Easily create an Ubuntu pen drive

Ubuntu. The most popular and (i think) best linux operating system there is.

Especially because it’s lite. It takes up less than a gigabyte to install.

But go before that. Go back to putting in the CD. You know how you could select “Try ubuntu without any change to my computer”? That’s where this post is coming from. You can create a CD but have it save data and instead of a CD be s USB disk.

This is actually simpler than it looks. You will need an internet connection (which I’m assuming you have as you are viewing this page), a PC with Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) installed, and a USB disk, and preferably a mac as well.

First, open a web browser and go to www.ubuntu.com/download to get yourself the .iso of the Ubuntu install. disk. Then, plug in your USB disk to your Mac, open disk utility, select the disk and select Erase. In security options select Zero Out Data, and put the disk format to MS-DOS (FAT). Click erase, then go into the drive (not the partition), click the Partition Menu, from the Pop-up select 1 Partition, and on the right I would title it USB and slect the partition type to be MS-DOS (FAT) and click Partition. Let that finish, then Eject he disk from your mac. Unplug the disk and plug it into the PC that is running the latest ubuntu on it and has the .iso from ubuntu.com/download downloaded. Close all of the running applications and in the menus go to System>Administration>USB Startup Disk Creator. Here, drag in the .iso file to the top box. Select the USB drive from the box on the bottom. Change the slider that appears to a desired amount. I have a 4.4 GB drive and I let it have 1.5 GB. This is because I still wanted to use it as a normall USB drive.

Now click create startup disk and let it do the rest. It will take 10-30 minutes, but the outcome is great. Plug in the disk to a computer and on most computers on the initial bootup screen (usually with the logo of the computer manufacturer) hit escape. Select USB[-HDD/Hard Drive] and you are good to boot. Select “try ubuntu without making any changes to your computer” from the menu that follows and you will boot right into the ubuntu operating system from your USB disk. Here you can setup email, download files, etc. and after shutting down you can plug the USB drive into another computer and boot using the same process and your files and settings will remain.

If you can, try putting it on a necklace. This way you have an operating system with you and all you need is another computer, which there are probably plenty of around these days.

I used the PNY MicroSwivel which is great because it is 4GB and nobody would think that it was a USB disk until you opened it. And then you boot it up and your friends think you just screwed up their whole computer, until you shut it down, unplug the disk, turn it on again, and it’s like nothing ever happened!

Art online silent auction!

So I have started a digital artwork collection and I am auctioning off a 19X13 Hi-Res glossy print of this piece [link]

This piece is titled Pentaflame, and is 1/10 of the prints. The piece of artwork is signed.

The current highest bid is $25.

Send in your bids to auction@goodmorninggeek.com

The highest bid by the end of 2009 will be the winner.

Google Chrome

As many PC users know, Google Chrome is by far the fastest most stable most simple and most versatile web browser in existence. It’s lean and makes sense. But many Mac users are stuck with Firefox, which is bulky. And even worse some PC users still use internet explorer: The bulkiest, fattest, slowest, most insecure, and overall worst web browser.

So all of those Mac users wanted Google Chrome. And right then what did they get? They got a buggy, unstable, feature barren dev-release alpha of the web browser. I had it, an I was not happy. No flash! Back to firefox I went.

The Google Chrome omepage always had a sign-up button for the developer emails, but no browser.

UNTIL NOW!

On 11/8/2009 Google released the official beta of Google Chrome for Mac.

And it’s everything you expected.

Speed

Google Chrome got its reputation for speed. It’s fast, fast, and literally seems to suck down all of the information and coding and stick it right in front of you in the form of a web page.

I decided to test the speed of it against the other most popular web browsers.Here’s a countdown from slowest to fastest.

Safari: Believe it or not, but Safari was the slowest of them all. It took a painstaking 11.488 seconds to load Good Morning Geek! [Yawn in anticipation of the page loading]

Internet Explorer: Yes, Safari was slower than internet explorer. Internet explorer was able to get the text fast, but not the images. It took a total of 9.62 seconds to load Good Morning Geek. [Yawn in anticipation for the page to load]

Firefox: Just as predicted, Firefox came in second place for the web browser race. It took Firefox 5.607 seconds to load Good Morning Geek. [Small Yawn]

Google Chrome: is the winner (after all that was the whole point of the testing)! It got a remarkable 2.49 seconds to load Good Morning geek with images and all. Google chrome is FAST…


Stability

Yup, it’s stable. This is because Google Chrome has a new process for each tab. If one tab crashes, that oe process crasher, and the rest of the processes (tabs) are left intact.

I tested this using the Activity Monitor and just deleted one of the processes called Google Chrome Helper; the title for the process of each tab.

An the result I got was the tab looking like this:

Crashed Tab

But the other tab:

The other tab survives!

Yet, there is in fact a downside to this. It sucks up all of your CPU! But the results always vary.

I’m writing this post in Google Chrome. I have the post edit open in one tab, and Pandora [link] in the other. I am using very little CPU, but at points depending on what you’re doing it can max out a 2 core intel processor.

But yesterday when I was doing the same thing but had another tab open, my CPU was in fact maxed out.

Google chrome is fast and stable but because of its stabilization techniques it tends to take up memory and CPU.

Features

These features work on PC Mac and Linux, so first download the app (bottom of the page) and try them yourself.

  • Rearrange tabs by clicking and dragging them.
  • Make a new window from a tab br dragging the tab out of the window.
  • Drag a tab back into a different window by dragging it from one window and dropping it in the desired window.
  • In the OmniBar type in the name of a search engine like google.com or ask.com and press tab. What you then type will be searched by the search engine without loading the search engine’s homepage.

And many more!

So go get your copy of the fastest cleanest and stablest browser ever!

Google’s write-up and videos of Chrome’s Features

Mac

PC

Linux

Tip/Trick: Save battery on your iPod touch

Your battery life is important… If you don’t believe me, you will when your iPod dies while writing an incredibly important business email.

You can use a few simple little tricks to increase your battery life.

1. At least every month, drain your iPod until it dies, and fully recharge it. It’s even better to do this every time you need to charge/discharge your iPod. This tip works for everything that runs on batteries: laptops, phones, you name it.

2. Turn off Wi-Fi if you’re not using it! It discharges battery fast.

3. Turn down brightness! If you are in a car at night you don’t need the screen at full brightness!

4. If you are concerned about your battery draining in less than an hour, consider getting your battery replaced.

5. Gameplay drains battery as well. You can ultimately get 2 hours of battery life with gameplay, that is if you have followed all of the other tips above.

6. If you have other battery issues, keep track of what you do and time how long the battery lasts. When the iPod is in auto-lock (automatically turns off or you press the sleep button) It will use very very VERY VERY little battery life. Therefore, when timing don’t count the time the ipod is asleep. After seeing how long until it dies, go into the apple store and tell one of the people walking around about your problem. This doesn’t require a genius appointment, and who knows. Maybe that’s supposed to happen. Ad if it’s not, then it’s time to schedule a genius appointment.

How-to: Create huge posters and cool entryways

You like that picture on your computer. but you want to put it on your wall. Wait. You want it to COVER the wall. But, it’s too expansive to print on big paper at kinkos, etc., etc. So what do you do? You use an online tool called the rasterbator.This great tool will simply take your image and make the pixels big dots. The size of the dot will depend on brightness of the poto and how big you want it to be.

To use to this online tool, just click HERE, upload your image, crop if desired, size to the number of pages you want it to be, SELECT MULTI-COLOR ON THE NEXT PAGE, and download and print the PDF. Well, then of course there’s cutting it and putting it together, etc.

So originally I had a big picture of the aple logo that was screddd and hanging from my door, shown below.

Old Entry...

But I was getting very bored of it.

So I had just made my new logo, and I decided that I should create an entry thing with my logo. I was having some problems with the software I had previously used, so I used the rasterbator this time. Below is the image I uploaded to the rasterbator.

Original Image

As you can see, it’s simply two of my logos on top of each other.

So after downloading the PDF I printed it out (turned out to be about 30 pages) and put it together… with nothing but scissors and Scotch tape. This is quite the challenge as with a normal printer there will be a border, which you have to find a way to fold over.

After piecing it I did what needed to be done: I cut the whole thing in to strips EXCEPT FOR THE TOP. Then, I simply hung it above my door and this is what I got.

New Entry

As you can tell, this one hangs much mower than the old entry, and in a cose-up, you an see how this tool really fit it to this big of a size.

Pixels to dots

The rasterbator did just what I said it would do – pixels to dots. The brightr, the smaller the dot (as more white will appear). And of course, the bigger you want the picture, the bigger the dot.

But some people go REALLY far with this thing.

Whow...