I Want It!

Nice enough, but I want to hook it up into home automation hardware/software. Heck, I want to hook it up into some robotics… send a robot on down to the PO to pick up my mail, to the grocery to buy some munchies, to the kitchen to cook up dinner (and then serve it), to a client’s to work on some hardware. Now, that’d really let me sit n veg out, lard on the fat, whatever.

This isn’t nearly to that point yet–not even within an order of magnitude “near”–but it is cool enough for what it can do. Hmmm, with voice recognition software integrated, it could enable a lot more “hands free” computing. Too bad it’s just for gaming at this point, since I have just about zero interest in that.

Clean As the Driven Snow

I’ve grown to appreciate the new Win7 toolbar enough that when I have Windows “on top”. Aside: Linux Mint runs in a VM, now, so I no longer have to dual boot with Ubuntu, save in those rare instances when I attach an old peripheral and need hardware compatibility. Eh? Linux for hardware compatibility?!? Yes, like today when I discovered I’d misfiled the power supply to our nice scanner and had to plug in an “old” Canoscan LIDE 20. Apparently, Canon isn’t all that interested in making an older, $50 (retail, if you can even find it retail anymore) scanner compatible w/Win7. Yeh, Canon offers a driver it says works, but Canon lies. *heh* Anywho–Ubuntu is much better at having drivers for some older hardware, I’ve found, than Win7.

But back on point. Clean desktop.

Win7Desktop-December-09

Yes, I edited my location out of the weather widget. Anyone with two active brain cells can locate me, if they’ve read here long, but no sense giving trolls an easier time of it.

The point is simply that, since the Win7 toolbar is more useful than in previous iterations, and the “Start Orb” includes some very nice ease of use functionality, although I do have a bunch of icons on my desktop, I can hide ’em and not really miss out on getting things rolling whenever I need to.

Very nice.

Ubuntu (and Mint and most other Linux distros, as well as desktop BSD distros) includes other kinds of usability tweaks and features that allow me to keep clean a desktop when I run it, too–just differently.

No clutter. Quite a contrast to my RW desktop. *heh*