Les Bonnes Choses

Warning: geekout ahead. That means you Carolyn. If you continue to read this and then complain that my post was boring, I'll retaliate in a way that only a big brother can. Or worse: in a way that only uncle Dave can.

I've got this old laptop, which served me well for much of my PhD, and a few months into my postdoc before it started to act kind of wonky and was then dropped on to a hard tile floor. I then bricked it when I tried to reset it to the factory default state because something was amiss with my restore CDs. My attempt at installing Windows XP and drivers from the Lenovo site, and then pretending that nothing was amiss worked for a short while, but it became apparent that the jig was up when it stopped booting. With nothing to lose, I decided to install the latest iteration of Ubuntu. Real slick. In fact, since installing it on this computer -- which had become unusable with Windows XP -- I have been using my old notebook to the exclusion of my newer, fancier notebook.

And what have I been doing on my testdrive of Ubuntu 10.04? Trying to get one of my old webcams to work, because ultimately, I wanted to be able to use this computer primarily as a Skype terminal (with video). Unfortunately, the only two webcams I own (Creative Labs VF0400 and Microsoft Lifecam VX3000) do not work out of the box with Linux, and this version that I'm using appears to be too new for any of the solutions posted for earlier versions to apply. So if you consider that it appears that I could just go find a cheap webcam off a list of cameras that do work out of the box, then by saving the $18 that I would have spent means that I value my time at about $3/hr. And that's why my degree is not in economics.