The June issue of Computer Power User is just choc-full of my stuff, most of which was really fun to write.

Once again, one of mine is a "cover article," which always feels good. This time it is a 6-page write-up on Windows SP 1 on Page 56. I'm not a big fan of Vista, but SP1 makes it better by far, and you should definitely download and install it if you are forced to run Vista. I think my best line was "If you love Vista, it improves the OS's Letter Grade from an A to an A+; and if you don't, SP1 turns Vista from a D student into a C student."

Also printed is a review of PerfectDisk 2008 for VMWare, which is a good enough disk defragmenter to give Diskeeper a run for its money, but for less money, and EzMigration, which is a basic disk-cloning tool that's good for beginners, but unfortunately you must buy it before you can try it, which is a necessary business decision for this kind of software, but it always pains me. Both are on Page 79.

Because I wasn't busy enough, I looked at the Pinnacle PCTV HD Pro Stick on Page 34 which was something I saw in a Best Buy and thought would be interesting to review. Becha didn't know I pitch reviews too, didja? Anyway, it is a brilliant piece of hardware hobbled by average to mediocre software, though it is compatible with most of the Tivo-like software packages out there, so you can use it more efficiently. It really does let you watch HD-TV from over-the-air signals on your laptop or desktop with excellent picture quality.

And finally, I cover both the major web browsers in my monthly Beta Software column on Page 72. Firefox 3's beta is much farther along than Internet Explorer 8's beta, and is probably good enough to use regularly by the time you read this. Opera has just released their own beta, which I plan on covering next month.

The May 2008 issue of CPU Magazine is out, and it reflects a very busy month for me.

Page 77 has a 5-page round-up of 10 popular Linux distributions, which was a blast to write. I had most of my test machines up and running at the same time for a few weeks to use them all side by side, with all of them also running under VMWare Workstation concurrently too. Ubuntu 8.04 comes out on top as the best general-purpose Linux, but I'm quick to point out that most distros are geared for a certain type of user, and if you are that type of user, you'll probably find that distro best suited for you. While I prefer Gnome to KDE for a graphical desktop, I wish Ubuntu and Fedora would take some steps to simplify the occasionally random and sometimes cluttered GUI choices Gnome makes. I am very impressed with OpenSUSE's re-swizzling of the standard Gnome menus and GUI, and I wish Ubuntu would do the same. Favorite line: "...PCLinuxOS looks and feels like a slightly older version of Ubuntu slapped about the head and neck with a Simplicity Stick."

Two of my reivews are on Page 82. SPAMfighter is an innovative anti-spam plugin for Outlook and Outlook Express that uses the power of millions of other SPAMfighter users to identifiy spam far better than any Bayesian filter, but the free version drops advertising turds on your outgoing email, and $29 a year for the turd-free commercial version seems a tad overpriced to me unless you're really buried under spam. TotalMedia Extreme is a do-it-all DVD burner software suite that handles Blu-Ray and HD DVDs too. Very nice.

I also looked at Tritton Technologies' SEE-2 Xtreme on Page 33, which the good people of Tritton Technologies were nice enough to loan me a pre-production sample of. It basically gives you a DVI connection for an LCD monitor from any USB 2.0 port (they also sell a VGA version), allowing you to add up to 8 monitors. The video is plenty fast enough for web browsing and YouTube videos, but gaming looks rather poor.

Finally, Page 75 has my monthly Beta Software column, where I cover a real gem called ClipX. ClipX is the kind of utility I just can't live without: it keeps track of everything I copy into the Windows Clipboard, and allows me to Paste something back from the last 20 things I Copied by pressing Control-Alt-V instead of the typical Control-V. A menu pops up and shows all my clipboard items, including graphics. The beta is stable, the software free, and it takes less than 500k of RAM. Highly recommended.

So, it seems I haven't been very diligent in doing updates to my own site, which is really a shame since I have quite a few things to talk about these days, what with the new notebook, the elections, Windows Vista, and what seems like about 6 to 10 pages of stuff I've written in every issue of CPU Magazine.

So let's hope I catch up and make The LlamaPen interesting to read again...

Though none were cover stories this month, the April 08 issue of Computer Power User Magazine has a lot to offer you if your primary goal in life is to see how much I can write in a single issue. So I guess it offers you a lot if you are my Mom. Or my Grandma.

Page 59 has a 7-page article of mine on "covering your tracks" while online and using other computers, though the advice applies to pretty much any computer you use, such as a PC you share with family members at home, or your office PC. I also cover some hardware that can enhance your security, like the Corsair Flash Padlock (which is good, though not foolproof, security), APC's BioPod fingerprint reader (which doesn't work with Firefox - come on!), and the Rohos Login Key, which transforms any USB Flash Drive into a key that can lock and unlock your PC.

My monthly beta column, "The Bleeding Edge of Software," is on Page 72 this month, covering FeedReader (a great RSS reader) and AdMuncher, which manages to remove ads from both web pages and from any program that has an ad-displayer-dealy built-in.

Finally, on Page 79 I cover MojoPac Freedom, which is a "virtual windows running on a thumbdrive" kind of program that actually works and is free, and NTI Shadow 3, which is a near-revolutionary backup program that sort of acts like a software RAID running in Windows. It watches folders you designate, and then automatically copies files to a second device (hard drive, thumb drive, etc.) as they are added or updated. It's a bargain at about $30.

I am a huge fan of older Thrustmaster products, especially their "high-end" flight controls from the mid 1990's. They are reasonably well-built, can be disassembled and repaired, and can have any of their buttons emulate a keyboard keypress via a custom programming language.

Unfortunately, all these older items, including the F-16 FLCS, the F-22 Pro, the WCS Mk II, and the F-16 TQS, are all gameport and PS/2 keyboard port -based. Also unfortunately, though the software to write the joystick programming works in Windows XP and Vista, the software to compile and download the program into the joysticks only works in DOS (and with tweaking, Windows 95 and 98.) Ironically, once a joystick is programmed, it works just fine in XP (and probably Vista too - more on that below.)

I have a huge supply of old Thrustmaster hardware, and plan on using it for as long as possible. (In fact, I'm using my FLCS and WCS Mk II almost every day in Windows XP Pro right now, which is something a lot of folks say is impossible.) As such, it seems to me I need to collect all the software and document the process while I still can, and put it all in one place, both for myself, and for anyone else who wants to keep using this old (but still great) stuff.

As such, I present to you the The Book of Thrustmaster: Windows Vista and XP Edition. It is a work in progress, of course, but I hope people will find it useful. It should include downloads, links, instructions, and recommended hardware to buy to keep your gear going.

Editor's Note: Its Election Day, and October average oil prices are out, so I've updated the table below.

So you've probably noticed that gas prices are dropping a lot, and that it seemed to start around a month ago. If you're like me, always looking for cause-and-effect relationships in stuff, you might be wondering what the cause of this drop in gas prices is. Initially, I assumed it was that crude oil prices were raising and falling, and that gas was following suit.

Being a computer guy, I keep a gas price/mileage/economy journal in my Treo with a neat little program that calculates all that stuff automatically -- just enter in the odometer mileage, amount of gas pumped to fill up the tank, and the total price paid for the fill-up, and it does the rest. It can easily break down the price per gallon of gas, and Excel can easily average those values to get the average price of gas over a month.

Crude oil price statistics are all over the map, mostly because the price of a barrel of crude oil changes depending on what sort of oil it is (where it comes from), but it seems that different reporting organizations use different criteria too. (When you hear "Oil is $60 a barrel today" on your local 24-hour newsradio station, you have to wonder where they get that data and what sort of oil they're talking about.) Anyway, the Illinois Oil & Gas Association, of all places, has a pretty nice history of average crude oil prices for a given month, and though I don't know exactly what type of oil they're pricing, I'm going to assume they're using the same type and data month after month.

So this weekend I put these data points together, and got the following table:

Well, between January and March, Oil prices actually dropped around $3 a barrel, yet Gas prices rose about $.25 a gallon. Between April and May, Oil rose a mere $.44 a barrel, yet Gas rose $.37 a gallon.

September Oil prices are around the same as February, yet gas was $.24 a gallon more per gallon.

Overall though, the general trend seems to be that Gas prices generally follow Oil prices in the grand scheme of things. It seems, however, that there is something of a disconnect on a micro-level, where the small fluctuations of the price of each don't seem to follow each other. Hmmm. I guess I am a little suspicious of this, but I can't put my finger on why.

It has been suggested/reported (by the New York Times, The Washington Post, and several bloggers in high places) that large investment hedge funds are (temporarily) pulling out of oil futures, which is lowering the price of crude oil, (and hence gas), at the request of the Bush administration, so the voting public won't be so pissed off at the (Republican) incumbents in Congress and elsewhere. If it weren't for the fact that this scheme requires cogent thought on the part of the President, this makes total sense to me.

Anyone have any other thoughts?

Here's a question that my wife keeps asking me: "Why does the screen on this notebook of yours look funny?" Of course, she says this when Ubuntu is running instead of Windows XP, so I think she's vocalizing the more general question: "Why use Ubuntu instead of Windows?" Fair question, especially for someone whom I will call the "Average Windows User," or "AWU" for short. Up until recently, I had a hard time justifying Linux generally, or Ubuntu specifically, for the AWUs in our lives. But now, I can. Sort of. And the Mac users of the world are gonna want to kiss me for this too.

What does the Average Windows User do all day? What does the AWU really need? Let me boil it down to the following tasks: Web Browsing, Email, and Word Processing. Toss in iTunes/iPod music management and Digital Photo Management/Photo Printing for the slightly more advanced Windows user. That's 80% of all Windows users right there.

A Macintosh, complete with its OS X operating system, can do these all AWU tasks brilliantly, and without the virus or spyware problems that make up maybe half of all my billable consulting hours. Though easy to use, OS X is different enough from Windows to require some user training before an AWU feels comfortable enough to use it daily. This last fact is important to my argument here, so I hope you believe me when I assert it.

As it turns out, Ubuntu can be described pretty much the same way. It too can handle Web Browsing, Email, and Word Processing brilliantly thanks to Firefox (browser), Thunderbird (Outlook Express-like mail) or Evolution (Outlook-like mail),  and OpenOffice (MS Office-like  "productivity" applications). Picasa has got all the digital photo stuff down. In fact, the only gaping hole here is iTunes, since there's no Linux-friendly way to use the iTunes Music Store. (That said, if iTunes purchased music is not involved, then Banshee works brilliantly.) As with OS X, Ubuntu Linux is more or less invulnerable to the Windows virus and spyware scourge, and isn't really any tougher to train an AWU to use it than OS X. Trust me, I've done this, folks...

I always feel like a battered wife when I talk about my experiences with Linux. Don't know what I mean by this?

I have installed and used Linux many times over the years, starting with RedHat 6, Mandrake 7, then Debian Woody, and then finally Ubuntu, starting with Warty Warthog (4.10) up to the current Dapper Drake (6.06). I've used them as both the base for my servers, and as my "daily workstation OS" for whatever notebook I'm using this year. And keep in mind, I'm not a total dummy when it comes to non-Microsoft operating systems, or computers in general.

And with all these Linux Distros, things were great. At first. It was a like a honeymoon in the beginning, learning to perform new tasks in new ways with the new operating system and new software. Sure, there were little hiccups, but what new relationship doesn't? Who cares if it takes 8 hours to get network printing working? The OS is free, new, and exciting!

But then things start to get burdensome. Spending an average of 5 hours to get one major feature working, and pouring over and mentally combining many different and incomplete "HowTo" documents to figure out what are simple tasks in Windows and MacOS, makes for a tiring relationship.

Then there's a big blowup. Some major function refuses to work anymore, and no amount of counseling by outside parties, or no amount of work, seems to be able to get it working again. Or there's a breach in security, because some module you didn't know you had needed a vital security patch, and now I'm  hacked.

There's fighting. There's teeth gnashing. There's defeat. I cast off Linux, swearing never to waste my time on it again. Linux isn't mature enough. It isn't ready.

Yet 8 months later I find myself missing Linux. "Maybe the problems I had with Linux last time were my fault," I think. "I can change. Things will be better this time. I can make this relationship work." And then I take Linux (at least, the latest and greatest Distro) back, blow away the old installation (if it's still there) and install from scratch.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Classic "Battered Wife Syndrome," if you ask me...

While this isn't my advice, per se, I recently ran across some very good advice for any longtime Windows user who now finds themselves owning a brand-new Macintosh.

Ed Thomson's professional blog has about a dozen well-thought-out tips for any new Mac user, and even if you aren't switching, it's interesting to see how the other half lives.

So I'm very excited about the Intel Macintoshes, such as the MacBook Pro, the forthcoming MacBook (which actually may be called the iBook again), the iMac, and the Mac Mini. I'm very fond of my PowerPC-based Mac, and I love OS X, and frankly, I would love to have a single computer that I could run OS X on for everyday surfing, writing, and emailing, but then reboot to run Windows XP for games and various Windows-Only applications. The only problem is that stupid freaking single-mouse button that's built into the Macintosh notebooks. (OK, there's also the problem of cost, but there are cheap Intel Macs out there - the Mini, for one - and a cheap notebook is probably on the way real soon now.)

Apple's Boot Camp has made running Windows XP on a Mac a reality, and if you use a "regular" external two-button mouse, Windows (and OS X, for that matter) will see the right mouse button for what it is, and life in Windows is fine. But what about those notebooks that just come with a single mouse button built in?

In Windows, what you'll need is some special program running in the background that can emulate a right mouse button click when you press some key on the keyboard. One program that does this, and a lot more, is AutoHotkey, and it is totally free, being Open Source software. And right here I'll tell you how to do it.