Click turns 1,000 (entries)

I meant to call attention to Click reaching the 1000-entry mark, except that Entry No. 1,000 appeared four days and about 10 entries ago.

There have been a few others posting on Click here and there, and I'd love to find somebody (or bodies) else to contribute to this blog from the Daily News, or even the vast Los Angeles Newspaper Group empire. (Hint: If you're reading this, you work here, you want to write about technology your way, I'll set you up.)

The Click blog began in August 2006 at the behest of now-former Daily News/LANG online guru Josh Kleinbaum. It was supposed to be a place for "cool things found on Web," "viral video," and stuff that would appeal to the average Web surfer.

Didn't turn out that way. Not that such things don't creep into here from time to time, but I quickly made Click about my technological journey, one borne by frugality, making old crap work as much like new as possible — not just because it's there and it's fun, but because I really don't have a whole lot of discretionary income knocking around.

Hence hundreds of articles on a 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt laptop (233 MHz Pentium II MMX, 144 MB RAM, 3 GB hard drive) , a 2002 Maxspeed Maxterm thin client
(converted to PC use with 1 GHz VIA C3 Samuel processor that doesn't always run that fast, 256 MB RAM, three swappable 14.4 GB hard drives), a 2002 Gateway Solo 1450 laptop (1.3 GHz Celeron Mobile, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB hard drive), a 2003-ish Palm Tungsten E PDA, and even a 1996 Apple Macintosh Powerbook 1400cs (116 MHz PowerPC with 48 MB RAM and a sub-1GB hard drive), which I've managed to use to log into modern Unix-like boxes with MacSSH. (The Holy Grail of this column still remains finding and installing the MacX program, which should bring X11 capability to Mac's System 7 and allow me to run an X session over SSH on the Powerbook, making it look like it runs Linux or BSD, even if it's just doing it as an X terminal).

How many other technology bloggers/columnists can get excited over a 22-inch HDTV? That's our newest gear purchase, and it was a ponderous journey from thinking about it to spending $350. Ilene and I don't have cable, satellite, we are still using the Motorola V180 cell phones that were made in 2004, and we have and use a landline telephone.

My entire discovery of Linux and BSD on the desktop unfolded in this blog, and that's what most of its posts are about.

But lately things have been changing a bit. I started a print column about five months ago (available at the Daily News Web site) and have been focusing on broader (read: less geeky) issues.

That's where columns about digital TV, cell phones and making backups have come into play.

And I've been ready to stabilize my PCs somewhat, to stick with the same Linux distribution (or, in the case of the Compaq, OpenBSD, which it's still running, although it's a bit slow on that ultra-secure system when compared to how it works with Puppy Linux on live CD).

After all, my work box, a 2003-ish Dell Optiplex, has run Windows XP continuously since the IT people set it up. Not that I have the power to change it, which I don't. And I'm using the Mac more than ever, mostly for video editing, something I'm still pretty awful at, from a technical and creative standpoint. Hence my latest quest for a video-editing solution that runs in Linux. In case you haven't been following my tale of woe (and really, why would you?), the state of Linux video editing is pretty sorry at this point, although I've heard that an app called Kdenlive should change that somewhat (and I will be trying it).

I'd like to thank the readers of Click, whoever you are, and especially those who have come here over the years as the result of links I've gotten from Distrowatch, LXer and elsewhere.

These entries do tend to ramble. When it comes to blogging, I've done a lot of things wrong. I tend to write way too long. I ramble. Blogging is supposed to be about the minutia of the writer, and there's plenty of that here. My hope is that all I've "gone through" trying to get things to work might, in a small or even big way, help some of you out there, just as many other bloggers have helped (and continue to help) me.

Whether this blog can be deemed "successful," or just "there," is something still up for debate, but the key to blogging, successful or otherwise, is obsession and compulsion. I'm sure there's another way to get to 1,000 entries, but if there is, I know nothing about it.