This morning when I should have been working on the daily blog post I decided to install Ubuntu on an external hard drive to see if it still worked as I remembered it working. It does, sort of.
There are two approaches. You could install Linux straight onto the internal HD of a mac device but if you do, and you encounter problems then it could take hours to fix your mistake.
Recently I have been sliding between Windows, Linux distributions and MacOS throughout the day. I use a mac for blogging, and Linux to experiment and learn new skills, and windows to watch Netflix and YouTube. I might be over-simplifying but that’s the simplified version.
Pi and Linux I find that I have come to be at ease in all three environments, especially since playing around with Raspberry Pi devices. “Why?”, you may ask.
Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2gb of memory to work as a Nextcloud server is quite easy. Download the right ISO from nextcloudpi.com, flash it, put the card into your pi device and after two or three more steps you have a local machine running Pi but you still need to setup port forwarding, open a UPnP port to access the server externally and other steps.
The simpler solution is to download the Nextcloud app on your phone, as well as for the desktop/laptop that you’re using.
Picasa is now available for mac and it works well. It works so well it took just 30 seconds for me to crash the application. On a more serious note Picasa is an interesting application that auto indexes all of your pictures in the Pictures folder and indexes your images within the application. As a result you have easy access to those images. At the same time as it can do those things it also makes uploading images to picasa on the web, to blogger e-mail and more.