Annual Holiday Gift Guide: eronstuc's Holiday Gift Suggestions

by Gary L. Ratliff Sr. <eronstuc>

Around this time last year, the magazine published an article about what types of goodies could be found for your computer. So, I wish to share with you some of my recent finds, which I located at the local Walmart store. Since I live in a very small town in Mississippi, you should have no problems locating these items at your own local store. They can all be found in the electronics department.

Now if you have been reading my articles on computer languages, you also know that my hard drive containing 14 distributions of Linux has failed. In an effort to get something to backup this material on, I first purchased a 2 Tetrabyte Seagate Go Flex Disk system. This was only $99.00 and it holds 20 times the storage space of the 100 gig drive which came with my HP system, which is now about six years old.

When I first tried the machine, I was disappointed that all it did was make a backup of the files in my own area of the drive. However, once I installed the Full Monty System, I soon learned that this was recognized by this system and also my Knoppix 6.5 system. These are the only functioning Linux systems I have at the moment.

I plan to write another article sometime in the future, which will show how to save material on these drives using Dolphin.

Next I learned that my son took my webcam. He left his, but I had no driver for it. Some tech from Gear Head told me that for $38.00, he would show me how to get the driver and the camera working. Well, as much as we like free software, you can imagine this did not sit well with me. I found a Logitech C510 HD webcam at the store for $18.88. I really think the clerk gave me the wrong price, as I later checked back to learn the $18.88 system was really much smaller than the camera I purchased. It makes movies in HD to the same resolution as my HD TV system. The cashier rang up $44.88, but when she called electronics, the clerk told here that the price she told me for the camera was $18.88!

The very next week, my printer told me it was out of black ink. The store was out of the 92 Black ink cartridge. (The 92/93 combo pack sells for $38.97) However, I wound up buying a new HP 1000 DeskJet, which has a 61 black and 61 tricolor as part of the deal and this was only $29.00, or about $10 less than getting ink.

I have often wondered why it was cheaper to throw away the old printer and buy a new one, instead of purchasing ink. However, this is shown to be the case.

Below is a photo of these items:

The camera is found and usable by WXCAM, which comes with the Full Monty. The printer installs with CUPS and prints (many printers still do not work with Linux) and the 2 TB hard drive is easily used by the Full Monty, despite the data sheet from Seagate only stating compatibility with Windows and the Mac operating systems.

Have a happy holiday, and may your holiday wishes be filled with holiday gift goodies.