A Brand New Flickr Yay!

Rebranding in the tech world usually end in tragedy but I have high hopes for Flickr. Is it too late to write Flickr! With an exclamation point here.



Free accounts like mine gets 1 Terabyte of storage and the site gets a makeover. I can still edit and retouch photos. But a TB gives me around 500,000 plus photos at 6 megapixel each. This is an invitation to the masses of photo sharers out there and a direct cannon shot to the bow of Facebook.

I think Yahoo! is just getting started.

Audacious Replaces Rhythmbox

I've been using Audacious since 12.04 instead of Rhythmbox or Banshee. I discovered Audacious when I was dual booting Archlinux and Ubuntu in one of my machines. I like Audacious because it is solid, reliable and resource efficient but feature-full. It plays all codec types format types I can throw at it. Plugins are not an afterthought. I can enable them without any problems.

Its tab interface is no problem to me. I can work with it. If the browser's tabs format is okay to people then why not a music player. To be honest, I'll miss the cover art but the plug-in / patch work way they try to implement this on Rhythmbox isn't working for me. Too buggy, sudden spikes in cpu, then locks up. The basic Rhythmbox works well though.

One of these days, I'll test the brand new Banshee. It's in version 2.6 now and it's a bug fix release. I can't wait.

Evolution Mail: A Second Look

I first became aware of Evolution as soon as I use Linux. My first experience with it is mixed. The core functions were working fine but configuration was buggy. There were other mail applications that were easy to configure such as Thunderbird. Evolution also offers a full suite of enterprise features such as calendar, contacts management, LDAP, even Exchange. But it was buggy and slow it it works at all.



I tried Evolution again (after being a Thunderbird user) and Evolution 3.x brought with it heavy development in the tradition of open source. Right now I'm using Evolution 3.6.4. It is easy to configure, fast to start, well integrated into the GNOME desktop. I am now enjoying my email tasks and my Gmail (email, contacts and calendar) works well and easy with Evolution 3.6.4.

Firewall Set Up-6th May 2013

Hi Reese

I just came upon this ubuntuforum thread about setting up a proper firewall. It explains the howto but most importantly the whydo. I was under the impression that if you set up iptables with "default deny" you're ok. wrong.

Outgoing rules should be "default deny" too. After making this rule of course I should make exceptions because I won't be able to connect to other machines. What are these exceptions?

1. dhcp
2.http and https
3.dns=53/tcp,udp
4.email (in my case email over SSL)
5.Bittorrent client

List of Ports here.

This set up adds to security in my desktop. If you have additional applications that cannot make connections. I suggest you look at /etc/services file, the List of Ports above and the ubuntuforum thread OP will likely answer your query.

Bud and Bloom - the bloom part

The bloom part.

Bud and Bloom

A Second User Account In Ubuntu Linux

It's a good idea to create a second account in Ubuntu (or even if you're using any other Linux distribution). It's no secret that Linux is very customizable and the urge to play with it once you're set up is very strong. A second account configured minimally, is a good way to back up your settings, also it serves as a life boat if your command module gets stranded.

You can create an account by running User Accounts.


User Accounts under System Settings

Or just open a terminal type:

$adduser "username"

Go with the defaults. Enter a password once prompted. Information regarding user will be saved in /etc/adduser.conf.

Now you can modify or theme your main account all you want.