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Creating a link in a WordPress blog

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The downside, the disk drive is only 4 Gb.

Before we bought it 4 Gb seemed small, but after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I paid about $500 for a 120Mb drive for my IBM desktop, and 4Gb still holds a lot of word processing documents. Or so we thought…

When the Asus arrived it included a handsome Xandros operating system. The “Easy” interface was ideal for someone used to MS Windows. The trouble was, it was shipped with a huge number of applications that took up virtually all of the disk space (like 95%) and there is no way to remove unwanted applications. Since we left the auto-update switched on we soon ran into problems of using up absolutely all of the disk space. We could have used an external disk drive to store documents, but in the shipped state the device did not run YouTube videos or Facebook chat. Of course, it might have done if we had been able to update packages but this was impossible because there was not enough free disk space.

Searching the forums it appeared that it was possible to remove applications. Some said this could be done by running in Advanced mode which required manifold changes and tweaks to operating system files (especially for the 900A). Others insisted that you had to mess with the disk partitions to allow changes to be made to the system partition (which contained the backup data and most of the available disk space). I believe you need at least  PhD in computer science to follow these conflicting instructions or at least a lot of patience. As with most advice for Linux, it roughly divided into 40% that conflicts with other advice, 40% written to make the person writing it appear very clever and to obfuscate information for everyone else, and 20% useful. And you never know which is which until you have spent many fruitless hours.

I eventually gave up and turned to http://www.eeebuntu.org/ This site is definitely in the useful domain.

EEE Ubuntu is a subset of Ubuntu that is designed to run on EEE machines ‘out of the box.’ At least that’s what the Web site says.

I followed the install instructions for EEEbuntu Base, which is the smallest of their downloads. I downloaded the ISO and then went to http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ to download a program that runs under Windows XP to create a bootable USB stick.

I adjusted the Asus to boot from the USB stick (by pressing F2 on bootup and changing the order of boot devices).

The real beauty of using the USB is you can boot up in the new operating system and test it out without touching the old. In other words, you can check that everything is working properly before you commit to installing the new operating system on the Asus disk.

After checking that the wireless driver was working properly and that it was possible to watch YouTube (which required downloading Flash, which was easy), I clicked the install link and installed EEEBuntu.

Having installed the operating system, the system recognized my wireless network. I just had to enter the password to connect. I quickly installed OpenOffice Word and Spreadsheet, and also Thunderbird for email.

Connecting to a Windows networked printer was extremely easy.

Overall I wish we had gone down this route months ago.

Asus make good machines but they need to be a little more thoughtful when they fill their computers with unneeded applications without a way to remove them.

Post from: Billy Fire LLC Visit us and subscribe to our blog for more tips on marketing, blogging, social media and the Internet.

New Operating System for Asus EEE 900A

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One of the features I do not like is the email invoice function. Instead of being able to send an emailed invoice directly, you have to send it via a Quickbooks server. But there is no real need for it. If you connect to the Internet using an ISP then invoice emails could be sent in exactly the same way as any other email.

The real reason for this feature, of course, is that at some point Quickbooks will cease to support it and strong-arm all their loyal users to buy a new version of the software they don’t need. This is a fact of life/commercial reality, but why do Quickbooks have to come up with nonsense that I saw when I sent an emailed invoice today.

A message appeared that said something to the effect that the great, magnanimous Intuit (Quickbook’s publisher) needed to make the change to best support the maximum number of users on their new version.

Come on guys, you could have come up with a better excuse than that, or maybe, you could have been honest.

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Quickbooks 2006 to stop sending email after May 31, 2006

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The twist with BudURL is that is includes analytics behind each link that you create. So, for example, you could include a BudURL link in a Twitter Tweet and then see analytics on any clicks on that link.

I will post more when I have examples of the analytics.

BudURL includes free and paid services based on the number of links you create.

Post from: Billy Fire LLC Visit us and subscribe to our blog for more tips on marketing, blogging, social media and the Internet.

BudURL

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1. Creating a link in a WordPress blog The following video is a very simple demonstration of how...

I am a big fan of OpenOffice, it does everything that I need, everything that MS Office does that is of any importance and sometimes more, for example you have a huge amount of flexibility in which file types it can open and edit. You can also create PDFs directly from OpenOffice.

One thing that I don’t think is overly easy is creating address labels – especially ones that do not include blank lines (if a field in a database is empty, as is often the case with my Christmas card list)

Anyway after a lot of effort last night I managed to create the labels I wanted, without the empty lines (and without showing the country: USA on the cards destined for the USA).

I have created a tutorial at: Creating mailing labels using OpenOffice – remove blank lines.

Post from: Billy Fire LLC Visit us and subscribe to our blog for more tips on marketing, blogging, social media and the Internet.

Removing blank lines from OpenOffice labels

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