David Trebacz Blog

I've been a big fan of Android's app's for many years. Lots of great free applications out there that help you do whatever - better. Couple that app environment with a smartphone, car mount, data plan, and you can have an amazing array of information to make you car trip more fun and less stressful. Here's my setup for family road trips: My Road Trip Hardware: I currently own an Motorola Droid Razr Maxx ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/DROID-MAXX/better-battery/96406,en_US,pd.html ) and use their windshield mount ( http://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/Vehicle-Navigation-Dock-for-DROID-RAZR-MAXX/100141,en_US,pd.html ) with one slight modification. The current windshield mount stalk is a bit too short, so I use the old stalk from my original Droid ( http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-89396N-Window-Mount-Droid/dp/B002WC7RKU ). The extended length makes it possible to use the camera and easily keep the suction cup mount out of the pictures. The new Droid Maxx has fa...

When I upgraded the machine from 11.10 Kubuntu 64-bit to 12.04, my machine essentially became unusable until I turned desktop effects off (ALT-SHIFT-F12). The story was well documented on the internet ( http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4ODQ - Good story on the failings of the 295.40 Nvidia driver that shipped with 12.04 LTS Kubuntu ). I suffered along not wanting to custom a version of Kubuntu expecting Canonical to relatively quickly update the version in the repositories - after all this is an LTS version. After 3 months of running my video on Kubuntu 12.04 by running desktop effects under the compositing type "xrender" for my Quadro NVS 210S/GeForce 6150LE graphics card instead of "OpenGL", I was fed up. Running under xrender was just as good as turning them off. I wasn't up to downgrading my drivers to the previous version or suffering through the continued development on the Nouveau drivers.  I even contemplated getting...