For those of you who may not know: Xmarks is a secure cross-browser bookmark and password synchronization service. They support Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari (including iPhone), and was working on an Android application.

Many users (me included) are very willing to pay $5+ per month for this invaluable service, I already pay that much per month for premium Evernote. Apparently, the Xmarks team didn’t know this many people would be interested in a premium Xmarks server (over 12,500 so far) and never considered it a viable option.

In order to evaluate the premium service option, Xmarks has setup a PledgeBank pledge for interested users to pledge to pay $10 – $20 per year. Incredibly inexpensive for this service!

So, if you’re an Xmarks user and are willing to pay $10 – $20 per year for the service, do one of the following:

• Sign the pledge.
• Retweet my blog post (or create your own) to spread the word.
• Comment on the Xmarks blog.

If you’re not an Xmarks user, then get it for your browser! Even if you use Firefox and Chrome on the same computer, you can benefit from this service. Try it out and then, if it proves worthy to you, do one of the the aforementioned tasks to help keep Xmarks alive!

I couldn’t find a download link, but there are high quality images available for each of the letters. And the project has been released, by Alex, under a Creative Commons By-NC License (free to share and remix under the conditions of attribution and non-commercial user).

During my shift last night at work, something very interesting happened to me: I was sitting in the office all by myself (my entire building is empty except for myself and my coworker whom frequently goes out to the floor as the tech-on-duty). All  I could hear was the rumbling of the servers in the distant background, the hum of my computer’s exhaust fan, and the off-balanced spin of the rickety fan sitting atop my desk…

For a solid ten or fifteen seconds, I felt what Eckhart Tolle talks about in The Power of Now: I just was. I had stopped thinking. My mind was as calm and smooth as freshly cleaned glass. Those few seconds were both blissful and utterly painful. As soon as I realized what was going on, I was scared and in a physical pain. Then, a flood of thoughts came rushing into my head like never before… I can only describe the latter feeling as a safety net which saved me from being scared and of physical pain.

Remember in The Truman Show when the people who broke onto the set gets dragged away? Imagine the calmness as the impostor and my mind as the actors.

Then, it dawned on me: I have to gain control over my mind and being. I have to stop being afraid of just being and I have to stop trying to occupy myself. I have to be alone and happy. My partner used to tell me all the time: “you need to be happy alone before you can be happy in a relationship.” Maybe there’s some truth in that statement.

It doesn’t mean I can’t date or have friends or even be back in the relationship again. It only means I have to be able to be happy alone.

Sounds somewhat of a no-brainer when one says it aloud, doesn’t it? “Well, duh, you need to be comfortable being by yourself.” But it’s a lot more difficult than one would think.

The mind, according to Eckhart Tolle, is constantly thinking. We can all vouch for that, we’ve just become so accustom to it we don’t recognize it. Take a moment right now to just step back and listen to your mind’s chatter. It’s going a million miles per hour, isn’t it? To me, that’s what keeps us company and keeps us from being happy when we’re alone.

Although, our mind’s chatter isn’t what will make me happy, it just seems to be an inhibitor of the happiness in question. I still have several more roadblocks to knock down.

I make this whole process sound incredibly easy. It’s not. There’s people who literally spend their entire lifetimes attempting to achieve the awakened state of being and never quite make it. This will be an on-going attempt for me for many years to come. I’ll just be starting the journey of being happy alone by starting my journey of becoming awakened.

Consider this post an inaugural for the documentation of these journeys. I hope you, my subscribers and audience, will join me. I’ll be posting the tips and information I find useful or interesting. There’s no time like the now to begin better yourself for a lifetime of untold happiness.

If you’ve never read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I highly recommend you pick yourself up a copy on Amazon or at your local bookstore. For the Kindle on Amazon, you’re looking at $10. Same price for the paperback on Amazon and in most bookstores (I bought mine from B&N). I also recommend the audiobook available because Eckhart has quite a lovely voice (available for $26 on Amazon).

- Logan

Prerequisites:

• working and internet-ready CentOS 2.6 guest OS (only needed if you don’t have the prerequisite software)
• root or sudo access to your server (prefix commands shown here with sudo)
• GNU compiler (Run yum install gcc)
• Kernel development kit (Run yum install kernel-devel-`uname -r`)

Steps:

1. Startup your guest OS and login (either the console or SSH will do).
2. Go to the Devices -> CD/DVD Devices menu and select “VBoxGuestAdditions.iso”. If the option is not available, click on More CD/DVD Images… then add and attach the image.
3. Mount the CD image using mount -o ro -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom. If you get an error that /mnt/cdrom doesn’t exist, use mkdir /mnt/cdrom to create it. if you get an error that /dev/cdrom doesn’t exist or isn’t mountable, try restarting your guest.
4. Run the installation script using sh /mnt/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions-(your architecture: either x86 or amd64).run. Example: sh /mnt/cdrom/VBoxLinuxAdditions-x86.run.
5. If the GNU compiler and kernel development kit have been successfully installed, it will finish.
6. Reboot your system using reboot.

And now you’re done. :) I hope that helps someone.

You can thank Tux Training for some of the information in this tutorial.

From the article:

When I got my first job at a newspaper in 2001, I had a small Rolodex. I got it because everyone around me had one. What’s more, people talked about their Rolodexes. “I think I have her in my Rolodex,” they’d say. Or, “If he leaves, he’s going to take his Rolodex with him.” This, of course, meant that someone’s “contacts” were veeeeery important. Sometimes, people would take a card out of their Rolodex if I needed it, and I’d go copy the information and bring it back to them. There were people who stapled cards onto Rolodex pages and people who hand wrote all the information. Cards could be added or tossed or shared with ease. It was a genius, efficient and highly personal way of staying in touch.

It’s features like this that keep me on Gizmodo… Enjoy!