Marc Fearby’s Home Page

This past week I have evaluated five Linux distributions to see if any of them would make suitable replacements for Windows XP so that I could avoid Vista. Sadly, Linux proved to be far more finicky and troublesome than I expected. Take it from me, if Windows XP is behaving itself, then don’t try to fix what ain’t broken; stick with what works…

At first sight you might think that the Windows XP installation CD might contain an operating system, but more importantly, some sort of tool that could prove useful if your computer should ever run into trouble. The CD has a nice, blue, cloudy watermark on it and the interior rim has a shiny hologram. Clearly, there must be some goodness locked inside – it just oozes quality…

I’m a very fussy user when it comes to my operating systems and I have managed to get by with Windows XP for a long time, but its days are numbered. Vista is looming and I refuse to install that rubbish, so I have chosen Kubuntu 7.10. Normal Ubuntu users might be wondering why I chose Kubuntu. To demonstrate just how fussy I am, I installed Kubuntu because…

I’m not exactly suffering from any malady that I can think of, apart from a general case of apathy regarding most things, but my spirit is somewhat lifted after receiving a care package from Buywell Just Classical in Western Australia. It has been quite some time since I last purchased some classical CDs so I decided to fill in a few gaps in my collection…

Just now I copied several gigabytes of data from one partition to another on my Windows XP Pro (64-bit edition) Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 machine. Having toyed around with Linux here and there over the years I’ve come to know that such a request isn’t beyond the realm of reasonableness. Linux can carry out this seemingly trivial task with aplomb but if you try to get Windows to do the same thing, old faithful shows just how crappy its inner workings truly are…

It seems that I’ll do anything to avoid writing my ethics essay for uni – watching TV, household chores, (thinking about) gardening, even adding another post to this widely-read blog! A looming deadline used to be motivation enough but it just doesn’t seem to make a difference when it comes to a subject which has nothing to do with “Web-Based Information Systems” (my B Info Tech major)…

For the past ten years I have converted most of my CDs to MP3 format and, gradually, a sense of order has evolved. Now I have my collection sub-divided into the following folder structure: d:\mp3\artist\album. This is all good and well but the ID3 tag information in these files isn’t as pretty as my nicely-ordered folder structure, which became apparent when friends, family, and colleagues wouldn’t shut up about the virtues of iTunes and I tried to import my collection.

What I once regarded as a lovingly-ordered collection of music was reduced to rubble when iTunes tried to make sense of it all. It seems that I never before cared enough about ID3 fields in Winamp which resulted in iTunes separating “JS Bach” from “Bach” and “Bach, JS”. Needless to say, I was not impressed, and quickly discarded iTunes. However, I have grown tired of navigating through my folder structure in Winamp’s standard Windows common dialogue, so I have finally done something about it and have written a program to tidy-up my entire collection. Introducting: iTunes Preparation…