Internets!

I have recently bought a friend's phone line and DSL modem. In a week or so ("ya mismo"), employees from the phone company will install the line and I should be in business! Look forward to more regular updates at that point. In the meantime, I am playing a lot of guitar and watching the homestead in the hopes that the employees show up. To give this post some filler, here are some pro tips that everyone should know, vaguely in order of importance:

• I have recently discovered a program called F.lux. It automatically adjusts the brightness of your computer screen so that it is appropriate to the time of day. I highly recommend it, as it decreases eye strain.
• If you have more than one computer on the same desktop, synergy is an invaluable tool that allows you to share the same mouse and keyboard across multiple screens. This allows you to seamlessly switch between them and copy/paste text across computers.
• For web browsing, I highly recommend Google Chrome with the AdBlock extension.
• For PDF viewing, I recommend Foxit. It is much lighter-weight than Acrobat, and you're less likely to be targeted for malware since the user-base is so small.
• For organizing your pictures, I find that there is no competition for Picasa.
• If you download torrents, utorrent is hands-down the best client. Vuze hogs resources.
• For downloading from newsgroups, forget alt.binz which is terrible. Use SABnzbd instead. Set it and forget it.