Last time I built my own computer, I thought, “This wasn’t too hard.” This time it was disturbingly easy. If you’re looking for a new machine but don’t think you should tackle building your own, think again. Everything is so darned modular, it was a snap – literally.

No, I won’t go into excruciating detail.

Pick a processor – Intel or AMD. Hit Newegg and use the user reviews to find the best motherboard that supports that chip.

See what kind of RAM it takes and buy what you need. Use those user reviews to pick a video card, hard drive, DVD drive, and case (unless you already own any of these). Checkout. Wait.

The motherboard screws into the case with five or six screws. The RAM pops in, in about three seconds. The power supply cables each plug into one and only one place on the motherboard. Lights and switches are labeled for easy connecting.

And so on. It’s pop, pop, pop, everything fits. And everything is the brand and model that I chose. I was up and running in a shocking 30 minutes, starting with an empty case. The only problem was that my KVM switch (keyboard, video, mouse – so two computers can share those things) didn’t work right away. I removed it and all was well.

So yeah, building the perfect beast is disturbingly easy. You gotta love standards — ATX motherboards, SATA hard drives, PCI-e video cards, and so on. Like Lego, but cooler.

Alaska Gov. Sarah has been using a personal e-mail account (gov.palin@yahoo.com) in order to get around the various laws that require her office to keep records of all government-related correspondence. But now, per Wikileaks…

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) activists loosely affiliated with the group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com and passed information to Wikileaks. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two example emails, address book and a couple of family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name tends to re-enforce the criticism.

Click here to go to the Wikileaks page. But the site is, not surprisingly, getting heavy traffic.

Click here to download the zipped file containing everything on Wikileaks (i.e., it’s a mirror till Wikileaks can handle the traffic).

Note: If you’re a vice-presidential candidate who is breaking a law designed to protect your constituents, you might want to have at least a vague grasp of technology.

The new computer (well, the parts of it) are on their way from NewEgg.

I vacillated between two processors, both Intel: A 3.1-GHz dual core and a 2.4-GHz quad core. For gaming, the dual core is apparently better because of the higher clock speed. But for image editing and video rendering, quad core wins. I do both.

I finally decided on the quad core because A) the difference in gaming isn’t that great, B) new games may begin to take advantage of the four cores, and C) it just sounds cooler to tell people.

I ended up getting EVGA’s mid-range GeForce 8800 video card and an Arctic Cooling CPU Cooler as well, to keep the CPU happy.

The final product:

Three-day shipping was less than 10 bucks. So now I wait and decide which case I’m gonna put all this stuff in. Heh heh.

The time has come (i.e., The Wife has given her reluctant blessing) to get a new computer. Build, actually. It’s been a while since I’ve done that; my current machine was a gift, and the one before that, which I built, was an at-the-time-incredible 800 MHz.

My general rule for a new PC is that I look to get one when I regularly find software that won’t run or runs poorly, and when an upgrade won’t cut it. That’s where I am now with my 2.8-GHz single-core, single-processor machine. It’s got 2 gigs of RAM, but it’s relatively slow RAM, and it doesn’t support the modern video cards needed by too many games.

But I really notice the slowness when I’m rendering video, either when creating one of my own or converting something to burn to DVD.

Plus, The Boy’s computer (an even older model) won’t run the games he likes (e.g., My Farm or Spore Creature Creator), which are pretty low-spec. So he needs an upgrade. What better way to do that than to give him my machine and get myself a new one? :)

Luckily things are even more standardized than they were the last time I did this. And luckily there exists NewEgg, which is not only a great story, but has lots of geek customers who buy lots of stuff and write lots of review. Ergo, I can get a feel for which technologies are popular (read: won’t disappear over night), and which ones are good (and believe me, these people don’t hold back).

For example, when looking for a video card, I see that by far the most popular standard is PCI Express x16. All right, then, that narrows it down a lot.

I have a case, great power supply, two big and fast hard drives, and a nice CD/DVD burner. So I need….

• Motherboard (ASUS P5Q Pro — $140)
• Processor (Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 2.4GHz — $190)
• Memory (2GB of DDR2 PC1066 RAM — the PC1200 is just too expensive — $55)
• Video card (One based on Nvidia’s GeForce 8800GT chipset, probably — $120)

Which brings the total to about $500. (Maybe a little more, as at least one of these products has a rebate that may expire before I get it.)

I can get a rather nice case for less than $50, too. (A Cooler Master Centurian 5, which I like because all the drive bays are tool-less, and it gets great reviews.) That would make it a little easier to give The Boy my old machine (just swap out the drives, really), but that’s iffy. I could use the money to buy Crysis or something instead.

More on the situation as it develops. And, of course, comments and recommendations welcome.

I use TinyURL all the time to shorten annoying Web addresses. The result is usually something like http://tinyul.com/17a345q1.

Today I popped in a YouTube address for a video from the California Association of Realtors. What URL did I get?

http://tinyurl.com/0

Whoa.

CORRECTION: Looks like it was a glitch in the TinyURL system. It doesn’t actually work. :(

What does it mean? This office has more three-hole punches than any place I’ve ever seen.

It seems I spoke too soon when it came to the new version of Kubuntu and its Wubi installer. Sad to say, it suffers from the same problem that every other Linux distro I’ve used has: While it’s wonderfully polished in many areas, in too many it’s still clunky.

Here’s what happened.

I had Kubuntu running happily, and installed and configured Firefox, Thunderbird, and a few other things. Then I began to tweak the desktop — colors, styles, etc.

One of the options I had was to turn on desktop effects (the little animations and other niceties that can add some sparkle). I usually end up turning them off to get the speed boost, but I like to see them.

Evidently, though, my hardware (graphics or otherwise) couldn’t handle one of the effects I turned on. The screen went blank — and stayed there. Then a cursor appeared, along with some gray rectangles that were obviously the various dialog boxes I had open. But that was it; my screen was gone.

I rebooted. Still black. And then I realized I was stuck. There was no option for “Safe Mode” as in Windows that I could use to restore my settings.

I tried Ctrl-Alt-F2, which let me log in again, and I selected the Kubuntu equivalent of Safe Mode, but that only gave me a command prompt. I can navigate and edit in Unix, but I don’t know enough to know what to do.

I switched back to Windows and Googled whatever I could think of. I found references to the xorg.conf file. So I went back to the Kubuntu command prompt and tried editing that. No joy. I deleted it. I ran a command to rebuild it. Nada.

In other words, my Kubuntu installation was kaput because I chose a wrong graphics setting. Grr.

But wait, there’s more

So it was back to Windows, where I uninstalled Kubuntu. (Remember, in my previous post, I mentioned that one of the beauties of Kubuntu with Wubi is that you can uninstall it like any Windows app.) Then I went to reinstall it, and the installation was different.

It did its thing for a while, then popped out the CD and gave me a dialog asking if I wanted to reboot now to continue the process. But it didn’t tell me whether or not to remove the disk. (I did, which turned out to be the right choice. Maybe.)

On reboot, it began finishing up the installation, which was what I expected. Then it started Kubuntu… with the same blank screen that had caused me to give up the first install. Augh!

I restarted, and Grub loaded. (Grub is, essentially, a small utility that lets you choose which operating system to run, if you have more than one loaded.) But Grub gave me five choices: Three Ubuntu and two (identical) Windows.

I almost hit one of the Ubuntus, but then I realized that I was in the middle of, technically, the installation of a Windows app. So I chose one of the Windowses.

It gave me an odd error about the partition, but then started up. But then it gave me a Windows boot-choice screen: Windows or Kubuntu (but only one of each). I chose Kubuntu — and moments later was greeted by that misconfigured, unconfigurable blank screen with the cursor. The one I thought I had removed.

Say what you want about Windows, but sometimes — especially dealing with a new operating system — a little handholding is a good idea. In this case, a chance to start in some sort of basic mode that would let me fix my settings so I could see my screen. I’m sure there’s a way to do it from the command line, but I don’t have a clue what that is. (And, I suspect, neither would any of the Windows users that Canonical (Ubuntu’s parent company) wants to attract.)

So I ended up reinstalling the entire thing, only to end up with a system that thinks it has, I dunno, three or four operating systems on it and still doesn’t work properly.

Tonight I’ll give it one last shot. I’ll try to remove Kubuntu again, and I’ll pore over the system looking for leftover files. If that doesn’t work, I’ll put it down to Linux still not being quite ready for prime time.

This is Tommy “Chip” Holohan. His sister is married to my brother.

Tommy was a firefighter at Engine Company 6, in lower Manhattan. It was one of the first responders on 9/11. Tommy was one of four from the company who didn’t make it out.

No long eulogies. Plenty of those around. Let me say this, though: Never forget that while we are all running out, people like Tommy are running in.

When my son asks me (as he has), “Are there any real superheroes?” I can answer, “Yes.”

Every few months I get the Linux bug again. This time, though, it might be installed to stay. The new version of Ubuntu (or in my case, the KDE version, Kubuntu) has a single feature that’s a game changer for me and — I can imagine — for others. It’s called Wubi. More in a sec.

Whenever I catch this bug, I dig out one of my older machines, hook up my KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch so I can share those things between computers, and download the latest version of my Linux distribution of choice. Kubuntu is usually at the top of the list, but it’s been PCLinuxOS as well.

I burn Linux onto a CD with my Windows machine, then install it on my older computer. Double-clicking the Scroll Lock button then lets me switch between ‘em.

Eventually, though, the newness of Linux wears off. The fonts are annoying (too many, too similar, and all of them have unfamiliar names). The lack of Photoshop is annoying. The lack of Sony Vegas is annoying. Of the gadzillion little apps installed, I never know which is the best one. (Seriously, how many different media players do you need?) Firefox and Thunderbird work fine, of course, but it’s a lot of work just to run the same programs you can run on Windows.

And that, of course, is the crux: I think Kubuntu is great. I love the idea of running a non-Microsoft, open source operating system. I love the way a lot of little things are implemented. But the bottom line is, it doesn’t feel any better than Windows.

I know, of course, that there are a lot of better-than-Windows features under the hood in terms of security and stability, but the four times I’ve had a serious virus infection in the last 10 years, it was my own damn fault and I recovered nicely. And Windows just doesn’t crash on me more than once every month or two at worst.

And then there’s the fact that getting access to all my files is a bit annoying. I need to get my Linux box on the same home network as the rest of the computers in the house, which means finding my way through unfamiliar menus. (Windows asks you the name of your network when you install it.) And having a second machine running in my office is both hot and noisy.

So my Linux experiments last a few days, after which it’s back to Windows. I tell myself that next time I’ll install Wine to run Windows apps, and that I’ll clean out those fonts first thing, and that I’ll wait for a better video editor to come along. And so on.

This time it’s different

I get this Linux bug often after reading some book or another that makes me want to play with various tools, or just makes me want to go without Microsoft for a bit. In this case I’ve been re-reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. And I knew that a new version of (K)ubuntu was out.

This time, I had a new plan: I had already moved all my data to a different hard drive, so I had a lot of room on C:. I was gonna set up a dual-boot system. Then I started reading the how-to. You’ve got to mess around with your drive’s partitions, which for the non-technical among you means irreversibly changing the structure of your hard drive to accommodate Linux. It can’t be undone without wiping the drive. I hesitated.

Then I popped in the Kubuntu installer disk, and then the light shined.

A new option awaited me: Install Inside Windows.

Using a new creation — that Wubi thing I mentioned — for the first time I could install Kubuntu on the same machine as Windows lived. No running a separate machine. No messing with the hard drive partitions. It installs and uninstalls just like a Windows application.

So I installed it. The process wasn’t perfect; it needed a reboot but didn’t ask for it, for example, but it worked. When I boot now, I get a choice: Kubuntu 8.04 or Windows XP Professional.

What makes this so darned great is that anyone who wants to play around with Linux no longer needs a separate machine, or has to make do with a “Live CD” (which lets you run the OS from a CD instead of your hard drive — sloooooow). You can install a full working version, learn the ins and outs, and go back to Windows anytime, permanently or temporarily.

Further, because it’s on the same computer, you have easy access to all your files (including those familiar Windows fonts).

There are still things I don’t like about Linux. If a program you want isn’t in the official repository, installing it isn’t simple at all. (If it is in a repository, that’s another story — having just about every piece of software that’s available for your machine a click or two away is incredible.)

And then there’s the aforementioned 400-versions-of-everything problem. Until I learn which IM client or which Bittorrent downloader is the right one, it’s a bit overwhelming. Choice is great, but too much choice is, frankly, offputting.

But now it matters a lot less. Thanks to TK being included as part of the Ubuntu/Kubuntu installer, I can switch back and forth easily whenever I need my Linux fix. Now it’s time to research some Linux blogging tools….

Still no police. They must be waiting by my car for the ambush.