Skateistan: To Live and Skate Kabul

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Skateistan is one of my favorite causes to support. One could argue there are better ones out there, but this one is near and dear to my heart.

There’s nothing like watching an Afghan woman go down a ramp for the first time and she’s achieved something that she never thought she would.

Visit skateistan.org for more information, and please give generously. And if you need something to “show for it”, they have some nice t-shirts. Always makes a great holiday present. :)

See also: Skateistan, the Movie

Ubuntu 10.10 Looking Spiffy on our Acer Aspire One

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I’ve upgraded our household netbook to GNU/Linux Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat (10.10, from 9.04), and the latter is now the default boot-time option instead of Windows XP.

Twenty of the drive’s 160GB are dedicated to Linux, as ext4. The rest is divided between the legacy NTFS partition for Windows, and another partition (~5GB) with Acer’s eRecovery tool, so I can reset the machine to factory defaults if ever needed. Since I was able to resize the partition dynamically right in the installer, I didn’t even need to move the files we had under Windows. The NTFS partition mounts in full read/write mode, so why bother for now?

Teagan (11) has been using it for a few days now, with Chromium/Chrome as his default browser and VLC as his default media player. The latter two being the apps he spends 99.9% of his time in.

For the record, I did try Ubuntu Netbook Edition, but I couldn’t get used to the dashboard-type UX, being a long-time Gnome user… The rest of the family would have probably been fine with it, but I figured I’d stick with the original for now. We can install the netbook remix interface on top later anyway.