I’m opening up one of my services to anyone who wants to get involved on a limited beta basis. To participate, drop me an email and I’ll give you a link to the signup page. I will be after feedback from anyone who participates.

So, a brief description:

Followup is a social bookmarking service without the social aspect. It is a web-based service that lets you bookmark a page you are looking at so you can come back to it later - and, in a nutshell, that’s all it is.

It was born out of a desire to keep a track of interesting pages to come back and read later, alongside using several different machines and operating systems, making it impossible to use the browser’s standard bookmark feature. Since most other bookmarking services are all about tagging and sharing, another thing that just seemed to waste time, Followup was designed to work in a very simple way: Bookmark the current site, then go back - no tagging, no descriptions, no sharing at the point of bookmarking. This is achieved through the use of a bookmark button that can be dragged to your browser’s toolbar - or all yourbrowser’s toolbars, on whichever machine or OS you’re running. Since the bookmarking is based on your logged-in state alone, as long as you’re logged in (or have logged in using that browser, under that OS, on that machine), any new bookmarks will be added to your list.

Followup does have a more social side, with automated links built in that allow users to submit their saved links to a range of popular social bookmarking/listing/linking sites, but this is a secondary service, and certainly isn’t the primary focus. If you want to share your links, or look at the pages you’ve bookmarked, go to the Followup site. All your links will be listed, along with various things you can do, including the all-important delete function.

So, if you’re interested, drop me an email.

The more I use Windows Vista, the more I hate it. The latest bugbear for me using Vista has to do with the way files and folders are viewed. I am yet to find out how I can tell Vista to stop being ‘helpful’ by ‘identifying’ the type of folder by the content, and just please remember that I have manually set what information columns I want, and to please use them from now on for all folders? Including the ones I manually reset and you overwrote?

This is really starting to become incredibly annoying, and far from being helpful is actually making it harder for me to work with the OS, as I have to spend time resetting the view every time I set down to work with some files, as well as resetting the columns.

The single most useful piece of information I find in the file column view is ‘last modified’, and the least use are ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’ - yet for some reason Vista insists that it knows what I want, and resets all folder views to show ‘tags’, ‘rating’ and ‘date taken’, and removes ‘date modified’.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that Vista likes to decide when I’ve finished using Windows Explorer by helpfully closing it, without warning. Here’s something you can try for yourself, and this is a change in behaviour from Windows XP:

Put a DVD or CD in your DVD drive. Open Windows Explorer. Select the DVD/CD from the left-hand column so you can see a list of files on the DVD/CD. Now press the Eject button on the front of the DVD/CD drive, and watch Vista close Windows Explorer. You were finished with that program, weren’t you? (For the record, Windows XP would automatically select the next available device/folder further down the tree, rather than closing the program).

There’s been a lot of talk in the past day or so about Dell finally listing a desktop computer system for sale without Windows XP or Windows Vista, shipping with the option of Ubuntu instead. The pricepoints are interesting as well, with the Ubuntu-installed machines coming in at a lower price than their Windows installed equivalents.

Given that the Dimension E520 desktop starts at around £249, I figured I’d see what the Ubuntu price was - but it seems that the much-vaunted “Dell Sells Ubuntu-based Desktops” only applies in the US, as there’s no mention anywhere on the European Dell website of any models that feature Ubuntu as a choice of OS.

Technorati Tags: Ubuntu, Dell, US Only

Well, it’s all configured and working now, with a little fiddling, a lot of reading and the kind help of the Ubuntu community. Here’s what I had to do to make my Compaq laptop work, both with video and with wireless networking.

Video
The first sticking point. To make this work, you need to add the directive

vga=792

to the end of the boot command. When you first boot the live CD, press F6 and add that command at the end of the line. This will let you boot into the graphical shell.

You will need to do this later to the grub bootloader menu in /boot/grub/menu.lst - simply add the directive to the end of the kernel boot command. That’s it, it all worked from there. Some minor issues with the NVIDIA drivers, desktop effects and Beryl, so I’m using none of those. I’m going to try the newly released NVIDIA drivers over the weekend.

Wireless
The second sticking point, and something that was giving me nightmares for ages. I got wireless working on the Broadcom 4311 that’s built in to the point where it would see other people’s access points, but not mine.

In the end, it was a post by Pichulines on the Ubuntu forums that solved my problem. He suggested following the Broadcom BCM4311 rev 01 (ndiswrapper) installation guide. So, I followed this very carefully, except that I used the latest 1.43 ndiswrapper instead of the 1.35 version documented in the guide.

After the reboot stage, everything worked perfectly. I could see and connect to my wireless access point using WPA and I could roam wirelessly.

Moving Along
Now all that’s left to do is to finish fiddling with the setup. I need to look at various things like reconfiguring the window manager (I’m using the default Gnome, but I may switch to KDE or Enlightenment), and I need to get little things in place like proper Beryl support (I love the multiple desktops on a cube - incredibly useful when you don’t have multiple monitors), and I would really like a Mac-like toolbar, something I got used to on my work PC, although it’s not critical.

Hopefully this will help those who have been having the same problems.