Danny's Space

I think that 2014 is a sober look at real situations coming up unexpectedly. We've started paying SSS Contributions monthly, faithfully. I want to make it a triumph beyond these figures, that paying it consistently points it out. Then there are a number of terminated contracts in the beginning of the year which coincides with the summer repairs. It takes some time to find replacements for those vacant spaces. 2014 is also the first time we implemented plans without worrying too much about income trends. It's liberating. It also prepares us for the next year or years. I hope to continue this habit of reporting monthly about income and expenses from now on. Hopefully there's not much bad news and more excellent news.  Here's to the new year!

While I don't share other's taste for it, I do enjoy taking their pictures.

Fedora 21 ( the torrent link is here ) is released yesterday and I started to download the torrent around 5pm. I believe I got the news of the torrent being ready from my twitter feed. Fedora 21 is ready at last. This is today after yum update and some additional repos downloaded for third party packages. I did mention in my previous post that I am switching distros to see how easy it is to do this at this stage of linux development. The requirement of course is that my data would be preserved after the switch. I had openSuse 13.2 running in my computer and this is the switch to Fedora 21. It worked very very well. I've been monitoring my fedora mailing list and there are a few fedup upgrades that weren't going the way it was suppose to. My experience doing this switch is a happier story. I got my home directory mounted. No data loss. The key to a successful switch like this is partitioning. A separate home directory is important to protect your data. ...

First week of November 2014, openSuse 13.2 was released and I installed it in my fresh computer, as in new hardware, never been used. I installed GNOME and started configuring it and using it. Then my plan was hatched after a week to switch to Fedora 21 when it comes out of development December 9th. to The schedule of its releases gave me the idea. openSuse 13.2 is coming on November 5th and Fedora 21 is tentatively coming later, hopefully by its developers' estimate on the 9th of December. Then I figured I should try and document at this stage of linux distro development how easy is it for an average user to switch distros. With two linux distros coming out of a long development ( a year) cycle for each of its own release, it's timely and fortuitous that someone try and describe the process. Next post, I will show some details.

​ And then November 2014 is behind us. I lost one tenant and gain back one. We are holding the course. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.

Mom got to work right away.       Smaller ones here. We called M Roger to level the ground left after the 3 man crew of acetylene torch equipped team disassembled the water tank and tower and took the pieces off in their truck.

Mom arrived early morning November 16th. She spending 2014 Christmas with us. Feet up on the chair. Relaxing after a 13 hour flight from Vancouver to Manila. Tito Bong and Tita Connie have gone home after fetching her from the airport. Tita Edios was here too.

I finally finished downloading the 4.7 GB "DVD" version of the Installer Image for openSUSE 13.2. I downloaded this install medium through torrent thankfully. After burning it to my usb stick ( not sure if the blank DVD with me could be suitable ) I booted to the polished green openSUSE installer. The installation was smooth except when it was time to configure the hard disks. Sorry it's my first time to use their user interface. I had to read everything just to make sure what I want to happen IS what's happening or about to happen. In any case i want to leave most of the defaults enabled. I used btrfs for the systems files and Xfs for the data files (/home). Don't worry the installer will tell you if there's a fatal error in the configuration, which makes the openSUSE installer better than the fedora installer (anaconda). The point in using the "DVD" installation medium is there's not much else to download during the installation because...

October figures are out. And primary costs (e.g. food,utilities,repairs) are steady at 15k. If I can hold them until January next year I just about pinned the GP for the year.

Reinstalled fedora 20 because I'm not satisfied with the partitioning. I created a separate / and /home partitions and made both btrfs, the next generation file system for Linux. It looks like this now. I can't encrypt the disks now because they're separate partitions. refers to previous post: New Computer also the one in Wordpress

I have a new desktop computer. It's an Intel i5-4590 Quad Core, Asus Z97-K motherboard Personal Computer. I installed a 16 GB (2x8 Kingston HyperX sticks) RAM. I chose the Crucial 240 GB SSD for storage. Additionally, I purchased a 2 TB Seagate SATA 6 hard drive for media. The casing is black and lighter than the old one I have back in 2008. The casing is paired with a 730 watt power supply. I recycled the dvd player and card reader from my old rig. I thought the old 1 TB Seagate hard drive is finished but after reformatting, it passed the test. It's still okay. I installed fedora 20 on the boot device.  I'm updating the system now. output of the lsblk -f command for this computer. I decided to encrypt the whole device after opting for an LVM. I'm using the Linux kernel 3.16.6 coming from the updates channel in fedora 20.

Gnucash2.6.4 in Fedora 20 date: 2014-10-2 Fedora 20 decided to update their repository to this version of Gnucash. One of the most powerful feature of Gnucash is it is very easy to generate graphics from the numbers. However the new version uses a new jqplot to render the graphics and there's a bug.

fedora 20 installed in btrfs file system. Although fc20 was released December last year, I wouldn't characterize it as last night's cold soup. With an updated kernel and some key packages in GNOME freshly pushed for it, fedora 20 is far from tired or old.

Formatted my SSD into Btrfs this time around. Put Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 LTS. Now to find me an extra disk to serve as backup to my media files, so I can format sdb partitions to Btrfs too.

10 years ago, on October 2004, a group of open source developers released a Linux distribution based on Debian. They named their first release 'warthy warthog' which is Ubuntu 4.10. The direction they took breaks the common myths about Linux back in 2004. Ubuntu became known as the most user-friendly distro in the Linux world. It is easy to install, easy to use and has a supportive community for new end-users. Linux for humans. Happy Ubuntu Day.

I reinstalled my Fedora 20 on a fresh SSD formatted with Btrfs. It's a much simpler setup in Fedora than in openSUSE. Me thinks that Fedora assumes you know what kind of partitioning your use-case needs and leaves it up to you. openSUSE on the other hand performs the virtual partitioning for you. I didn't encrypt the disks for the Fedora 20 install but I did it encrypt it in openSUSE.

openSuse or Fedora, which one to use? That is the question. I've been using both one way or the other after I removed Ubuntu 14.04 lts in my hard drive. I suppose I should test both operating systems thoroughly in my computer to see which one is better. I installed Fedora core 20 three weeks ago then moved on to openSUSE 13.2-rc1. This is a limited test and a blindly subjective one at that so here goes.  If you want an as close to the "devs-original" GNOME desktop experience, Fedora is what you want in your machine.  It has been default in Fedora for sometime now. The Fedora distribution doesn't try to be a jack-of-all-trade by having a "rolling release" as an alternative for you. They release when it's stable and ready. They update such a release fairly well. I have the newest stable kernel right now while waiting for the next stable release. Stability is the most important thing for me.  I didn't see this the first time I tried the Fedora ins...

I finished reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. I first learned or heard about Slaughterhouse-five from Jessica Zafra's radio program in the late 90s. I surmised that she loves the novel because she often mentions it. Ms. Zafra is an author herself and was the manager for the band Eraserheads. Due to the easy access to e-books nowadays, I decided to download Kurt Vonnegut this past week. I downloaded it using bittorrent along with a number of Kurt Vonnegut's other works. Mr. Vonnegut himself said that Slaughterhouse-five is a loser and promised that his next works won't be. Slaughterhouse-five is the author's personal experience as told by him in his own words and style, when he was a prisoner of war in Germany in the second world war. He would later write about his captivity and the bombing of Dresden where he and other prisoners of war spent the rest of the war in Europe. Slaughterhouse-five is an anti-war war novel. The writer who is also the main c...

openSUSE installer offers to format your root and home partition in Btrfs and XFS respectively. Next generation file systems in openSUSE. Other Linux distros should follow suit.

This is like one of those tiny seeds on the ground just off the edge of a really big and dark forest. Ebola's First Contracted Case in the US

Hi Reese I installed openSuse 13.2-rc1 on my local storage today. I have deleted Fedora 20 and now configuring openSuse.I had wanted to test it for a week but after getting through the initial bump of creating a partition and using btrfs and zfs as file systems for the install, I proceeded with the installation.

log entry last night when I was playing with Opensuse-13.2-rc1 I want to give Opensuse some shaking for a week. I want to see some stability and productivity. See you in 7 days.

Hard drives being prepared for new mounting. I have partitions here that were beginning to be filled. I removed the partition that I can live without and shared the free space to the two partitions which needed them. I used Gparted to the moving and resizing. First, unmount the partitions. Then delete the unwanted partition. The free space are shared to the remaining partitions using a gui. Nothing to it. Once satisfied, you start the operations. It would take at least 8 hours to do this so I prepared some time wasting activities. Games anyone?

GNOME 3.12 is the latest stable release from GNOME DEVS. They're coming out with GNOME 3.14 any day now but that won't make it to any major distribution out there. Not for about a month, I guess. I am using GNOME 3.10 with Fedora 20 and I am happy with it. Evolution is working with my accounts configured from the online accounts. When I had to add an account (eg zoho) it was a breeze. My initial install updated to the latest Firefox which came out a few weeks ago. Yum Updates installed the latest Linux kernel which is 3.16.x. When I checked if I had the patched bash package, I indeed have the bug-free version now. So I don't have a problem with my Fedora. I had to install Gnucash which is not part of the default application for Fedora 20. I had to enable several repositories for flash, codecs, dropbox and google chrome. But I was surprised that updates were light compared to Ubuntu. I mean Fedora 20 came out December 2013 and I am installing it October 2014, that...

I am getting to the tempo of things in Fedora. So I am installing Google Chrome in Fedora 20 and I have a bookmarked link at "if not true then false" dot com  which I am grateful for all these tutorials. Thank you. I learned that in order to enable a repo one must add a file in /etc/yum/repos.d. This is manually saving a created text file in that directory.  Then you can install: # yum install package. And there you go.

Fedora gave notification of updates for new software. Since i'm using GNOME it uses the Notification with that desktop. Clicking on the interactive thingy at the bottom it brought me to Software Updates, I guess. Clicking on OS Updates, a dropdown further shows what particular packages are being updated. I then clicked the "Restart & Install" button in the upper left hand corner. And I guess fedora needed to reboot because it did.

Thank you for this link: TechnoZeal I was able to install the dropbox repo and download dropbox in my brand new Fedora 20 install. Thanks from a newbie.

The Fox hugging Fedora

Fedora 20 updated to the Linux kernel 3.16.x from 3.11.x. I know I updated (or allowed the update) the linux kernel during a #yum update but didn't expect a new kernel line all together. Talking about bleeding edge.

It is always sign ificant when we mark time. The mere act of looking at the clock seems to put a moment up on a pedestal. Se ptember is ending and the last quarter of 2014 is coming in a few days. So I want to put my financial reports out there and also to give a hint as to how I should proceed to 2015. My Income and Expense Quarterly Chart I got a small pick up from the latest quarter due to pretty consistent performance monthly from rentals. My Expense breakdown Chart The rise in the 2nd quarter is due to a bigger repairs cost. In addition to traditional summer repair, a bigger depreciation due to increase in capitalized property improvements, put total expenses to record high. Depreciation doubled this year (2014) starting May.

I went ahead and installed Fedora 20 on an old machine circa 2007. This desktop computer has dual core intel and 2 GB RAM. It's been a while since I've tried Fedora again, but I keep getting good feedback from friends using it. I'm a GNOME fan so I can't stay away from a distribution whose default desktop is GNOME. The last time i tried GNOME in Fedora I was disappointed with Evolution. I got Evolution up and running my Gmail now. I have contacts and calendar automatically from online accounts. Gnucash and LibreOffice are a must have for my tasks. Gnome 3.14 was released today. If it makes it to Fedora 21 that's coming out December, I surely will upgrade this machine to the newest.

Logins and passwords were leaked. An estimated 3 million users were affected. The good news was that most of the logins were three years old. The LastPass Blog came out with an interesting analysis of the data set leaked. It's still the same problem with too short and too simple a password. People are still using the same weak password for many websites. Use lower case letters, use numbers, use symbols. Make your passwords at least 14 characters. The longer the better. Don't reuse passwords. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.

My old machine with its 2 GB RAM is showing its age when I run Ubuntu Unity. After numerous freeze and random theme issues, I decided to throw in the towel. I'm installing Xfce. Switching To Xubuntu × ​ I miss my Gnome keyboard shortcuts but my Xfce desktop is a lot faster and nimble. I can't control volume from my keyboard and that's annoying. I can minimize windows again. No more freezes and random display issues. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.

These are graphs for expenses from January to August of 2013 and 2014. I'm outpacing the previous year by 27,000php. Repairs and Depreciation is up in 2014. Medical and SSS contributions are new in 2014. Below are Income-Expenses-Gross Profit graphs comparing the same 8 month period for each year too. Income is outpacing the previous year by 38,000php. However as stated above, expense is outpacing the previous year by 27,000php. The net positive difference is 10,400php. All these is for an 8 month period from January to August of their respective year. Let's see if the remaining months for 2014 is more productive.

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 <br>I've just tried installing OpenSuse and Fedora on my computer along with Ubuntu. These distros are the top distros in the Distrowatch page hit rankings. People do ask a lot of questions about which one they should use in their computers. They are easy to install because of their graphical installation tools. New users will find them friendly to install and configure.<br> <br>My experience in installing these linux distros is one of delight and surprise. I have installed linux distros since 2004 and compared to the present, that is like the moon landing while today' s affair is like a party. I mean friends bring their laptops and do it together-like it's a party.<br> <br>As long as the wireless connection is holding and reliable, there's no reason why you can't have a party and install linux.<br> <br>I use Ubuntu. I use Unity. I have no problem with the dash...

So it has been 4 months since Ubuntu 14.04 came out. This is LTS and supported for 6 years by Canonical. The first mobile device with Ubuntu pre-installed is promised to come out later this year, 2014. It's time to check out how the apps perform so far. It is a good idea. I use Gmail and Twitter and Facebook. Why not a webapp in a desktop? So I start the Twitter and Gmail webapp. So far it has crashed my computer 6 times. Not a very good sign. On the other hand it does work but not as stable as opening them in Firefox. -- Use my PGP key if you want to encrypt your replies/messages to me. You are invited to also send me your PGP keys so we can communicate in private.

It has been 7 years since I first posted here in Blogger. I signed up for a Gmail account a week earlier then signed up for a blogger account afterwards. It felt empowering and a little overwhelming to open up my thoughts to the web. I had to find my voice and learn what I think is appropriate for the web. 2007 seemed so far away. I was using Ubuntu linux 7.04 and getting my feet wet in open source. I just switched from MS XP. It's another space expanding experience. From Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox. I passed the 50k email count in Gmail last month. Google gave me 15GB of storage. It's mostly Gmail and photos. I remember when Yahoo gave away 1GB of email storage. I thought that was the coolest thing. Mom is out of the country. She left October 2011. I have been managing our property for leasing since then. I have Imee to ask for help if I am swamped. It was difficult at the start. I am learning. I have been posting monthly graphics of cash and finances. I want ...

Robin Williams died at 63 August 13 2014, rest in peace. The most memorable scene in Good Will Hunting is this screenshot of Will and his shrink (Robin Williams). Matt Damon plays a math genius with personality flaws. Robin Williams shows him his file and past life and tells him "It's Not Your Fault". Over and over again until Matt Damon's character gets it.  Robin Williams earns his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in this role.  ​

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 E-mail of the Day. I am glad to hear we are doing this. Salvaging an old satellite from way back 1978 moving it closer and reusing it using open source technology. - -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject:     Free Software on the final frontier: GNU Radio controls the ISEE-3 Spacecraft Date:     Fri, 08 Aug 2014 16:41:21 -0400 From:     Free Software Foundation <info@fsf.org> Reply-To:     Free Software Foundation <info@fsf.org> To:     Donato Roque Hello Donato, The ISEE-3 spacecraft An original drawing of the ISEE-3 spacecraft from the 1970s. The International Sun-Earth Explorer-3, or ISEE-3, was launched in 1978 by NASA to monitor activity on the sun. After three years of observation, NASA repurposed the satellite, which soon became the first spacecraft to visit a comet. T...

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I took my desktop beyond the normal defaults today and paid for it. I removed Evolution Mail. I could not fix the multiple instances of profiles in my account, calendar and contacts. It has to be the installation of the unstable version that messed up Evolution. I purged the ppa and installed the latest stable version but Evolution Mail wasn't the same again. I downloaded Thunderbird and started it. I have my Gmail back and Enigmail is working fine. I figured that in 6 weeks a new Ubuntu version will be ready for download and testing along with a new stable version of Evolution Mail. I can wait for it no sweat.

Self-worth: Did you have somebody to hug you and kiss you? Did somebody called you to come inside when it rained? Did you cry when all you have of them is their picture?

Except for the slight increase in Income, July and June 2014 is telling the same story. Expenses are stable at 25k monthly. I don't think I'll make my 80k annual gross profit projection but we'll see.

I have got to talk about gmusicbrowser , my current music player. This is an extensively customizable player. It comes with several layout configuration by default and then there's user created layouts available from third parties. The 1st screenshot shows the shimmer desktop layout with the song tree pane. The 2nd screenshot has the shimmer desktop with browser configuration. If you're the kind of music player aficionado who likes to change the user interface every time you start a music player then you're in heaven. And I was just trying to find a player with a decent equalizer! gmusicbrowser has that and MORE. I could filter my library based on metadata. Metadata includes artist, album, genre(s), year, label and more. I could customize the filter and save it. I could control how random play goes in gmusicbrowser. I could play music based on its metadata of course. But when it comes to random play, gmusicbrowser allows me to combine several...

I wrote a blog post a few days ago about using Evolution Mail client and GPG and I partly talked about how to encrypt files. If say I already opened the compose window and partly proceeded to type off my email and then remember I want to send an attachment with it, that's how I would do it. It turns out that nautilus, the default file browser in Ubuntu can help me if i want to encrypt a file. Put the focus on the file you want to encrypt. You can either right-click and choose encrypt from the pull-down menu or hit the pull-down key (right side of the keyboard, next to the control key) in my pc. I'm using Ubuntu 14.04 lts Unity desktop. If you're using a different desktop environment, you might try exploring your file browser. GPG is standard in any Linux distro. Also, if it's the first time you're doing this, it might prompt you to download needed nautilus add-ons, so just answer yes. In my case, I downloaded seahorse-daemon, libcryptui, and seaho...

Most of the people I exchange emails about half use Windows. The other half mostly use their smartphones which means they're using android. This is a rough approximation of my personal communication environment today. I occasionally use Windows 7 in a laptop at work. So for us who wish to keep our emails private, this is important. Windows users can use GPG by downloading GPG for Windows. It is called Gpg4win and it is a package that incorporates Gnu Privacy Guard cryptography, extension for Outlook, extension for Explorer and documentation. This enables Windows users to encrypt and sign their emails and files. It is Free Software. Generate Your Key Pair For Windows users, it is important to be able to encrypt your files and email messages. The first thing to do is to generate your key pair. This is a very nice wiki for Gpg4win. Let us start fighting for our privacy and stop mass surveillance.

I sent a GPG encrypted message with attachment (also encrypted beforehand) to myself. This is it using Evolution Mail client. You need to know that Evolution Mail makes encryption in email much less cumbersome. First Things First In order to use GPG (the open source implementation of Pretty Good Privacy PGP) generate your key-pair. Your public key is uploaded to a public server accessible to the public and can be downloaded by anyone interested to send you an encrypted message. Your private key is stored locally, encrypted and secured by a passphrase. Your passphrase should be good enough to protect from attackers trying to break the encryption. I use Seahorse to manage my passwords and keys. It's a GUI for the GPG program. Nevertheless, I still use the Terminal to encrypt files that I wish to attach to the email message. How To Encrypt Files There are many programs that you can use to encrypt files or an entire directory (or even an entire partition). I am j...