Ubuntu meets ASUS F3Sa

As I mentioned in my previous entry I'm working on getting Ubuntu installed on my ASUS F3SA-A1 laptop. Initially I had some problems with the discs, I kept getting errors. I finally resolved this by burning the disc with ISORecorder on the laptop under Vista. The install appeared to have smoothly at first, but there were two major problems: the video and audio drivers.

The screen resolution was 1024x786 not the full wide screen resolution. Upon further investigation this was due to the fact that XF86 was using the vesa drive instead of the ATI Radeon driver. After several failed attempts I finally got it working using ENVY a handy little utility that can help you install ATI and NVidia drivers for XF86.

The next issue was getting the sound to work. I'm still working on getting it to work completely but so far I've at least gotten it working via a suggestion from Luke Hollins to set model=lenovo in the alsa-base file which doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it works. I haven't tested the mic yet. The speakers work but not the headphone jack. I'll have had a chance to test the micphone yet.

I've been installing Linux since 1995 and found Ubuntu to be the easiest install so far. It feels a lot more responsive than the previous install of Vista on this computer. I was even able to get a few windows applications installed with Wine. I'll post more about that later.

At this point the todo's are as follows:

• Finger Print reader
  
• WebCam
• Explore the TurboMemory options
  

ASUS Laptop Adventures

I've been looking for a new laptop for my wife for the past 6 months. I knew what I wanted for performance and what I wanted to pay. To problem was that the two concepts were not getting along until I finally spied an Asus F3sA-A1 from Newegg for $999 with a 15.4" screen, 2.2 Core 2 Duo (T7500), 1GB ram, 160GB drive, 512 Video Ram, Gigabit Ethernet, Wireless ABGN & bluetooth, & 1GB of Turbo memory. The memory was low but it came as only one stick so I could easily upgrade it to 3 which I did. The core features were there along with a few extras that I didn't require like N, Gigabit, and 512 video ram. I was looking for at least 128 video RAM. We'll have had the machine for almost a week and here are my adventures and reactions so far.

Initially I turned it on with 1G of ram just to see how Vista would perform. As expected there was a lot of swapping going on in the page file. The Windows Experience Index was around 4.5 because of the memory which is DDR2 667. When I upgraded the memory to 3GB it increased the index value to 4.7 which was the of everything except the processor which is 5.1. I finally dug around to try and figure out what this Tubro memory is and found it on Intel's website. It is a large cache of either 512MB or 1GB of SSD memory that helps the hard drive work more effectively.

Since my wife is willing using Linux and doesn't care for Vista. I started rummaging around to see how things were configured. I'm a debian fan so I first tried booting with Debian Edgy and it didn't find the network drivers out of the box which I thought was a problem that could be overcome by finding the right module but I thought this would be a good time to give Ubuntu a try. So I downloaded the Install/Live DVD from Ubuntu because I read on a blog that they got it to work with no problem on this laptop.

Next I started looking around at the partitions to see how they were configured. I found that there is a 6+ Gb at the beginning of the drive which I correctly assumed was for restorations. Since I purchased Vista I didn't want to get rid of this. I started searching for a partition backup solution. Initially I looked at Ghost because I was familiar with it. Since there were a bunch of bad reviews that I saw on Newegg. I returned to the open source options and found DriveXML & Clonezilla. DriveXML isn't open source but it is free and several reviews spoke highly of it. Initially I created a backup using this but the restore process looked cumbersome. That's when I stumbled upon Clonezilla which is based on a bunch of Open Source tools and a Debian live CD.

I downloaded the Clonezilla live CD which was less than 100MB. I used this to backup my OS partition and the hidden partition which it reported as vfat to the data partition. Next I transferred this to an external drive which I could have done initially but I didn't have access to it at the time.

Well back to the hardware. The laptop came with a finger printer reader which makes logins super simple. It also came with a few extras such as a nice little case, screen cleaning cloth, and small mouse. With Vista there are some excellent options available for adjusting the screen to your liking.

The biggest problem with the computer so far is the batter life. It only appears to have about 2 hours which is pretty unacceptable. But for the price and portability I was willing to sacrifice that for how my wife will be using the computer. It will mostly be a home computer that will be travelling on occasions.

At this point the machine is backed up and ready for the Ubuntu install. I'll post those in my next blog.

Harnessing the Money in the Web

We've all hear the expression a "penny saved is a penny earned." Many of us don't believe that any more because we can't find anything anymore that costs a dollar much less a penny. I believe the statement is still true and wanted to try and squeeze the the penny a little harder. Ebay and google have demonstrated that you can make millions using pennies. Ebay listings aren't very expensive and google ads are also relatively cheap. If you get enough of them out there then your bound to bring in a little bit of money. Anyone that has done any investing knows that diversity is a good thing, so I've tried to diversify the ways that I make money on the Internet. Here's a list of my portfolio in the order of which one has brought in the most money. I've also split them into two different categories: those that you have to put money into and those that are free.

Prosper
Peer-to-peer lending. This is the ebay of the loan industry. Being greed here will lose you money. You need to put in at least $50 to start off with and it will slowly trickle back to you over the next three years. Here you can diversify between people that you loan your money to and get some pretty good interest rates. Mine is at about 14% right now. At this point I've stopped investing any more money there I'm just reinvesting it else where. From other blogs that I've read some people have had problems with people being delinquent. I just check to make sure that they had a good debt to income ratio before I lent any money and so far I haven't had anyone be delinquent yet. I would suggest that you only invest a small amount of money each month because then you can skim the quality loans off of the top without stretching into the people that are more likely to default.

Online Banking:
For security purposes I won't name this company but I made just over $100 last year because of the interest this last year.

Posters @ Fotki
Fotki allows you to upload and sell you photos with there premium account which can be customized. I've upload the best of my flower and scenery images here which can be purchase as posters.

Interactive Websites & Activities
I've created several interactive websites that contain ad's which bring in a little bit of money but they require a server behind it to work.

• Math Facts Question Generator
  Create a random order of basic math questions with an answer key such as 1 + 1 and 2 * 2
  
• Random Student Selector
  This program was created to a teacher randomly select students to answer questions in class.
  
• Moodle Math Question Generator
  Moodle is an online learning environment and this script will create math fact questions for that environment.
  
• Flash Activities
  
• Flash Line Grapher
• General Grapher
  This is a very useful module where someone can create a graph on the web page or on there computer.
  
• Finding the GCF
  Simple flash tutorial describing how to find the Greatest Common Factor.
  
• Algebra Worksheets
  Worksheets that other teachers can use to distribute to their class.
  
• Factoring Polynomials Worksheet
  

The following ways that I've made money do not require any outlay of money.

Google Adsense:
I've placed ads on sever websites that I run, this being one of them. Some of these have cost me some money but the adsense has helped to reduce the cost of those sites though it hasn't yet meet there expense.

Zazzle.com
Zazzle is an on demand company allows you create a product such as a t-shirt, mug, poster, postcard, hat, tie, and much more and it will create the product when it is ordered. You simply provide the picture and the create the product and ship it for you. Personally I've ordered the Pumpkin pi mug and some of the note cards that I've created and am pleased with their quality.

Lulu.com
Lulu is another on demand company but the specialize in printed material. The produce many types books and posters. I don't have much with this website yet but I have some math resource that I hope to publish soon.


MicroStock Photography
This has been a little harder to get into. So far I've messed tried to get into the following microstock companies.

• fotolia click the link to see my portfolio
  
• iStock
• ShutterStock
• StockXperts
  

Some of them have been harder to get into than others because of the submission of several photos to pass an initial test on the quality of your photography. As of yet I haven't made any money with these websites but I've only posted 2 pictures that have been accepted so far so I can't expect much. It's also not true with this one that it does not require any outlay of money because you will need a descent camera to be able to accomplish this. These companies are looking for quality images not just snapshots.

So the moral of the story is that you have to do something to make something. After a while the Internet has the potential to work for you but you have to work to keep it working and at this point it hasn't been worth it's time yet but I'll make a final decision on that later. Until then I'll keep enjoying the hobby of trying to make money grow on trees.

Is Qassia helping you? Have you earned and real money?

I was sent an invitation to Qassia.com today which claims that it can help improve the traffic to your website. I've posted a couple articles in there just to see if can help.

When you post content, rate content and invite others to Qassia.com you earn qassia dollars which improves your ranking within the site. From my understanding if you get in early this may be a benefit to your sites by providing quality external references to your websites.

Qassia also allows you to earn real dollars when your google adsense id with them. Any ad's that get displayed with your content go to you. This is definitely an incentive to write quality content that people want to read. They are currently displaying two adds per content item.

I would love to hear everyone's reaction to this website and hear how much money people have earned because of it in both qassia dollars and real bills. This site is currently in beta so it will be interesting to see where it goes from here.

Journeying to CSS

While looking for resources for my Internet programming class I stumbled upon this great article discussing the process of switching to CSS from tables. There are many other interesting articles since this one is obviously pretty old.

From Table Hacks to CSS Layout: A Web Designer’s Journey
by Jeffrey Zeldman
http://www.alistapart.com/stories/journey/