Desktop – Kasperian Moving Parts

On Gaming, Highest Quality, Best Price

Tuesday September 1, 2015

I am a nerd and love video games. I looked into buying a gaming laptop, but after researching and talking to some friends who know more about this space than I do, I decided to go a different route. First, the GPUs they put into laptops are nowhere near as good as the same model GPU you get in a desktop machine. The GTX-980M GPU is nowhere near as good as the GTX-980. Second, gaming laptops are REALLY expensive. I was tempted to get a top of the line Alienware gaming laptop with a GTX-980M GPU. It cost over $2200. And that’s for a graphics card that won’t be able to handle what I want to throw at it anyway. Read more…

Apples, Desktop

Changing Background/Wallpaper on OS X With Multiple Spaces and Multiple Monitors

Tuesday September 25, 2012

There are a bunch of partial solutions and comments and questions “out there” about how to change the background/wallpaper on OS X so that you have the same background image on all of your desktops/spaces and all of your monitors. The way Apple has implemented this, at least on Lion, is goofy as heck. I’ve been participating in one of these discussions on this Apple Support Community thread and while there’s been a couple of decent hacks, I’ve not really liked any of them so far. I was playing with this again today, not really happy with any of the solutions I’ve seen. I first started looking into python/appscript, which used to expose the internal bits necessary to do this, Read more…

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Linux, Open Source

Goodbye, for now at least, Linux Desktop

Sunday November 13, 2011

I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am. At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason. But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and Read more…

Apples, Desktop, KDE, Linux

Having spent a few days with his MacBook Pro…

Saturday November 14, 2009

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all of the issues at hand. The impetus in this case was: Frustration with a particular admittedly proprietary application that didn’t use to have any problems in Ubuntu 8.10, and since then has been nothing but trouble for me and roughly 90,000 other people. You may say that it’s unfair to fly off the handle at one proprietary application having problems and condemn all of Desktop Read more…

Apples, Desktop, Linux

Why Isn’t Desktop Linux “There” Yet?

Tuesday November 10, 2009

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re in the mood for a good rant or are bored beyond belief or want to hear about how to get Ubuntu Karmic installed on a MacBook Pro (system 5,5), stick around. Otherwise, I’ll understand. So, I’ve realized that I need to buy a personal laptop for a while now but have been putting it off because it’s expensive and a big ordeal. I don’t do Read more…

Desktop, KDE, KPilot, Open Source

KDE 4.2 is flat out going to rock

Tuesday November 11, 2008

That’s my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I’ve been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I’m thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I’m seeing! Recent KMail improvements are awesome. Plasma is getting more and more bullet-proof and gorgeous by the week. Kwin just keeps getting more and more stable and purty. Kdevelop4 and Kate are getting some SERIOUSLY cool enhancements Read more…

Desktop, Google, KDE, Life in General

KDE/Qt California People Sightings!!

Thursday October 30, 2008

I’m out in California this week (belated warning) again, WOOT! I got to spend another awesome weekend at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. This year, Leo and I were the official KDE representatives, but Thiago, Simon, Ariya, and Olivier got to join in on the fun too. And then today and tomorrow are the Qt DevDays, where I finally got to meet blauzahl, greeneg, and hays, as well as catch up again with the Qt dudes and njaard. It’s a really, hectic, crazy week, trying to cram everything into it, and I’m tired as hell, but it’s been an awesome week thus far. Hopefully my body will hold off on the usual travelling sickness until I get home. Read more…

Desktop, KDE

Bringin’ Sexy (urxvt) Back

Wednesday October 22, 2008

Let me tell you a (short) tale, my children. In the dark but awesome olden days, before KDE and GNOME were but glimmers in the eyes of their current communities, there existed a bunch of scrappy hackers who would take the best X applications out there and hack them into submission to their will. Why, I don’t have time to tell you of the years where olvwm reigned supreme, nor of the dark days when wm2 brazenly rotated window titles 90 degrees and put window titlebars on the side *gasp!* of the windows, nor of the exciting times when AfterStep was KING, nor the outright courage shown by rasterman who started hacking fvwm2 to do his bidding in exciting and Read more…

Desktop, KDE, Linux

Replace Laptop Video Card? Replace Laptop? Give Up Hope?

Sunday October 12, 2008

I just read Alexander Dymo (adymo)’s blog post “KDE4 performance on NVidia 8600GT: problem solved by bying ATI” and am quite sad because I’m pretty sure that it’s impossible to rip out the nVidia Quadro NVS 140M that’s crammed into the motherboard on my laptop and replace it with an ATI (or Intel?) chip. I know I blogged recently about how zippy KDE 4.2/trunk was after the latest nVidia driver update, but it only takes running for about a day solid until the performance on this laptop becomes unbearable again. And I’m not even using Firefox–thinking that Opera would fare better being Qt4 and all. Also making me sad is the fact that all 5 of the things Alexander mentioned Read more…

Desktop, KDE

nVidia 177.80 Released!

Wednesday October 8, 2008

Holy crap. KDE 4.2 frickin’ flies! And contrary to my previous post, now if I set IPP=2, everything’s blazing fast and I’m actually able to resize konsole again! WooooooT!!! YAY progress!!! [[ UPDATE ]] : Added link to my previous post. I had already posted my xorg.conf settings and since then, the only thing I’ve changed was IPP=2 from IPP=1. HTH!