Social networking is really a marvel in and of itself.  It lets you reach a large audience very quickly and, when used responsibly, can promote good ideas and encourage collaboration.  Just like any tool though, I’m noticing more and more that it really can mess up your life.  I keep finding stories of people doing stupid things and then updating their Facebook page to reflect that.  That just doesn’t seem wise.  Oh well, I guess as long as I’m not horribly stupid and not anxious to let the world know, I should be ok.

First off, the only problem that I’ve had thus far is that my webcam doesn’t seem to work in Skype anymore.  It simply isn’t detected.  It worked perfectly in 9.10, but I guess drivers have changed, and Skype doesn’t know where to look now.  The camera still works in Cheese and such, so I’m confident it’s something like that.

Other than that, I’ve found the bootup to be quicker by a few seconds.  Also, the installation was very streamlined and easier to work with.  The updated packages are great.  Even my g15 keyboard has better packages now.  The new theme is nice, but the icons on the left side take some getting used to.  Once you get used to it though, it isn’t all that bad.  This has also been more stable. Before I would get Xorg restarts when using ram intensive applications, that appears to have been fixed now.  Only time will tell though.  Let me know how it works for you.

The Good:

It’s very swift.  Rarely do a I have to wait for more than a few seconds for an application to open.  After it is open, I can even switch between concurrently running tasks.  This is something I’ve found to be extremely useful.  I’ve found that a few programs tend to suck more resources and can cause a slowdown, the Ovi Maps being one of them.  Generally though, when using Ovi Maps, you won’t be using any of the other heavier applications.

It has plenty of storage, and I’ve not run into any issues there.  One feature that I really like is that when you plug it in via USB, you can select to have it run as a mass storage device.  Moving my music collection was as easy as drag and dropping my collection onto the phone.  Since I run linux, I did need to show hidden files to really get into it, but it worked well.  I’ve never used the other mode (PC Suite Mode) but that’s because I’m on Linux and they don’t have a version of that software available yet.

I use the phone for my email, but still wanted to have my emails available on the desktop workstation that I use.  I decided to use IMAP.  It has worked swimmingly.  I wish it would place sent items in the sent folder of the IMAP server, but that’s a small complaint since Evolution doesn’t do that either (if someone knows how to fix that, let me know please.)  I have been able to read and open attachments without any difficulty.  The PDF reader and image viewer is powerful enough to handle decent sized files.

The media player is nice, but lacks any sort of ID3 tag editor, which would be quite nice for me.

The messaging service integration is really top notch.  It talks with skype, google talk, and my cell carrier with the same application.  That means they all get treated the same way.  I was also able to do a video call on google without any issues.  That feature is supposedly being brought to skype soon as well.  One thing that I really liked was that the contact manager helped me merge my contacts together across various messaging platforms.  When I go to call someone, I can talk to them on skype, on the cell, or text with google, or whatever.  It is quite nice that way.  It treats SMS the same way.

The only real complaint that I have is more with my carrier than with Nokia.  Everything works well, I have data and such, but “Nationwide 3g” isn’t really nationwide.  It really only applies to more densely populated areas.  Hopefully they’ll get 3g service here in southwest Idaho and we can be happy on all fronts.  Until then, EDGE is what I’ll have to use.

I had a great opportunity to present to some of the students at a school I attended when I was younger.   Being a small school, budgets are always tight and technology is always a little sparse.  The current IT administrator for the school (Mr. Osman) has been doing an excellent job and allowed me to present to some of his students.  Everything went great.  I was also able to bring a server with me to donate to the school.  Hopefully they can use it to improve the infrastructure there.  As time passes, I hope to be able to continue donating equipment and possibly give some more presentations about what open source can do for the school.  Apparently, the big thing there right now is GIMP.

Presenting at a small class in Campbell, MN.

Battle for Wesnoth
Tremulous
Nexuiz
Warzone 2100 (latest stable release, not the beta)

Those are all excellent FOSS games that I’m sure we’ll all enjoy.

The Good: You can tag photos, manage revisions, view a nice timeline, export to various sites, without much trouble at all. You spend 30 minutes with the interface and you’ve got it down pretty well.

The Bad: What is this F-Spot View thing and why would I want to use it? Opening up an image with F-spot skips the importing (which I’ll get to later) bug doesn’t provide really any usable tools.

The Ugly: Speed is a major issue, especially when importing, and even moreso when importing raw imagery. I would love to talk about how well it handles raw, but honestly, it’s still slowly importing. Apparently it runs dcraw over the file (for some unknown reason) and that takes a while when you have thousands and thousands of raw files. It isn’t multithreaded either, so my fancy multicore machine doesn’t help with the speed at all.

Overall though, F-Spot is a much needed project. Hopefully these rough edges can be smoothed out. For people with smaller, or nonraw driven photo collection, I can see this being very useful for maintaining galleries. I’m still deciding what I think. I guess I’ll know once this import finishes. Oh, and if you know a way to speed it up, please let us all know in the comments.