I don’t think I truly know what the words “vacation” or “relax” mean. Seriously. We’re visiting friends right now and I’ve taken the week off, conceivably to “relax”, or have a vacation. But I don’t know if I’d be able to relax if my life depended on it. When I’ve not been running around town with my little brood, or busily doing “fun” stuff, I’ve been trying to get caught up on my work e-mail, personal e-mail, and GSOC project, among other busy-work. Not exactly relaxing fare. I’ve recently realized that this state is not necessarily a good one to exist in, and have become increasingly aware of an absence of rest, peace, and tranquility. So, in an attempt to Read more…

I switched from SUSE 10.3 to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) just this evening. It’s always good to get a feel for how the various distros are doing. Anyway, it took me a bit of digging to figure out how to get the artwiz fonts (smoothansi, in particular) to work as my konsole font. Thanks to this article for the help! Couple of notes: Ubuntu Hardy doesn’t ship xfonts-artwiz anymore, apparently. Download them from this sourceforge project. The trick is to tell fontconfig to use bitmapped fonts by running sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-config.

I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely unhelpful people. The guy actually said “gee, it’s kind of funny that you’re calling in with a Linksys router that isn’t able to get an IP address today–we’ve had a lot of Linksys router users call us today and tell us that.” I asked him if he didn’t think that that might be an indication of a problem in Charter’s setup and that it might Read more…

Oh HECK yes!!! I am SO buying this the split-second it comes out!!! Here’s an awesome review to boot!

I’ve been using Firefox 3, beta5 for a while now and am very much liking it. It’s crashed a fair bit, but that’s understandable being that it’s only a beta5. One thing that has bothered me, though, was that quite a few of my must-have extensions aren’t released for FF3 yet. TinyURL Creator, for one, is notably absent. Well, thanks to this page, I found a really simple workaround to enable (possibly dangerous and a bad idea to do) your old extensions in FF3: All I had to do was to create a “extensions.checkCompatibility” boolean field in the Firefox about:config and set it to false. As you can guess, this disables the compatibility check for the extensions, and all the Read more…

KDE3, KDE4, Plasma, Twinview == Not Good Originally uploaded by vanRijn Dear Lazyweb, This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3’s kicker and KDE4’s plasma stacked, which is less than fun and not quite useful. Also, I can’t get plasma/kwin4/kde4 to play nicely with twinview. I have an external monitor that runs @1280×960 and my laptop screen that runs @1280×800. I think it’s confusing plasma, and it looks like this. =:( Anyone know why or how to make it better?

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, but he was right on, which made it even worse for me, as I was sitting in the eye exam chair, trying way too hard not to laugh. If you’ve never seen Brian’s eye doctor skit, you totally owe it to yourself to watch it. NOW! Oh, and as an added bonus to the thoroughly entertaining morning, I found out that I have pretty durned Read more…

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s plugged in and take up a lot of space. If it works for me, it can work for you too! Now, seriously, this sucketh mightily. I was toying with the idea of going out and plunking down a large amount of $CURRENCY for one of them new-fangled big-screen, flat-panel dealies–especially being that the PS3’s graphics are totally wasted on the old CRTs we have had, Read more…

I have discovered how to save millions on Christmas and birthday gifts. Just have something shipped to you that is packed in bubble wrap. The “something” goes to you, and the bubble wrap keeps the wife and kids entertained for hours!