Denis Lemire's Site

The goal was rather simple, take my infinitely useful FreeBSD box and scale it down to more practical metrics. Less space, less energy, no noise. The tool for the job: 10 years of technological progress.

Well, I’m not sure if that was the goal or the excuse, sometimes one simply gets an itch. An urge to integrate new hardware and drag old and reliable but bulky and power hungry hardware to the curb.

Maybe I’m being too specific in the details to label this as a recurring rite… but a good intro is a good intro, I’m sticking with it.

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As a new year approaches, I find myself glancing at this site in realization… Gee, it’s now a matter of months until I can say I haven’t posted here in two years!

That’s quite alright… Unless I have something substantial to justify one of my long winded posts, its just so much easier to spew at 140 character intervals! I’m now a fully formed twitter addict.

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Having a new addition to the family (our new month old daughter, Allison) my wife was itching to begin printing some photos to get started on a “Baby’s first year” type of scrapbook. Unfortunately our HP Officejet printer decided that it was above the task of putting ink on paper some time ago. No amount of pleading with this lousy HP printer would convince it otherwise. Given the circumstances, after some discussion, Jessie and I decided that we had little choice but to fire the Officejet and seek a replacement.

A quick Google search for the MFC-495cw prior to running out to Best Buy confirmed that people appeared to be having success with this printer under Ubuntu. Given that, the decent feature set and the low price of $99 we decided to give this printer try.

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Today marks five years since I abandoned Windows on the Desktop in favor of an OS that doesn’t completely suck. At the time, my primary motivation, or excuse, was to familiarize myself with an OS that I was receiving an increasing number of tech support calls for at AirSurfer. Trying to support an OS I had never used was no easy task.

I had actually been eye-balling the Mac since the appearance of the Power Mac G4 Cube and later the iMac G4. The high cost of either of these systems kept me away, but I was definitely drawn to the compact and elegant design of the integrated hardware as well as the rich graphical UI Apple had been showing off since the early releases of OS X.

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About a month ago, I reached the breaking point of my own curiosity and decided to wipe out my Ubuntu installation in favor of the latest Fedora release. The VAIO notebook I loaded it on has typically served as my ‘plaything’ machine, as opposed to being my primary workhorse computer.

Due to this choice of purpose it changes Linux distributions or even operating systems on a pretty regular basis. More recently I was even perverted enough to allow it to dual boot with Windows 7 Home Premium, but that’s a filthy confession for another day.

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