Here are my steps to getting pictures into the “system”. Basically,

1. Save pictures to some folder on the desktop of whatever computer I happen to be using. Remove the obvious “bad” photos.
2. Add the library to my Gallery2 library that’s hosted by Dreamhost. Gallery2 is one of the best online photo-view apps I’ve found, and since it’s hosted on my Dreamhost account, I have unlimited space to put pictures (unlike Picasa Web Albums which caps you out 1GB)
3. However, Dreamhost is by no means a secure backup location (they don’t claim to be, and they recently lost a bunch of user data), so I don’t feel very safe having my photos only stored there. Therefore, after my photos are uploaded to Dreamhost, I rsync the photo directory onto Dropbox. Dropbox is a great online storage and file-syncing utility, so it doesn’t matter which computer I’m using — the Dropbox folder is always the same on all of them. When I rsync to my Dropbox folder, the files are automatically backed up online and synced to the other computers that have Dropbox installed. If you’re curious, here is the rsync command I use:
   
rsync --verbose --progress --stats \
--compress --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \
--recursive --times --perms --links \
/source/directory ~/Dropbox/Photos/.

   Note: That’s a space between /source/directory [space] ~/Dropbox/Photos

   From here, all of my computers have Picasa installed (since it works on Linux, OSX and Windows), and the Dropbox photo directory is set as a “watched” directory. This means that as new pictures are synced to the Dropbox folders on other computers, Picasa on that computer picks it up and adds it automatically.

4. The final, and probably unnecessary step is rsyncing the files to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk. This doesn’t really offer anything in the way of additional backup security, since Dropbox is S3 based on the backend anyways (so if anything happens to S3, both will go down). The reason I do this is because I look at S3 as my long-term “vault” and Dropbox as a shorter-term, more convenient storage place. The rsync itself is the same command as above, but replace the Dropbox destination directory with your Jungledisk directory.

If you’re on Windows, you can replace the rsync steps with a straight copy — you’ll still get most of the functionality. Rsync works fine on OSX and Linux.

Clearly, it’s an involved process when I add pictures. However, it’s not too bad — a bulk upload onto Dreamhost and then running 2 commands from the command line to get the photos onto Dropbox and Amazon. You can even remove the Amazon step if you want. Last time I checked there was no way to add photos to Gallery2 using a script, but if and when that becomes available, this whole process can be turned into a quick script to run in the background.

Follow these steps, and you’ll have secure, accessible and useful photos on all of your computers.

MythTV turns your computer into a media center

1. Linux can be customized far more than Windows or OSX, so your system can be set up to do exactly what you want it to do. In college, I had a spare Pentium 3 computer lying around that I wanted to use as a frontend to my media server. I didn’t care about (or want) a desktop or anything other than a media player that would play my files fullscreen. Since I had a wireless keyboard but no mouse and no remote, I wanted everything to be completely keyboard-driven. There were a few options from a “nice frontend” standpoint, most notably MythTV. However, since I wasn’t recording shows and I didn’t care so much about a fancy interface (I was fully happy with doing everything from command line since its easy enough to browse folders and play files), I settled on Ratpoison for the window manager. I set the system to boot up to a full-screen command line with a large font, and did all browsing from the command line. When I wanted to launch a file, I used mplayer set up to launch full screen. As a result, I could very quickly play a large variety of files without any GUI hassle or slowness.This was a special use, but it goes to show that Linux can be tailored in a nearly infinite number of ways. Want a large, cushy GUI? Try KDE. Want something barebones? Try XFCE or Fluxbox. Want to create a server and stick it in the closet? Just leave off the GUI — everything can be done command line. Choose what servers and services you want installed and what you want to run in the background. Finally, perhaps the best part — if you build a system using a distro like Gentoo (my distro of choice), you know and have control over everything going on. That’s power.

 

2. You can chain together basic system services to create your own custom software routines. A few months ago, I decided I wanted to wake up each morning to a different song from a playlist of about 100 songs that I had on my computer. When I got up, I wanted to first hear a random song from the playlist, then listen to current business headlines and weather read to me as I got ready. With Linux, setting this up was pretty basic. See my other blog post Talking Linux RSS Alarm Clock if you’re curious how I strung together several off-the-shelf components to create this app in only a few minutes.

 

3. You can custom-configure the OS to run well on even your old, underpowered computer.
   

   SSH clients like TouchTerm allow you to administer your machine from anywhere, even a cell phone

   
   The newest versions of Windows or OS X will run painfully slow on a computer that is more than 3 years old. This is because Vista and Leopard have become extremely bloated because of “features” like enhanced visual effects, indexed search and always-on spyware and virus protection. Visual effects are nice, but you certainly don’t want or need them when you’re using older hardware for basic tasks. Spyware and viruses are much less of a problem on Linux than on Windows, so you can get away without running any protection software on Linux (provided that you update they system regularly). Indexed search is one of the better features and almost worth the cycles it takes; however, if its an older computer, its nice to be able to forego this. Granted, you can turn off or lessen the effects of any of these three, but your system will still not be as peppy as it could otherwise be. With a stripped down Linux install, your old Pentium II can run basic apps with plenty of speed.

 

4. The system is fully accessible remotely, even over the slowest connection — even from a cell phone!With Windows, you only have control over the system remotely if you set up remote desktop, and even then, you’re severely limited to where you can connect from because sending a full screen requires a pretty fat connection. OSX is a little better — you can do the remote desktop, but you can also connect remotely over SSH, which only sends text and commands, so its a lot speedier. The problem with OSX is that most of the Apple software is designed to be used and configured through a GUI, so often there isn’t much that you’re able to do over command line. Almost anything in Linux is available over the command line, so when you connect remotely over SSH, you have as much (or almost as much) power as you have when sitting right at the desktop. If you regularly login this way, you can find applications that easily let you access your mail, play music (on the server computer) and even chat on IM all through the text-based terminal. Perhaps a special use, but its pretty convenient to be able to reboot your computer or restart your web server over your cell phone when you’re in the next state and need to retrieve a special file.

 

5. Its free, and you can try it without reformatting a computer. Check out a LiveCD like Ubuntu or Knoppix, both of which will bring you to a full-fledged Linux desktop as soon as you pop in the CD/DVD and reboot the computer. They allow you to get a very basic feel for the system without having to remove or disturb the existing OS underneath. Knoppix especially has a huge suite of applications that let you test out several programs for any given use without having to worry about downloading or installing them

 

6. Installing, maintaining and upgrading your software is a snap.Modern Linux distros (short for distributions) have very advanced package managers, which are programs that handle the search, installation, and maintenance of all of the programs on your system. Gentoo uses a system called portage, which downloads the source code for all the applications, compiles it, and installs it. This is a bit slower than just copying over pre-compiled binary packages, but [in theory] results in software thats exactly tailored for your PC. Ubuntu uses a system called apt, which is much faster than portage because all of the packages have already been compiled. In either case, finding an application is a quick command away, and installing it is only a few more keystrokes. When it comes time to upgrade, another few keystrokes can update an individual program, only system files, or every program on the computer. This is heads and shoulders above the OSX or Windows way of doing it, where you need to browse the web for a file, download it, and then go through the setup routine.
7. Linux is great with networking. Sharing files across a network? Want to set up your own web page and serve it to others? Want to connect automatically every time to other shares that people have set up, and have them seamlessly integrated into your file structure? Linux has industrial strength support for a variety of networking applications, such as Apache for web serving and Samba, NFS, scp, and a variety of other protocols for filesharing. Many of these are a click away from installing on a major distro, and can be seamlessly integrated into your files. While OSX does a pretty good job at this sort of thing, support for these services on Windows is spotty and incomplete, especially on the home versions. For example, if you have a music directory shared on Windows that you connect to using SMB (Samba), you can just set that share to appear in your home directory as /home/user/music, so it looks identical to any other directory in your system and can be manipulated and used by other programs just as easy.

 

8. Almost all of the best software for Linux is free! Just about anything you want to do with Windows is relatively easy to do with Linux, and chances are someone has written some very good free software to do it. In fact, I’ve found that software for Linux tends to be better-written and more powerful in many [most?] cases than its Windows or Mac counterpart. The reason behind this is that there is a huge network of software developers that use Linux, so when there is a glaring omission application-wise on Linux, the community is quick to step in and fix it. Furthermore, as I mentioned above, it is relatively easy to string together tools with Linux, so often application development is quick because application C makes use of applications A and B in an efficient way. Here is a [very, very brief] list of great free software on Linux:- Firefox [same program as Windows and OSX]
   - Amarok [music manager, syncs with an iPod. Comparable with iTunes, has some other interesting features]
   - KWrite [text editor, far more powerful than Notepad]
   - AbiWord or OpenOffice [word processing and office software, comparable to MS Office]
   - EasyTag [MP3 tag manager, very powerful for getting your songs tagged and named properly]
   - KAlarm [alarm clock program, can set alerts, timers and alarms on a one-time or recurring basis]
   - Pidgin [IM application, connects to AIM, Google Chat, Yahoo, MSN, etc. Lots of cool plugins]
   - The Gimp [Powerful image editing program, comparable to Photoshop]   

   These are some of the applications that are free and useful to get going on a day-to-day basis. You’ll find that a huge amount of specialized programs exist, and are free, to do things like photo management, backup, games, etc.

9. LiveCDs exist for countless specialized uses, so advanced applications are just a disk image away Because Linux is so modular, any type of system can be built around the core. For desktop users, this typically includes a nice desktop graphical environment, a web browser, a word processor and a media player. However, not all computers and configurations need this much in terms of user applications.When I was in college, I wanted to be able to compile software on Gentoo faster by using a cluster of computers to break up the workload. The good news was that there was an abundance of powerful computers on the network (namely, my friends’ machines). The bad news was that none of them had Linux or the software needed to compile over the network. The solution was distccKnoppix, a LiveCD that came pre-setup with the DistCC compiler software I needed. After downloading and burning a few copies, I went around and rebooted the computers around me into the LiveCD environment and was soon compiling on 5 separate computers.
   Lots of other great LiveCD systems exist: MythBuntu turns your computer and TV into a media center, gOS creates a very simple cloud-computing enviroment built on Google Applications, Redwall Firewall turns a spare computer into a logfile-rich firewall for the network. Tons of other CDs exist for every other conceivable use from network attached storage (NAS) to kiosk-style arcade games. The old computer that was sitting in the closet collecting dust can easily be reborn in many different ways with a LiveCD install. Check out The LiveCD List for an extensive listing of LiveCDs.

 

10. New and cutting-edge features come very quickly to Linux because of the wide network of smart programmers all over the world.Since Linux is a collection of software made by programmers all over the world instead of simply an OS packaged by one company, you can have new developments on your desktop in days or weeks by simply updating your system instead of waiting years for the next release. Furthermore, the sheer number of different minds working on the problems creates a multitude of choices for any given application.For example, in the media player area, Amarok incorporates sophisticated music analysis and fingerprinting technologies that help identify your music and suggest music that you might also like. Similar features are now trickling down to iTunes, but Linux has had them for years. Users that were interested in incorporating information from databases like Last.fm could do much more quickly by using software in Linux than they could waiting for mainstream apps for Mac OS and Windows.Desktop environments like KDE 4 and Gnome are constantly pushing the envelope in user interface technologies and new features come every day that improve the experience and add functionality. Of course, not everything is a slam dunk, so some degree of willingness to test out cutting-edge technology is required, but for those that like to be at the forefront of new tech, Linux is the place to be.

The next decade will be about deconvergence. Perhaps you still have a PC in your den that can browse the web, play music, watch videos that you downloaded off of iTunes and myriad other PCish activities. However, that device will be far less important than it is now, or than it has been in the last 10 years. The idea of using your main PC for everything will fade as smaller, more specialized devices take over and cannibalize the attention that this big, expensive box receives.

Since trading my Treo in for an iPhone, my use of my laptop has greatly diminished. Since getting my laptop, my use of my desktop has greatly diminished. The idea here is that, like just about anyone, my main use for a computer is browsing the web and reading emails. When I got my laptop, no longer was it necessary to be chained to a seat in my room in order to read my websites. It was replaced by sitting on the couch in my living room, where I was able to browse the web without being secluded in a den. Email was similar — the iPhone handles Gmail admirably, so in the same vein, no longer did I have to be chained to a laptop [or desktop] to check my messages — instead, I just clicked on the mail icon on my phone, and there they were.

The exciting thing next on the horizon is small devices that don’t do it all, but do one thing really well, and do it in the most ideal location. I can easily imagine a kitchen device that does little more than email, recipe database, and a basic web browser. Want to write a paper? Too bad, can’t do it here. Want to play a video game? Nope. However, what you do want is basically a kiosk that makes it dead-simple to look up a recipe or follow up on an email with grandma, and this machine does it perfectly. Of course, the price point is important too — however, since the hardware requirements will be extremely modest since we won’t be storing large files or running lots of apps, we can get away with very basic hardware. Eventually, things like these will sell in the $100-150 range, and thats where we get critical mass. Devices like this do exist (the 3M Audrey was perhaps the first, and others have come and gone), but haven’t caught on, probably due to a high price point, poor or nonexistent marketing, and overly complicated or overly simplistic feature sets.

Similar equipment will come for the home stereo and theatre. AppleTV, which has [regrettably] gone largely unnoticed, is a very good first effort at this. Plug the $300 device into your home theater, and you can buy TV shows or movies from the iTunes store and easily watch them on the big screen. Pictures and music stream from your base computer as well. The next step improvement on this is the Roku Netflix Player, which streams 15,000 titles from Netflix into your home. It costs $100, which is barely more than a decent DVD player.

Why haven’t these devices fully caught on yet? For one, people just aren’t really used to getting their television content from a computer. Its still easier to tune into ABC at 7:00 on a Monday night to watch a TV show. Music has all but entirely transitioned to the web and to iTunes (and its better competitor, Amazon Music Store), thanks largely to Apple and the iPod. TV won’t be far behind, but will certainly take a bit more to get there.

Three things stand in the way: the first is simply society — people have to get used to getting off their main computer and allowing satellite devices to take the place for some activities. At this point, a lot of people simply aren’t thinking about how they could link up their computer to their home system and achieve a sort of media nirvana that doesn’t exist right now. DVDs are on their way out, and even BlueRay won’t be the next thing — forget physical disks, its all coming into your house through your internet connection. But it will take some time for basic home users to associate computing and home entertainment, and for the time being, its the job of the early-adopters to spread the word about this killer union.

Second is the price point. Many of the home devices try to be too much, or end up using hardware that is overkill for the most basic purposes that they will be used for. Others just haven’t hit the sweet spot where the price of the hardware and the market-clearing price of the unit have come into alignment. It will, though, and I think this zone, if not upon us, is closer than we think.

Finally, there are still technical barriers. Killer embedded systems will never run Windows or Mac OSX. These operating systems are designed for hub PCs, not for tiny devices running on a basic microchip. A fledgling startup, the kind of company that could likely hit this idea on the head, can’t easily strip down Windows to the point where it runs efficiently on the most basic of systems. Linux is perfectly suited for this, since you can take out all of the excess and leave just the basics, which I see as a kernel, some display drivers, perhaps some sound drivers, some networking, and a few services on top of that to handle communications with other computers in the home. Perhaps a generic server can power your kitchen device, your AV device and your bedroom web-browsing device. DRM is poison to the process, so hopefully the nascent push out of DRM will continue and spread to video content as well as audio content.

My vision of the future? Technology won’t be something you sit down at a desk to access — instead, it will be something that surrounds you and assists everywhere you go. The web isn’t something you open a browser to get on, but rather, the backbone for a dozen of your daily activities, without you even realizing it.

Technorati Profile

Combine the above with a general distaste for the jarring sound that my alarm
makes got me thinking that there had to be a better way to get my morning started. I searched a bit to find MP3 alarm clocks (of which there are many) and initially used KAlarm which served the purpose of waking me up with music quite adequately.

However, I work in the financial industry, where overnight news is advantageous to hear before getting to work. The markets might be up or down by large amounts (especially these days) based on what happened overnight, so at least figuring out what is going on before getting into the office is pretty helpful. This, combined with a day where I got stuck in the rain because I hadn’t checked the weather, got me thinking — how about an alarm clock that read news and weather from an RSS feed in addition to waking me up with a song.

Here’s how I created it:

Basics:
- Python with urllib, ElementTree, and re installed
- cron
- mplayer (available on portage and apt)
- [optional] A playlist of MP3s or other songs that mplayer can play
- festival — a text-to-speech program (available on portage for gentoo and probably on apt too)

Steps

1) Install the necessary software. Emerge or apt-get mplayer and festival. Install ElementTree for python by following the instructions here. The other packages, urllib and re were already installed on my python, but if thats not the case for you, a bit of Googling can help out here.

2) Pick one song at random from your playlist. The way I chose to do this was to use a quick bash line to pick a a random line from the playlist file (playlist.m3u), and then create a new playlist with only the one song (single_song.m3u). Another thought is to just start mplayer and play a random song directly from the big playlist, but this means that the music will keep playing until you kill mplayer. I wanted to have one song play and then have my news and weather start to be read, so I play only the one song from the small playlist.

#alarm.sh -- pulls together elements of alarm clock
#Written by ajlisy, 2008
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.

#Create file with single song
nlines=`cat playlist.m3u | wc -l`
random_line=`expr $RANDOM % $nlines + 1`
sed -n $random_line,${random_line}p playlist.m3u > single_song.m3u

#Play that song
mplayer -playlist single_song.m3u

#  <...>

3) Set up the basic scripts for fetching and parsing the weather from the Yahoo! RSS feeds. The idea is that 2 simple python scripts, get _weather.py and get_news.py are called from the main bash script to populate the “script” files that are read by festival.

#get_news.py -- fetches headlines from RSS feed
#Written by ajlisy 2008
# This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
# (at your option) any later version.

import urllib
import re
from elementtree.ElementTree import parse

def get_headlines(news_source,num_headlines):
  news_rss_feed=parse(urllib.urlopen(news_source)).getroot()
  raw_headlines=news_rss_feed.findall('channel/item')
  headlines=[]
  for i in range(0,num_headlines):
     try:
       headlines.append(raw_headlines[i].findtext('title').splitlines()[0])
     except:
       pass
  return headlines

print "Today's top news stories      "
YAHOO_NEWS = 'http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/business'
NYT_NEWS='http://www.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/Business.xml'

print "Worldwide news from New York Times"
for element in get_headlines(NYT_NEWS,5):
  try:
    print element
  except:
    pass
print "Business news from Yahoo"
for element in get_headlines(YAHOO_NEWS,5):
  try:
    print element
  except:
    pass

#get_weather.py -- adapted from the tutorial on the Yahoo
#  developers page found at
#  http://developer.yahoo.com/python/python-xml.html

import urllib
from elementtree.ElementTree import parse

WEATHER_URL = 'http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/forecastrss?p=%s'
WEATHER_NS = 'http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0'

def weather_for_zip(zip_code):
  url = WEATHER_URL % zip_code
  rss = parse(urllib.urlopen(url)).getroot()
  forecasts = []
  for element in rss.findall('channel/item/{%s}forecast' % WEATHER_NS):
    forecasts.append({
        'date': element.get('date'),
        'low': element.get('low'),
        'high': element.get('high'),
        'condition': element.get('text')
       })
    ycondition = rss.find('channel/item/{%s}condition' % WEATHER_NS)
    return {
        'current_condition': ycondition.get('text'),
        'current_temp': ycondition.get('temp'),
        'forecasts': forecasts,
        'title': rss.findtext('channel/title')
    }

weather=weather_for_zip(10038)
print "The current weather conditions are "+weather['current_condition']+" with a temperature of "+ weather['current_temp'] + " degrees."
print "Today's forecast is " + weather['forecasts'][0]['condition'] + " with a high of " + weather['forecasts'][0]['high'] + " degrees and a low of "+weather['forecasts'][0]['low'] + " degrees"

4) Link it all together with the alarm.sh script that calls the individual “subroutines” mentioned above and assembles them into the alarm.

#alarm.sh

#Create file with single song
nlines=`cat playlist.m3u | wc -l`
random_line=`expr $RANDOM % $nlines + 1`
sed -n $random_line,${random_line}p playlist.m3u > single_song.m3u

#Play that song
mplayer -playlist single_song.m3u

#Create file to read
python get_weather.py > weather.txt
python get_news.py > news.txt

festival --tts weather.txt
festival --tts news.txt

Add the resulting script to your crontab for whenever you want to get up, and enjoy a better start to the day.

1. XM/Sirius
2. Blockbuster
3. Microsoft

Lets go down the list and discuss why each of these is marked for death.

XM/Sirius
First on the chopping block is satellite radio. But wait, you say…GM is including satellite radio in all its cars! I know, I know…with GM’s market power (they probably should be on this list as well, but I suppose the optimist in me will hold off for now) it seems like satellite radio is bound to replace traditional terrestrial radio. It will…but then the good-old radio-from-towers-on-the-ground model will spring right back up, and knock the satellites right out of orbit [I couldn't resist the pun]

It won’t be AM/FM this time though…the thing that will kill XM/Sirius is ubiquitous broadband internet. XM/Sirius has maybe 200 channels tops, and to a given listener, 90% of those channels are garbage. Honestly, although it makes great advertising to be able to say you have a station devoted to Aborigine tribal music, I’m never going to listen to it on my way home. Thats the case for most of the junk on right now.

Broadband to your car brings internet radio to your car. Already I can get Pandora on my phone, which gives me a personalized station based on a few recommendations I make. Imagine if you can just go on the internet at home, make a few recommendations, drag and drop a few stations into the bucket, and have 50 stations that you actually like on your dial instead of 190 that you have to scroll through to get to the 10 you care about? Want to learn spanish? Stream a learn spanish podcast right to your car. Want to hear classic jazz? Add that station to your car. Don’t like the current song? Hit ‘next’ on your receiver to skip the song as well as send a downvote to the server so you don’t hear songs like that again. Those that take the time to create a sweet deck of channels could then share that deck with others, so that if you don’t want to spend the time mixing and matching your own music, you could find someone that has already created a set of stations that looks appealing and just use theirs. Maybe some arrangement could even be made to share ad revenue with the most popular of the virtual DJs.

Blockbuster
The idea of going to a video store is rapidly becoming as antiquated as going to a CD store like Virgin or Sam Goody to buy music. The advantage, in theory, to a place like Blockbuster over Netflix is the ability to browse a physical selection and have the ability to explore the titles and potentially come across something that looks interesting that you didn’t think of. In theory that is. I was at Blockbuster today — we made one trip around the store, didn’t see anything we liked, and asked for a list of most-popular movies. Once you go down this road, the “physical selection” argument is all but gone — if you’re reading down a list at the counter anyways, why not just see a list online, which is probably personalized for you anyways? I whipped out the iPhone as we were reading this, and found a great list on Amazon — The 25 Best Movies Ever Made which was particularly good because its focused on a lot of newer movies instead of the oldies like Casablanca which are great in theory but in reality not something that I’d likely watch.

Anyways, back to what is really going to kill Blockbuster — streaming Netflix. Just recently, Netflix and TiVo added the ability to stream to set-top devices like the Roku Netflix Player and the TiVo. Combine this with movie rentals on iTunes Store, and you have a lethal combination that all-but-eliminates Blockbuster from the equation. Why go to the store when you can get personalized recommendations right from your browser, download them or stream them over your high-speed connection, and watch them right in your living room?

DVDs are going the way of CDs. Blockbuster is going under, and Netflix is the one pushing them there (as they have been doing since the start, when all they were was a DVD-by-mail company).

Microsoft
Vista was a flop. Can Microsoft survive another, especially with Apple gaining market share and Linux for Mom on the horizon?

I truly believe that the operating system is becoming irrelevant, especially as a revenue model. There was a time (circa early 2000s) when I considered myself a devoted Windows user. That was all I knew, and thats where all of the cool apps were. When computers were first getting mainstream, a good knowledge of how to use Windows was essential, since Windows was the basic springboard for all of your applications, so anything you wanted to do began with figuring out how to make Windows do it.

Fast forward to 2008… at this point, I don’t have a primary operating system. A favorite? Of course — I love Linux because I like to tinker and I like the flexibility that it provides me. Right now I’m sitting at home writing this post from a Windows laptop, but it could just as easily be the Macbook sitting in the bag in the next room. I’m a computer geek…but heres the kicker — although I’m equally comfortable with any of the 3 major OSes, so is the most inexperienced user out there. Why? Open up Firefox on Linux, OSX or Windows, and its the same. Gmail is there, as are their websites. So whats the difference if there is a start bar, a dock, or anything else.

This key theme is what will eventually drive Microsoft out of business. Why pay $200 for an operating system on your new PC when you can just get a basic box that runs Firefox for $200 total? What does it matter what the icon is when you first press the button? The reason I suspect that most people never got around to upgrading to Vista is that XP was working just fine in the internet department. Windows 98 was instable and crashed frequently, so XP solved that problem. But people don’t “use” the OS anymore, they use the browser. With a stable platform to run a stable browser, what impetus is there to get the latest and greatest operating system?

I took a look, and the issue isn’t really the computer itself so much as the 4+ years of application buildup slowing down the machine and a new version of OSX (upgraded to Tiger from I believe OS X 10.2) which undoubtedly eats up more cycles than 10.2.  If I spent a few hours uninstalling and cleaning, or worse, reformatting, I could definitely speed it up dramatically…but why?

What she and millions of other PCs sitting in dens, kitchens and family rooms around the world need is an extremely stripped down OS which would run only the barest of basics — in her case, it would be only Firefox, since she gets her emails though gmail. Conceivably, the 1% of other stuff that she does could be handled though another, more fully functioning computer.

What is needed here, and what I hope to build at some point given a bit more time to play around with the stuff, is a bare bones LiveCD that loads itself fully into memory and provides only a browser in an attractive and friendly format. I know there are distros like Damn Small Linux and others that begin down this road, but even those are too much for what I envision — a sort of set-top box for the internet. It needs to look decent (I installed a Ubuntu LiveCD and her first comment was ‘eww, whats that ugly brown color on my desktop’) and be completely free of other icon clutter — no dock, maybe a basic clock, no desktop icons, no media players, no email clients, etc. Finally, the icing on the cake would be this — you plug in a flash drive, and that becomes your home directory. Again, this is something other distro’s have attempted, but none have perfected (that I know). The way this would work is as follows: plug in the flash drive, boot up linux. On the first boot, if the flash drive isn’t formatted as ext3, give the option to format (this is dangerous because you would have to be sure its not a hard drive with Windows and data on it, but that can be surmounted). On subsequent boots, the /home/username structure would exist, and all Firefox settings and preferences would be saved to the flash drive.

The best thing about this would be that the volatile aspect of the OS would mean that a fresh, fast computer is never further than a reboot away. If the window manager was something very lightweight (XFCE, etc…or even Ratpoison started up with Firefox maximized…hmmmmm), it could run very well on even the oldest of hardware. People that don’t use computers often wouldn’t have to worry about breaking the system, kids could use it without corrupting anyone’s data (since everything would be on a flash drive anyways) and geeks like me could enjoy Thanksgiving without having to perform a brain transplant on an aging iMac.

Interested to hear if anyone has made more progress on this than I’ve seen…