I have now been using OpenStreetMap for a few months. Yes there are some features that Google has on their maps that is not on OSM. But what makes OSM so much better is that you can update the maps yourself, which is very addictive, OSM is also updated right away on the online map. I have already uploaded a few corrections from some errors I have found here in London. It is rather nice to see them live and on your GPS a few days later.
Where I’m still waiting for Google to update an error I spotted. Yes there is the so called “copyright errors” but this one is not just one road it is many roads in the same area.
Garmin has made so that the Dakota 20 (and others) are able use these free maps on these units. Yes OpenStreetMap is not fully up to date and is not covering the whole world yet. Some areas are in more details than others, but since people like me (and you) are out there every week, the maps are updated all the time with more and more roads, track, POI etc.
I have tried out a few different maps …

My old Sony *) laptop got retired last week since it was way to noisy and was doing my head in, so after a lot of looking around I got a Dell **). The Sony is a great laptop and still work just fine, nice an fast for what I need. The 4-5 trips to the doctor’s a few years ago took its told on the fan and how hot it runs the closest thing to describe it is a hair dryer just on normal use.
It was a bit hard waiting for the delivery of my new toy, we are getting so used to getting online purchase the next day or at least 48 hours later. But Dell had to my new toy build in China, since I wanted something that wasn’t directly of the peg. And then there was the annoyance of the online tracking tool, what every Dell told the shipping company, the shipping company didn’t understand. So I couldn’t track my toy as it made its way to me. Though after some searching I found out that if you modified the tracking code a little you could get it to work. Why Dell aren’t working on on …

I have four issues with ubuntu, wireless, dual monitor, network and DVD. The DVD worked from start (6.04) but somehow stopped working after version 7.10. Wireless just works strait away in the newer versions. And it gets easier to set up my laptop to run with my 19″ screen attached to it. And for the life of me I can never get samba to work so that I can see my other PC running ubuntu, but only NFS will.
Ubuntu 9.04 : Update it without any problems but the boot time was getting annoying, since it was over 1m45s. I know what my laptop could do faster, since when I ran a heavy tweaked Windows XP, I got the boot up down to around 35s. I read that ext4 was a faster file system than ext3. So I tried to convert (or what ever it is called) it but after few failed attempts, I had to format the drive to ext4. And got my boot time down to around a minute, still not anything near what I had with XP. And even with reading various blogs on how to speed up ubuntu it never got any faster.
Ubuntu 9.10 : They …

I do love using Ubuntu and have done so since 6.04. It has clearly become better and easier to set up and play with over the years. Though the only thing I still fight with is the Nvidia graphic card and being able to share my files over the network. The Nvidia issue is not an issue on my set up any more, since 9.10 found my external monitor and didn’t complain as it used to, so I would call that solved :)
Though the network share is still an issue, for the life of me I can’t get my two machines to see each other. I got a PC with my music, backup and other files which I would like to access from my laptop.
Both machines are set up just as Ubuntu come off the install CD. And now and again I would like the network to be seen from a laptop running XP. What I found out that there are a few ways of doing network share on the Ubuntu.
Samba : by the look and sound of it should be the easiest to set up and run. But I never got it to share the way I wanted. Either …

It is getting closer.
And I couldn’t wait so a couple weeks back I updated my other PC and it all fell over, yes yes I know don’t touch an Alpha if you don’t know what you are doing.
But today there might be some hope since I’m right now updating and it is downloading the new NVIDIA kernel as I type this.

… lets you share your files with others.
Sync your files, share your work with others or work remotely, all with your Ubuntu (9.04) computers.
I have just signed up for the 2Gb free option, there is 10Gb which you have to pay for and it works great.
https://ubuntuone.com/

… like burning, I was thinking when turned on my PC the other day.
Just got back from holidays, needed to backup the 300+ photos we took. So hit the power switch on the PC tower, and after a bit I was wondering why I did not hear the normal noises I hear when I turn on the PC. I then looked at the monitor saw that it just sat there displaying the BIOS doing nothing. So I hit the reset button and waited for it to boot again, only to find that this time it would not show the BIOS in at all.
Well time to have a closer look so I opened the box, hit the power switch again and saw that the CPU fan was not spinning and hard disks was not even spinning.
And then the burning smell hit me, bummer :(
Had a poke around and found that one of the heat sinks that normally only get luke warm, was blistering hot after only being on for 1-2 min.
We that was it I was thinking, time to get a new puter, which I rather not do atm. Because the last time I updated my PC I had …

Suspend works and I can be up and running in less than 12sec now !!!
Though suspend does work to some degree. When I come out of suspend if I had some programs running they tent to turn into memory eaters. Thunderbird really have a hard time to connect to the IMAP servers. FireFox eats memory and then freaks out the CPU and other bits are slower.
It does help close all the programs down before going into suspend mode, though after 2-3 of them ubuntu is just dead slow and only a reboot can sort that out.
Else I’m very happy with 9.04.
Just installed Picasa 3, and it scanned and loaded my 33Gb + worth of photos in less than 10min, the first time, and the cpu didn’t freak out.
FireFox and programs loads so much faster, I’m liking it :)
Though still no DVD play, it worked just fine in 6.10, or was it 6.04, but since 7.04 it does see that I got a DVD-r and the model of the drive (somewhere in the settings, can’t remember), it mount the CD and write cd’s just fine but it is still no go with the DVD’s.

wow I can now boot up just over a minute !!
Since 7.04 my boot time have been close to 1:45. But last night I installed 8.04 update strait to 8.10 and then to 9.04, after a clean format. And then I just could leave it be and upgrade my boot drive to ext4.
Haven’t installed everything yet, so I don’t know if that could slow it down, normally I don’t have anything runing upon start up. Got a wee problem with the graphic, got a line runing from screen 1 to screen 2. But FireFox is scarily fast to load and load pages compared to before. Haven’t had the time to test other things yet.

Got it up and running just fine.
I just had to figure out what this ext4 was all about and borked the system, while trying to convert from ext3 to ext4.
Now I’m installing 7.10 because that is the only disk I got laying around, never got around to burn the other ISO’s.
It is my own fault playing with something I don’t know, just about got my head around ext3 and the fstab. Oh well it is going to be a long night updating back 9.04, without ext4 :)