Have you ever seen a bunch of ^M characters in a text file? This odd character at the end of a line can also be represented as a Ctrl+M or <CTRL>M. You don’t know what it is, and you want it to go away.
Today, I’ll help you understand what that odd ^M character is, why it is in some of your documents, and how to get rid of them.
Since I have officially been using Ubuntu on my office laptop for more than a solid month without once booting into Windows, it’s time to mothball the Windows partition in order to give Linux more room to breathe.
I seriously considered removing Windows entirely as I don’t believe that I’ll have any legitimate need for it in the future. However, I think that I can get the Windows partition down to a manageable size and then forget about it.
I have a large number of computers. At my desk at home, I have two computers, Lumiere and Samus. I’ll often set up my office laptop, Rommie, on my desk as well.
I have a KVM hooked up between Lumiere and Samus, but I don’t use the video switching part as Lumiere has a dedicated 24″ LCD and Samus has a dedicated 24″ and 19″ LCDs. So, I use the KVM to do nothing more than switch the keyboard and mouse back and forth.
Things get more complicated with the addition of the laptop. Now I have another keyboard and a trackpad instead of another mouse. Thus, I’m always switching the KVM over between the two systems as well as moving my hand from the keyboard and mouse to the laptop and back again. There has to be a better way. Fortunately, there is.
image from New Life Service Co.
I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.
I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.
Over the past few years, I have developed a very strong desire to dump Windows entirely from my day to day computing. I tire of the obscure errors that no one has answers for yet are easily reproducible, the way that Microsoft is enforcing its “genuine Windows” initiative in ways that irritate paying customers while only mildly bothering pirates, and how Windows always has a black box model of operation which always keeps me, the user, out of the loop on what my own computer is doing. The final insult: User Account Control. I disabled that within minutes. Talk about a useless feature. People who know what they are doing will always click yes because they know what they are doing. People who don’t know what they are doing (the ones that were the primary focus for this feature) will quickly learn to always click yes because clicking no may prevent them from doing what they want.