Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

I was looking for a replacement for my old windows calendar program Windates, and I found Rainlendar (and also Rainmeter too - download at Softpedia).

The key points I was looking for in a Calendar program were that a) it should run on Windows and Linux, b) have pop-up / sound alarms (i.e. run in the task bar) and c) be customisable. I tried Sunbird, but at version 0.3 something it just just a little buggy and unrefined for me.

Rainlendar seemed to have the minimal requirements, and it's skinable as well. In fact, there seem to be a million and one skins out there for the thing. It's also free (for the "lite" version, but I don't use a Microsoft mail client or online calendars anyway) and open source, though I don't quite see the same level of activity on it as say, Firefox.

Rainmeter seems to have been the project that led to Rainlendar, though the two only seem to share the idea of skins between them (and Rainmeter seems to have a lot of skins too). Rainmeter is a customizable performance meter for Windows, which displays CPU load, memory utilization, disk space, network traffic, time and a variety of other things. I only downloaded and installed it as I was curious after seeing so many skins for it. My computer is slow enough without an extra monitor running in the background, but it "looks fun".

Hey, Windows knowing where it's partitions are got fixed yesterday, due to me doing one little change to the registry (I figure after I did that and rebooted, Windows was forced to rescan the drive), but I also found a neat little free utility called TESTDISK. It can find lost partitions for (and run under)...

• BeFS ( BeOS )
• BSD disklabel ( FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD )
• CramFS, Compressed File System
• DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32
• HFS and HFS+, Hierarchical File System
• JFS, IBM's Journaled File System
• Linux Ext2 and Ext3
• Linux Raid
  • RAID 1: mirroring
  • RAID 4: striped array with parity device
  • RAID 5: striped array with distributed parity information
  • RAID 6: striped array with distributed dual redundancy information
• Linux Swap (versions 1 and 2)
• LVM and LVM2, Linux Logical Volume Manager
• Mac partition map
• Novell Storage Services NSS
• NTFS ( Windows NT/2K/XP/2003/Vista )
• ReiserFS 3.5, 3.6 and 4
• Sun Solaris i386 disklabel
• Unix File System UFS and UFS2 (Sun/BSD/...)
• XFS, SGI's Journaled File System

Cool!

Well, I'm making "progress".

I can now boot from Windows, but it doesn't recognize any of the partitions on my second drive! This is where I have D: (Documents), F: (temp), I: (Incoming) and M: (media). Thing is, I'd left a 20 GB space at the start of that drive for the Linux install. It was fine when it wasn't installed, but now all windows reports is an "unformatted local drive" as D:!

Urk - well at least Linux can still read those partitions, and I can still access the web, and after installing Thunderbird under Linux I can now read my e-mail. It's a learning curve alright!

I've been looking at GIMP 2.2 as well, and it seems slightly better than last time I looked. maybe running the thing under its native OS makes a difference.

Well at least car's running OK, but my PC is still frustrating me.

I have this AGP graphics card called a Matrox G400. It's a lot better than the one I used to have, which could only do a screen of 800x600 in 16 bit depth. But - it causes weird problems with Windows 98SE. Didn't at first, but certainly did after I installed my anti-virus software AVG. Almost ever 2nd boot it gets stuck on a screen that says:

Windows Protection error. please reboot your PC

...and of course when I do, I get the same message. I can boot Windows in "Safe Mode" (and only at 640x480 resolution in 16 colours) but don't get any drivers (CD/DVD Roms, Modems or USB Sticks for example). I can also boot Windows in "Diagnostic Mode" (which you set from the General panel of the MSCONFIG utility) and most of everything works, but none of the start-up programs (Calendar, KeyNotes, AVG et al) get loaded. I'm using the PC in this mode now.

But this is just so frustrating! "Diagnostic Mode" doesn't stick, and it's back to the no-boo routine.

That's why I haven't been online much in the last four days. While I'm on this time around, I'm going to hunt around for a solution. There must be something on the net that will help. Yesterday I thought I'd found some replacement drivers, but they only work in XP. There was also a "flash burn" program, but that didn't seem to work at all.

Sigh. Been heavy rain and THUNDERSTORMS for the last week, so getting online safely is not guaranteed. In fact there's another storm coming right now, so I have log off or risk my modem.

Might not hear from me  until I can sort this out. If I had money, I'd get another graphics card, but I don't, so that's that.