Same here... I really like playing with KDE in KNOPPIX, but it has never quite made it to my desktop for some reason. I suppose I just like the simplicity of gnome-terminal (once I hide the menubar and scrollbar), and am also more familiar with how to strip down gnome-panel to the bare essentials. I don't really use much else from the desktop environment outside of those and the window manager.
Haven't really played with KNOPPIX much lately, mostly because I like running 64-bit systems. Ooh, looks like KNOPPIX does support a 64-bit kernel now as a boot option, and has a 64-bit chroot system. Maybe it's time to take it for a spin again...
Yeah, hopefully gkrellm gets sound effects someday, so I can tell when my SSD is up to something:-P It's also neat hearing my cooling fans spin up when my CPU/GPU is loaded.
The e16 theme was one of the NeXTStep-ish ones that came with the Debian/Ubuntu enlightenment themes package... will try to look it up when I get home. I actually like light-on-dark themes, so I made an amateurish attempt to customize it: http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome_dark.png
Unfortunately, I dorked something up so irrevocably that I somehow permanently broke e16, and ended up migrating to compiz-fusion soon after:-/ I miss having different desktop backgrounds on each virtual desktop, though.
I really wish someone would update WindowMaker with compositing and other modern features... I really loved the desktop/workspace paradigm, and the workspace-sensitive clip. It was also dirt-simple to make nice-looking customized themes for.
I bought my HTC myTouch 3G Slide from Craigslist for $250 last year. It gets HSDPA on T-mobile, giving me DSL-like speeds and latencies. Running CyanogenMOD 7.1, I always have a wifi access point anywhere. Best of all, the navigation features pretty much changed the way I plan and travel, so I found I could spend more time in interesting places... which was the real killer feature that I had really started to miss from the days when I had Google Maps Mobile on my work-issued blackberry.
I lived with a dumb phone for a long time. It could barely run opera mini. I used my phone/PDA more often to read than to talk to people, so I'm pretty happy to pay for my upgrade to the data services. With T-mobile it was $10 for unlimited wap and an extra $25 for unlimited Android data. I use the Google Voice app for SMS so I don't have to pay extra to exchange the occasional message with "those people".
The MT3GS does have limited application memory, so I can't install every useless game and utility available for Android. Which is a good thing. I picked up a Viewsonic G-Tablet from Craigslist for about $300 last year, and with the Vegan-Tab ROM it does a pretty good job of letting me play with all of the Android toys without worrying about compromising my phone. Yeah, people complain about the screen viewing angles, but it works for me, and otherwise has top-end Tegra 2 Android specs that are only recently being exceeded by the new Tegra 3 devices.
I didn't hate gnome that much, though... still like creating a minimalist panel for notifications and a handful of quicklaunch apps/drawers. Also I'm a sucker for composited translucent gnome-terminals
I love having gkrellm on the side for all of my system stats. But I'm also one of those people who get annoyed/nervous when I can't hear my hard disk heads seek under load.
Nowadays, I sort of use compiz-fusion, and maybe sometimes cairo-dock, but I don't really like it as much. But it's also more configurable and better maintained (e16 had some compositing artifacts with full-screen windows)
I use streamtuner + streamripper + audacious . Mostly listen to streams from http://somafm.com/ , because I otherwise don't like music enough to bother creating my own playlist / collection. Streamripper saves the stream to a big directory, so I can time-shift it into the car / subway later, while proxying the stream to audacious.
Every once in a while I'll drop them a donation, and buy a few tracks that I really like on Amazon. Which is much more than the music industry would get from me if I didn't listen to music at all... it has that weird effect, the more you hear a song, the more you want it.
About a year ago I was looking for something similar to the Radio Shack Armitron I had as a kid. I ended up getting an OWI robotic arm for my kids, which is pretty cheap at $35 on Amazon, also has a USB control board for an extra $15 or so. You assemble it yourself, but it's fairly easy as plastic models go, even relative to Legos, and the build quality is pretty high for the price.
There's even code. to get the USB control stuff working under *nix . I had to make a few minor tweaks to get it to compile on my Linux box, and it's a bit basic, but it worked! Would be fairly trivial to build a web interface to it along with a webcam. The only downside is that it still draws power from D-cells, but that's easy enough to live with.
Nagios isn't too difficult to set up to monitor lots of things, and lots of useful uptime metrics for every service, planned and unplanned maintenance, etc. fall out quite naturally from it. And you can kinda just keep adding modules to it into it and grow it until it's full of awesome.
I haven't personally used Redmine yet, but have been using Trac and everyone seems to agree that Redmine is the clear successor in terms of lightweight but capable trouble-ticket / project / task management systems.
Hell, yeah.. I don't know what all this talk about carbon sequestration is all about. I'm going to start an oxygen sequestration operation, and there's nothing anyone can legally do about it! Ha!
I think there's pretty good reason to believe that over the 14 billion year lifespan of the observable universe, we're still rather early to the evolved-life-in-the-universe party, which may explain why the universe isn't already littered with advanced civilizations.
Sure, it took us 4 billion years from the Earth's formation to where we are now (of that maybe 2 billion years of simple life forms, and maybe 500 million years of evolution of more complex life forms, and then about a million years to evolve somewhat intelligent life). But a lot of the 10 billion years before that was dedicated to our sun's first life as a main sequence star. During that time, our solar system (and probably most other solar systems) didn't have much in the way of heavy elements in their planets, which were still fusing in the early sun's core. Only after they had a full star's life span of about 8 billion years or so and went supernova did they spit up enough heavy elements from their core to create Earth-like planets with heavy iron cores that had a chance at creating magnetic fields.
So it doesn't really surprise me that any other kind of intelligent ET life hasn't already found and contacted us... it doesn't seem likely that many of them might have had more than a couple million years head start on us or anything, maybe a billion years max. And we're sort of stuck in some kind of evolutionary plateau right now.
Sweet! I say we take this trend far into the future, and have clothing fashion role models based on anime chan-style proportions! Big heads! Large doe-eyes! HUUGGE feet! Tiny bodies with bulbous life-preserver booties-n-boobies! And long trailing ribbons and utility belts and sashes that magically float a few inches off the body. Good times ahead!
I just want to say that these models don't go far enough!
I'm not terribly worried... the internet has always been somewhat just beyond the reach of the law. IMHO the only thing laws like this will do is increase the technical sophistication with which the internet can function beyond the reach of the law. If it gets more people to set up encryption / anonymization services / distributed mesh networks / decentralized DNS / etc. to circumvent attempts at enforcement, then it will be a better internet for the effort.
People have always wanted to get rich for the minimum amount of work. Having a piece of paper that says every else has to pay them money for doing something completely arbitrary is the easiest way these days, especially when you can also convince everyone else to pay for enforcement. With digital distribution, these days are behind us, and are only going to get further behind us as we get into various forms of widget replicator machines.
Bravo for putting up a good fight for sitting back and collecting royalties on an empire of past contributions, with no promise of future contribution or worse yet stifling the contribution of others. Now bow out as the curtains close on that act.
Somewhere there's another awesome animation of a huge tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile. The waves travel across the Pacific and swing around Hawaii, which acts like a lens and focuses multiple waves that converge right on Japan. Fun times!
Yeah, but at least it's a start... hopefully it'll lead to more engagement.
At least the muslims had the decency to send clerics to study and write about Western society (sometime around the 50s) before concluding that it was hopelessly corrupt and disengaging from it.
Sometimes it seems like we just thought we needed a third leg for our little axis-o'-evil metaphor.
Hopefully we'll still sort of find our way to their good side once they shed off the clowns acting as their leaders... most of our overreactions to him just seems to legitimize his criticisms:-P
I dunno, I used to have a very strong willful suspension of disbelief... insofar as I would see characters and not household-name actors acting.
But what has really ruined things for me is having had worked briefly in a production studio. Now I can barely watch ANY movie without deconstructing their lighting setup... "wow, there's no way that chick would have that kind of highlighting in that environment!"
So I really don't mind if studio take more artistic license with whatever special effects they do, just about all attempts at realism is shot already for me. If they have a meager budget, they can make do with the cheesy effects that were used in old Dr. Who or ST:TOS episodes, my willful suspension of disbelief and maybe some creative shooting that omits details does a better job keeping me in the zone than expensive visualization techniques. Especially when the expensive techniques defy the laws of physics (like lots of Hollywood explosions do)
Well, this is the Twitter generation. The worst thing that can possibly happen to you nowadays is that no one cares to listen to anything you say...
It used to be that ${God} would listen to everything you thought and prayed for, and that used to be enough to let people think their problems and concerns were being addressed. I think it's healthy to have that feeling replaced by the warm, comforting feeling that the government is watching you and might choose to intervene.
Or at the very least, it would encourage people to actually start using encryption:-P
Chrome might be replacing Firefox on my desktop, but I am finding myself turning to Firefox on Android more often to use pages that don't work well under Dolphin HD (UI layer for Google's standard browser component).
So, irony.
I still consider Firefox my "primary" browser. Even though I haven't used it on my home machine in months, it still has all my bookmarks, from back when I used to care about maintaining that kind of thing;-P
I mostly blame StumbleUpon & maybe Twitter (which I mostly use only as an rss feed) that weened me off of maintaining my own set of bookmarks to frequented sites. Oh, and of course the Google Awesomebar.
Slashdot Mirror
Same here... I really like playing with KDE in KNOPPIX, but it has never quite made it to my desktop for some reason. I suppose I just like the simplicity of gnome-terminal (once I hide the menubar and scrollbar), and am also more familiar with how to strip down gnome-panel to the bare essentials. I don't really use much else from the desktop environment outside of those and the window manager.
Haven't really played with KNOPPIX much lately, mostly because I like running 64-bit systems. Ooh, looks like KNOPPIX does support a 64-bit kernel now as a boot option, and has a 64-bit chroot system. Maybe it's time to take it for a spin again...
Any other good KDE LiveDVD distros?
Yeah, hopefully gkrellm gets sound effects someday, so I can tell when my SSD is up to something :-P It's also neat hearing my cooling fans spin up when my CPU/GPU is loaded.
The e16 theme was one of the NeXTStep-ish ones that came with the Debian/Ubuntu enlightenment themes package... will try to look it up when I get home. I actually like light-on-dark themes, so I made an amateurish attempt to customize it:
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome_dark.png
Unfortunately, I dorked something up so irrevocably that I somehow permanently broke e16, and ended up migrating to compiz-fusion soon after :-/ I miss having different desktop backgrounds on each virtual desktop, though.
I really wish someone would update WindowMaker with compositing and other modern features... I really loved the desktop/workspace paradigm, and the workspace-sensitive clip. It was also dirt-simple to make nice-looking customized themes for.
I bought my HTC myTouch 3G Slide from Craigslist for $250 last year. It gets HSDPA on T-mobile, giving me DSL-like speeds and latencies. Running CyanogenMOD 7.1, I always have a wifi access point anywhere. Best of all, the navigation features pretty much changed the way I plan and travel, so I found I could spend more time in interesting places... which was the real killer feature that I had really started to miss from the days when I had Google Maps Mobile on my work-issued blackberry.
I lived with a dumb phone for a long time. It could barely run opera mini. I used my phone/PDA more often to read than to talk to people, so I'm pretty happy to pay for my upgrade to the data services. With T-mobile it was $10 for unlimited wap and an extra $25 for unlimited Android data. I use the Google Voice app for SMS so I don't have to pay extra to exchange the occasional message with "those people".
The MT3GS does have limited application memory, so I can't install every useless game and utility available for Android. Which is a good thing. I picked up a Viewsonic G-Tablet from Craigslist for about $300 last year, and with the Vegan-Tab ROM it does a pretty good job of letting me play with all of the Android toys without worrying about compromising my phone. Yeah, people complain about the screen viewing angles, but it works for me, and otherwise has top-end Tegra 2 Android specs that are only recently being exceeded by the new Tegra 3 devices.
Word... E16 was pretty much my favorite desktop, and one of the few compositing window managers that also supported active thumbnails for my virtual desktops
(The little displays along the bottom left )
http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/pictures/misc/Screenshot-enlightenome.png
I didn't hate gnome that much, though... still like creating a minimalist panel for notifications and a handful of quicklaunch apps/drawers.
Also I'm a sucker for composited translucent gnome-terminals
I love having gkrellm on the side for all of my system stats. But I'm also one of those people who get annoyed/nervous when I can't hear my hard disk heads seek under load.
Nowadays, I sort of use compiz-fusion, and maybe sometimes cairo-dock, but I don't really like it as much. But it's also more configurable and better maintained (e16 had some compositing artifacts with full-screen windows)
I use streamtuner + streamripper + audacious . Mostly listen to streams from http://somafm.com/ , because I otherwise don't like music enough to bother creating my own playlist / collection. Streamripper saves the stream to a big directory, so I can time-shift it into the car / subway later, while proxying the stream to audacious.
Every once in a while I'll drop them a donation, and buy a few tracks that I really like on Amazon. Which is much more than the music industry would get from me if I didn't listen to music at all... it has that weird effect, the more you hear a song, the more you want it.
About a year ago I was looking for something similar to the Radio Shack Armitron I had as a kid. I ended up getting an OWI robotic arm for my kids, which is pretty cheap at $35 on Amazon, also has a USB control board for an extra $15 or so. You assemble it yourself, but it's fairly easy as plastic models go, even relative to Legos, and the build quality is pretty high for the price.
There's even code. to get the USB control stuff working under *nix . I had to make a few minor tweaks to get it to compile on my Linux box, and it's a bit basic, but it worked! Would be fairly trivial to build a web interface to it along with a webcam. The only downside is that it still draws power from D-cells, but that's easy enough to live with.
Nagios isn't too difficult to set up to monitor lots of things, and lots of useful uptime metrics for every service, planned and unplanned maintenance, etc. fall out quite naturally from it. And you can kinda just keep adding modules to it into it and grow it until it's full of awesome.
I haven't personally used Redmine yet, but have been using Trac and everyone seems to agree that Redmine is the clear successor in terms of lightweight but capable trouble-ticket / project / task management systems.
What is frelling wrong with you people?! What kind of lame expletive is "frack" ? :-P
Farscape > BSG, even with the annoying characters ^_^
First they came for the frackers, but I wasn't a fracker, so I said nothing.
Then they came for the fuckers, and there was no one left to come to my defense ?
Hell, yeah.. I don't know what all this talk about carbon sequestration is all about. I'm going to start an oxygen sequestration operation, and there's nothing anyone can legally do about it! Ha!
RFP: Re: MegaMaid
Ooh, ooh! Next, let's rank people from best to worst!
/ oblig xkcd
Ha, yeah, every company I've ever worked for has been trying to bury PHP :-P This bodes not well.
I think there's pretty good reason to believe that over the 14 billion year lifespan of the observable universe, we're still rather early to the evolved-life-in-the-universe party, which may explain why the universe isn't already littered with advanced civilizations.
Sure, it took us 4 billion years from the Earth's formation to where we are now (of that maybe 2 billion years of simple life forms, and maybe 500 million years of evolution of more complex life forms, and then about a million years to evolve somewhat intelligent life). But a lot of the 10 billion years before that was dedicated to our sun's first life as a main sequence star. During that time, our solar system (and probably most other solar systems) didn't have much in the way of heavy elements in their planets, which were still fusing in the early sun's core. Only after they had a full star's life span of about 8 billion years or so and went supernova did they spit up enough heavy elements from their core to create Earth-like planets with heavy iron cores that had a chance at creating magnetic fields.
So it doesn't really surprise me that any other kind of intelligent ET life hasn't already found and contacted us... it doesn't seem likely that many of them might have had more than a couple million years head start on us or anything, maybe a billion years max. And we're sort of stuck in some kind of evolutionary plateau right now.
Hey, if you remember the climax to "Fifth Element", the moon would have been extremely detrimental to life :-P
Sweet! I say we take this trend far into the future, and have clothing fashion role models based on anime chan-style proportions! Big heads! Large doe-eyes! HUUGGE feet! Tiny bodies with bulbous life-preserver booties-n-boobies! And long trailing ribbons and utility belts and sashes that magically float a few inches off the body. Good times ahead!
I just want to say that these models don't go far enough!
I'm not terribly worried... the internet has always been somewhat just beyond the reach of the law. IMHO the only thing laws like this will do is increase the technical sophistication with which the internet can function beyond the reach of the law. If it gets more people to set up encryption / anonymization services / distributed mesh networks / decentralized DNS / etc. to circumvent attempts at enforcement, then it will be a better internet for the effort.
People have always wanted to get rich for the minimum amount of work. Having a piece of paper that says every else has to pay them money for doing something completely arbitrary is the easiest way these days, especially when you can also convince everyone else to pay for enforcement. With digital distribution, these days are behind us, and are only going to get further behind us as we get into various forms of widget replicator machines.
Bravo for putting up a good fight for sitting back and collecting royalties on an empire of past contributions, with no promise of future contribution or worse yet stifling the contribution of others. Now bow out as the curtains close on that act.
Yay, a tools thread!
I am liking meld (python-based visual diff)
But I suppose they have a different concept of hierarchical diff than diffing/merging two directory structures.
I know you really want to see the animated version, with narration:
http://youtu.be/Lo5uH1UJF4A
Somewhere there's another awesome animation of a huge tsunami caused by an earthquake off the coast of Chile. The waves travel across the Pacific and swing around Hawaii, which acts like a lens and focuses multiple waves that converge right on Japan. Fun times!
Yeah, but at least it's a start... hopefully it'll lead to more engagement.
At least the muslims had the decency to send clerics to study and write about Western society (sometime around the 50s) before concluding that it was hopelessly corrupt and disengaging from it.
Sometimes it seems like we just thought we needed a third leg for our little axis-o'-evil metaphor.
Hopefully we'll still sort of find our way to their good side once they shed off the clowns acting as their leaders... most of our overreactions to him just seems to legitimize his criticisms :-P
Eek! And they also tied it into a square knot! Couldn't they at least have had the decency to tie it into a more secure figure-8 knot?!
I just think it's especially funny because it's not so hypothetical anymore! Oooh, burrn!
I work in an old wind tunnel today! They use it as a server room now.
Unfortunately they don't use it to cool the servers, because that would be just too awesome.
I dunno, I used to have a very strong willful suspension of disbelief... insofar as I would see characters and not household-name actors acting.
But what has really ruined things for me is having had worked briefly in a production studio. Now I can barely watch ANY movie without deconstructing their lighting setup... "wow, there's no way that chick would have that kind of highlighting in that environment!"
So I really don't mind if studio take more artistic license with whatever special effects they do, just about all attempts at realism is shot already for me. If they have a meager budget, they can make do with the cheesy effects that were used in old Dr. Who or ST:TOS episodes, my willful suspension of disbelief and maybe some creative shooting that omits details does a better job keeping me in the zone than expensive visualization techniques. Especially when the expensive techniques defy the laws of physics (like lots of Hollywood explosions do)
Well, this is the Twitter generation. The worst thing that can possibly happen to you nowadays is that no one cares to listen to anything you say...
It used to be that ${God} would listen to everything you thought and prayed for, and that used to be enough to let people think their problems and concerns were being addressed. I think it's healthy to have that feeling replaced by the warm, comforting feeling that the government is watching you and might choose to intervene.
Or at the very least, it would encourage people to actually start using encryption :-P
Chrome might be replacing Firefox on my desktop, but I am finding myself turning to Firefox on Android more often to use pages that don't work well under Dolphin HD (UI layer for Google's standard browser component).
So, irony.
I still consider Firefox my "primary" browser. Even though I haven't used it on my home machine in months, it still has all my bookmarks, from back when I used to care about maintaining that kind of thing ;-P
I mostly blame StumbleUpon & maybe Twitter (which I mostly use only as an rss feed) that weened me off of maintaining my own set of bookmarks to frequented sites. Oh, and of course the Google Awesomebar.