Fitting the battle of life

Terrible title, I know.

Went into Camden today to get some new shoes, as my old ones were a bit messed up. That’s mostly thanks to a couple of hours playing football in them, which I do not recommend doing in Converse! Anyway, pictures of old shoes with damage and my brand spanking new ones:

Pretty good for £45 I think - from Scorpion, which is on Camden High Street here.

Bought a handheld blender last week and have so far done very little with it, except make a couple of milkshakes:

• 1x large banana, sliced
• 2x ginger snap biscuits, broken up
• 1x glass milk
• Blend
• Drink

Mmmmmmmm delicious.

Well, decided to catch up on some music, literature and comedy all at the same time - god bless Amazon. This week’s deliveries (a few days earlier than I expected!):

• Underworld (Don DeLillo)
• Mozart’s Requiem
• The Flight of the Conchords Season 1 DVD

is anthropomorphising, because it’s such a fun word and fills so much space; it’s enjoyable to write (even if you have to concentrate on the spelling a bit) with a smooth fountain pen.

The popular, witty and frankly brilliant insult comes up often in questions of Linux usability, I’ve found. Just the other day I noted it in this Guardian article, and I’m sure if I bothered with a little googlage there would be countless other examples (like this CNET post from October dealing specifically with the subject). The question is, of course, could ‘your mum/mom use Linux?’ (where ‘your mum’ stands, quite naturally, for ‘the average computer user’).

Well, I’m going to throw my two pennies into the mix. My personal experience in this field is quite relevant, since my mum has used Linux, specifically Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 on my personal laptop. Her (Windows) laptop is old, rubbish and now doesn’t even boot up with any kind of regularity, and has been like this for some time. Hence, when I’ve been back home for the holidays and so on, she’s ‘borrowed’ my laptop for the simple tasks she needs (web, e-mail) and vague leisure activity as well, as has my 12-yr old sister.  Neither has run into any problems.

My mother knows, or can work out, what ‘web browser’ means. She can see the little label saying ‘Applications’ and - shock! - guess what it means, and work out  that the ‘Internet’ menu probably means things to do with the internet. Either my mother is a genius, or Ubuntu is quite easy to use (maybe both). My sister, too, manages to get over this difficult hurdle. They are also quite capable of pressing the ‘on’ button and logging on to the guest account (which could easily be their own personal account, if I were at home regularly enough).

One of my mum’s favourite means of whiling away the dull winter evenings is sitting on Windows playing FreeCell or Spider Solitaire. Guess what? She looks in ‘Games’ and there are versions of those card games for her (Spider is actually in the AisleRot Solitaire application, which is a bundle of too many different games to count). She also managed to use those old, tired eyes of hers to spot Mahjongg, and has been addicted ever since.

Admittedly I set up my sister’s MSN account on Pidgin for her, so I can’t comment on that aspect entirely, but aren’t we focusing on mothers here?

I do concede that drivers can be an issue on Linux systems with particular hardware. But my mother isn’t the type to cobble together a new desktop from spare parts lying around, or to try and rescue an old, battered Windows machine by installing Xubuntu over a network, but then, who has a mother who is that type? Dell and others sell systems with Ubuntu pre-installed now, and this (realistically) is the only way mums will get exposure to GNU/Linux OSs. If they do want to install it on an old system following media exposure, they’ll realistically pay someone/get a family friend (isn’t there always someone geeky in a family?) to do it for them. The same can be said for the XP to Vista upgrade - ‘average’ users are waiting to buy a new PC with Vista pre-installed rather than go through driver hassle there as well.

So long as media exposure increases (as it has been doing, if my reading is anything to go by), people will be more and more interested in the choice they have over OS. These average users who are looking to get a new computer anyway may well be tempted to get one with Ubuntu on it, as it can work out cheaper for them (a point my mum is very much in favour of!). If my mum can use Ubuntu as it is, and it’s being offered on new computers to customers like her…well, I think we’re just waiting for the ‘average’ user to start queueing, aren’t we?

It might seem a little odd that a grown man still looks at cartoons, but xkcd is a brilliant little webcomic (even if sometimes I don’t understand the maths jokes):

Rock on over to the site to read more.

(Reproduced under this license.)

The latest Skype for Linux beta adds video support, finally enabling Linux users across the globe to benefit from the same features as the rest of their Skype buddies. Skype, however, is non-free software in that it’s closed source (although it’s free in the free beer sense, it’s not free as in freedom). Does this mean we shouldn’t welcome this development?

Well, it sends a clear message to other companies (notably, the BBC) that services can and should be given equally across operating systems, that Linux users are an important sector of the market. This is true especially for peer-to-peer applications such as Skype and the BBC’s iPlayer - the more users on a network, the better quality service had by all. For Skype, this move might mean adding several thousand users to its network with more reliable, stable PCs; this is particularly important when we bear in mind the big Skype outage over the summer, when Microsoft sent out an upgrade that required Windows users to restart their computers. With so many people doing this at the same time, the Skype network couldn’t cope; more Linux users would help in situations like this.

As for the BBC and its iPlayer service, the benefits are greater. At present, unlike with Skype, there are no Linux users. Given that there are quite a few across the country (see recent media coverage about this one…), it would be adding quite a few new users to the network. For existing users who find that the p2p service eats up their processor’s power, it would lessen the load and improve service at the same time. For Linux users themselves, it would offer the same service that the BBC is providing to Windows users - downloadable content, rather than the planned streaming service (which is inherently unfair, and probably against the BBC’s charter).

Well, it won’t be long now before my current phone contract expires and the iPhone arrives in the UK. Now, I’m not an Apple fanboy, and my iPod nano was bought for me over a year ago by my mother as a ‘welldoneyou’vefinishedschoolfinallynowgetoutofmyhouseandgotouni’ present. I run Ubuntu as my main operating system, but retain windows XP for a few minor things (a couple of games, for instance, and also iTunes occasionally). (more…)

As Helvetica celebrates its 50th birthday, with a documentary all to itself, I find myself buying Don Quixote (trans. Edith Grossman) in what used to be Ottaker’s but is now a far more sombre Waterstone’s (the green facade having been replaced by black, and the interior soon to follow, I fear). I chose this edition because it looks, on the outside, far more interesting than the Penguin Classics edition, and the translation is apparently very good. (more…)