Cornerstone Software Ltd

I used a lot of cross-platform software already, so moving this off Windows to Linux was easier than it might have been. I pity anyone trying to migrate from Outlook on a dead Windows machine to anything else, for example.

I may have broken a few rules in how I’ve set up my Linux computer, but this is a personal computer, not a server, so I feel justified in creating a new partition and mounting it as /data.

One rule that I have broken is partly a personal one. But this is the rule anyway: My documents and application data belong in my home directory. Don’t create funny non-standard subdirectories under the root file system.
So of course the first time I have a computer to myself I break this rule.

This laptop came with a 250GB disk. I’ve partitioned it like so:
/boot - 6GB
/ - 60GB
/home - 60GB
/data 40GB
(plus stuff like swap and about 80GB unpartitioned space ‘cos there is just so much spare)

I highly recommend to anyone to put /home on its own partition. Means you can wipe out your root file system with a fresh OS install, without having to restore all your personal data. (You did back it up anyway of course…)

The reason I have this separate /data partition is partly because I want to share it neatly as a drive D: under my Windows Virtual machine, and also because I might need to change file systems (eg to NTFS) in order to make certain Windows things work. Could be interesting..

Where I don’t have a great need to share files, I keep them under my home directory in a “my” subdirectory. ~/my/documents and so forth. Not KDE defaults, but this way I get to choose the organisation and I can just back the whole lot up. I don’t recommend creating lots of subdirectories (work, personal, mail etc) directly in the home folder, there’s enough cluttering that already.

I’ve also used fusesmb to connect my network under ~/Network. An article about that in the Ubuntu community docs wiki.

My Nokia cellphone has “predictive texting” - where the phone attempts to match the best word for the sequence of digits pressed. For example, if I type in 74663 if comes up with “Phone” (5 button pushes instead of 10, often the improvement is better). This is quite good for clumsy texters like me who spend five minutes entering a two-sentence message.

It works most of the time, although there are a couple of words, usually short ones like “if” or “me”, which it gets consistently wrong. Sometimes it is a bit cute seeing the word develop as it makes the best guess on partially-entered words (eg along the way to “phone” it goes through s, pg, sin, sion, phone)

If the phone doesn’t have a suitable guess at what word I want, it beeps and comes up with a button labelled “Spell”, where I can use the old-fashioned way to enter the word.

Well, today I wanted to use the word “landline” (ok, maybe it’s not a word, but Im txting k?). So I pressed the required buttons: 52635463.

The phone’s suggestion: “landlgme”

No beep and “Spell?”. And I am at a loss to work out where it thought I was going with this one.

The only reason I thought this worthy of blogging was because I tried typing “landlgme” into Google to see what might happen. After all, it might be a famous town in Finland or something. And Google said:

Did you mean: landline
Your search - landlgme - did not match any documents.

Hurrah for Google. And of course, now if anyone with a Nokia phone tries to enter “landline” (or “janekind” or something), and then gets curious, they’ll be led straight to this blog post as the only search result. Perhaps even you who is reading it right now.

As usual when I struggle with the cell phone’s UI, I conclude I really should have just phoned the person I was sending to .. after all, my message in this case was essentially “Please call me”.

P.S. Yes, I’m aware the phone may not just use a dictionary to guess partial words, but I still don’t know what it thought it was doing.

Today is Father’s Day in New Zealand. Read from this month’s newsletter from somebody:

Daddy (n): a man who has photos in his wallet where his money used to be.

I check my wallet. The princely sum of $5.80 and photos. Yup.

On the upside - a handcrafted “Happy Father’s Day” card (complete with the helpful warning “be careful!”), and handmade daddy wrapping paper enclosing .. my very own set of colouring pens. I mean, what could be more valuable, really?