linux

What was your first Amazon purchase?

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Inspired by @mikko I just looked at my first ever Amazon order and: yup, that’s 14-year-old me. pic.twitter.com/cAuNzAoKAj

— Alex Hern (@alexhern) July 4, 2017

I saw this tweet on Tuesday about your first Amazon purchase. Amazon, of course, remembers your order history going back to when you first registered an account.

My first purchase was in May 2003, a few days before my 19th birthday. I actually blogged about it at the time. I bought Just for Fun (sponsored link) by Linus Torvalds, the memoirs of the creator of the Linux operating system. Although I wasn’t, and still am not, a great reader of books, I did actually read this book – it kept me occupied whilst on holiday with my parents over the summer. I remember a few things from the book, but not much.

The rest of my purchases from 2003 were a couple of textbooks that I needed for my undergraduate degree course in Computer Science. One was about TCP/IP networking, and the other on software engineering. I’m sure they’re significantly out of date now. Oh, and I bought Shrek on DVD (sponsored link).

So what was your first Amazon purchase?

My first Amazon purchase

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The cover of the book 'Just for Fun' by Linus Torvalds.

Call me strange, but despite having been an internet user for over 4 years now, I have never bought anything from Amazon (sponsored link). Until now.

I ordered the book “Just For Fun” (sponsored link) by Linux creator Linus Torvalds last night, and it’s due to arrive tomorrow morning. I’ve read bits of it in bookshops (although nowhere in Bradford appears to sell it) and decided to go out and buy it. After all it is my birthday on Sunday.

Talking of money, now that I can get back into my PayPal account (after my two week hiatus), you can now donate money to me, if you are feeling generous. Although I’m on track to finish the year with at least £600 in my current account, any extra will be gladly accepted.

Okay, I’ll stop begging now 🙂 .

Officially an adult

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It’s my 18th birthday!!!

Yup, I’ve turned the big 1-8 today. Marissa (my new laptop) is now up and running, though admittedly not under Windows. I decided to go ahead and install Mandrake 8.2, and I’m very impressed. The CD autoran in Windows, and gave me the option of either booting from the CD (didn’t work) or creating a boot disk and using that. Although the boot disk creation was a little difficult (I had to read the documentation to find out what to do), it was done quickly and I was able to boot into the installer.

The installer was great – the ‘express’ option take about 30 minutes and was nice and easy to understand – there was plenty of help available and no confusing dialogs. The partition manager was excellent, though I did have to say goodbye to Windows XP due to the fact that Samsung had chosen to use NTFS, which, although it is recognised by Linux, isn’t supported. But it is a new system so I wasn’t going to lose anything.
I’m using KDE as my desktop – not KDE3, since this isn’t yet included – but 2.2.2 (I think). It also comes with a full office suite, more web browsers than you can shake a stick at (including Mozilla, which loads much more quickly than its Win32 counterpart) and various other tools.

There are down sides – I couldn’t get the sound to work, and I won’t be able to use the internet for a couple of days until NTL get their act together (I’m on Marianna, the old machine), but on the whole, I’m pleased with what the Open Source community has done here.

My other presents included a laptop backpack – or rather the money for it, though I got one today from PC World. It’s great – not only will it carry the laptop but the transformer, extra mouse (which also works in Linux, despite the fact that it is USB and has a wheel) and Ethernet lead, and a great deal else. I also got a wallet (to complement my proof of age card, which arrived this morning – nice one, Portman Group) and more money. The rest of my presents will be here tomorrow when my grandparents and cousins come over for dinner.
Anyway, I’m off out for my birthday party. See you later!