2.0ers is wikipedia. I did a quick search on Google for free fps games and I came across this wikipedia entry I'm not sure how complete the list is but there is something there for every FPS lover. Now of course it isn't going to be as awesome as some of the new Direct X 10 games that are coming out but for free they are very addictive and sometimes have much more original game play. One of the best things is that most of these games will play on lower end machines. My home PC is a lightning fast AMD Athlon 1.3 ghz, 768 mb pc133 ram, a PCI (not express) 128mb Radon 7250, and a 80 gb hd all thrown together in a hp tower that has the worst over heating problem I have ever seen! But, most of these games will play on it with no problems running at higher resolutions.
A few that I tried this week end are the classic Cube series, Tremulos, Openarena, and a copy of Call of Duty that I picked up for $10 at Walmart.
The game I enjoyed the most was Tremulos. It has nice graphics, and the game play is very enjoyable. You can choose to play as an alien or a human. Upgrades for your character have to be earned through fragging people on the other team. Humans can buy upgrades (i.e. better guns more armor etc...) from the armory and aliens can evolve after fighting well. This is a challenging yet fun game to kill a few hours on. The Cube series was the first open source fps game I had ever played. The single player has much to be desired still. The AI is... well.. not very intellegent. They have no self preservation abilities and sometimes they will fight and kill each other. The mulitplayer version is much better. It is a classic grab a gun and kill anything that moves as well as some capture the flag and team deathmatch. Openarena was built on the Quake 3 game engine. It has a kind of cartoonie feel but is fun to play still. Its capture the flag mode is very fun and runs well on even my computer.
For a list of all free games (not just fps) you can CLICK HERE
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
What is The Cheap Geek?
Well to put it simply it is someone who loves tech but has no money. I personally love everything that requires batteries or an electrical cord but I can't afford that $500 Nvidia GTX8800 video card for gaming. (in fact, I haven't built a computer that cost over $600 since I helped my dad build his "high-end" gaming machine!) Does that make me any less of a geek? NO! Anyone can be a great geek for very little money. This is especially true today because of the massive amounts of high quality open source software. This blog is for the geek with the lean wallet. I want to lead you to places where you can get your geek on with out passing out every time you look at your credit card bill. I am only one man so I don't think that I have all the answers. I hope to use this blog to call upon the comments and ideas of others who suffer from this same condition. Feel free to comment and give your own ideas.
As well as getting your cheap geek on, I hope to lead you to some great learning resources that have helped me on my geeky path.
As well as getting your cheap geek on, I hope to lead you to some great learning resources that have helped me on my geeky path.
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