Another update to my long dormant blog.\u00a0 And only possible because I had a vacation day on Friday and therefore this is a long weekend for me.\u00a0 Friday was a very bad day for me though.\u00a0 Fuck you, weather headaches.<\/p>\n
Lately, I’ve been using my laptop more and more.\u00a0 This was one I bought in 2004, I believe.\u00a0 I’m not talking about the vintage 2000 laptop I got for free that runs my awesome Windows 98 setup and serves as\u00a0 dedicated Civilization II terminal.\u00a0 No, I’ve probably bored you to tears with the details of THAT machine.<\/p>\n
This is a Compaq Presario R3000.\u00a0 HP made it after they bought Compaq.\u00a0 It’s a very good piece of hardware, and the only thing I’ve ever had to replace was the hard drive.\u00a0 But everything else is neato.\u00a0 And this is what I’ve done a fair bit of writing on in the past.\u00a0 I likes the keyboard here because my clumsy fingers glide faster over the keyboard.<\/p>\n
And since this is my writing PC again, things are a little easier for me to accomplish now that I have Windows XP installed as a virtual OS on my Linux desktop.\u00a0 That is no coincidence.\u00a0 You see, I tried using Abiword to do some writing.\u00a0 And as is congruent with my previous experiences with that program, Abiword fucking sucks.\u00a0 And that’s when it’s not crashing and taking your writing with it.<\/p>\n
The idea behind it is quite admirable, though.\u00a0 A free, open source word processor with a basic set of features.\u00a0 Perfect for basic writing and composition tasks, no?<\/p>\n
No.\u00a0 It’s buggy and glitchy and should probably be put out of its misery.<\/p>\n
I started that little writing project on this here laptop with Abiword, but I just couldn’t finish it that way.\u00a0 I tried Open Office too, but it doesn’t run properly on this computer.\u00a0 The font rendering in both Abiword and Open Office is shit… donkey shit in the case of Abiword and majestic lion shit in the case of Open Office… I suppose.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to use Open Office for a couple of reasons.\u00a0 First, the text I type is too small.\u00a0 What’s that you say, oh heckler?\u00a0 Simply use the “zoom” feature?\u00a0 Oddly enough, on this computer Open Office’s zoom feature is broken.\u00a0 The second reason I don’t want to use it is because it’s really overkill for what I need.\u00a0 I just need something I can lets me type words, wraps the texts, and checks the spelling.<\/p>\n
So to finish my little writing project, I went back to Cetus CWordpad.\u00a0 That, you may recall from earlier posts I’ve made on this blog, is a crack of Microsoft’s Wordpad application from 1995.\u00a0 The crack added a spellchecker and a fullscreen mode.\u00a0 Trouble is, WINE notwithstanding, Windows apps don’t run on Linux.<\/p>\n
So off to the realm of VirtualBox I went again.\u00a0 I installed Windows XP on this Xubuntu setup, and got CWordpad as well as TextAloud MP3 and a dictionary application called WordWeb.\u00a0 And that’s all I really need for writing, proofreading and vocabularizing (not an actual word).\u00a0 It’s a shame I had to resort to digging up some Windows apps, but the state of Linux apps is kind of crappy sometimes.<\/p>\n
Now, since this laptop is mainly used for writing again, I’ve decided to actually go ahead and use a Linux app for the writing part of that.\u00a0 It’s the familiar and stable Gedit text editor.\u00a0 It has a spellcheck feature and the ability to display any font in any size.\u00a0 So that’s what this very post is being written in right now.<\/p>\n
I still have Windows XP running on my desktop so I can use TextAloud mp3 for the proofreading.\u00a0 I suppose I could use eSpeak GUI for that… but I’m still not a fan of its drunken Scottish C3PO voice.\u00a0 No offence to inebriated Scotch droids, but it’s sometimes hard to understand.\u00a0 And WordWeb is still there.\u00a0 I should try the “Dictionary” applet for my Xfce desktop and see how it compares… excuse me for a moment.<\/p>\n
Meh.\u00a0 It’s not so bad.\u00a0 I had tried Ubuntu’s dictionary applet about 3 years ago.\u00a0 The fact that I’d never used it since will tell you a lot about how I liked it.\u00a0 WordWeb may not have all of the English vocabulary in it, but it’s a heck of a lot faster and better designed than what I just used.<\/p>\n
But I will have to continue this rant some other time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Another update to my long dormant blog.\u00a0 And only possible because I had a vacation day on Friday and therefore this is a long weekend for me.\u00a0 Friday was a very bad day for me though.\u00a0 Fuck you, weather headaches. Lately, I’ve been using my laptop more and more.\u00a0 This was one I bought in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,4,26],"tags":[254,286,362],"class_list":["post-1566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computers","category-linux","category-windows","tag-geekdom","tag-laptops","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1566"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1567,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1566\/revisions\/1567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gratuitousscience.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}