If you are a frequent visitor to motorcitytimes, you have probably noticed that posting has been light around these parts lately. Real life has encroached on me a bit.

A few days ago, my main PC starts running r e a l l y slow. It was an old installation of Windows XP on a old PC, so I decided it would be a good idea to back the system up and start planning for a clean install of Windows.

After the back up of the the main PC was finished, my wife hands me my three month old laptop running Windows 7 with a ridiculous virus rendering the computer unusable. I have that sorted out now.

The laptop virus combined with the need to do a clean install on my main PC convinced me to give Linux a try. I’ve played with Linux in the past and thought this would be a good time to ‘make the switch.’ I decided to pick up a new hard drive and store the old XP drive (in case I really didn’t back EVERYTHING up). Hard drives are cheap. Right?

My PC is old and the shiny new 1TB drive is a SATA model that wasn’t compatible with my old power supply (7 pin edge card style power connection). I picked up a new power supply and installed it. Now my old motherboard isn’t playing nice with the SATA drive. I’m running a Linux live CD for an operating system until I can get to Micro Center to pick up a new motherboard. I’ll need a new CPU as well, because I know the old one won’t be compatible.

Oh, by the way did you see that you can make VoIP calls for free (for the time being) on Gmail?

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”

Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.

Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name.

Regular posting will resume tomorrow.