KPilot Almost Progress
Blef. So, I finally got a chance, late tonight, to hit the code, so to speak. After an encouraging couple of e-mails with a KPilot user (hi Ryan!), and my own discouraging lack of time as of late to touch KPilot code, and the fact that I can't sync with my Treo 700p (grr), I dug in and started looking at the guilty code.
Mencoder, DVD Rip, Volume Increase, Your PSP, and You!
Holy crap. The time between iterations of testing video encoding is prohibitive to quick progress as well as a (several) good night's sleep.
Embedded Album Covers, Your PSP, Amarok, and You
So... first off, I Googled for Amarok, hoping to find some new sweet pixels and instead I find this. Um... so not the Amarok that I know and love.
I am a nerd
So, lest there be any confusion about the subject, I'm a nerd. You can blame my wife for making me take the test. And there goes 5 minutes of my life that I'll never get back...
Ah, Now I See What You’re Talking About
It's an extremely difficult thing, trying to support this weird beast, the Palm. Or, more accurately, it's an extremely difficult thing trying to support the numerous personalities and implementations of the Palm beast. I mean, KDE PIM as a start is about as unsexy as you could want. But genius me, I focus on the ugliest duckling of KDE PIM: KPilot. Don't get me wrong... I'm a gadget geek, enjoy Palms immensely, and have been for... gosh... 8+ years now?? (Wow, just had to check what year the IIIe came out...). And, there's a reason that I'm hacking on KPilot, and that's because I honestly believe it's the best PIM-synching Palm solution in FLOSS-land.
Better Firefox Themes??
Okay, seriously, I think we could just delete 90% of the firefox themes on addons.mozilla.org. Truly, I am almost physically ill after spending a few minutes looking through them. And the ones I've found on deviantart are out of date and unusable. Surely, there must be a top-secret repository of really good Firefox 2 themes somewhere, right? Certainly this can't be all that there is?
Bah humbug.
You know what? I think I'd even consider paying some small amount of $cash for something truly beautiful and groundbreaking.
MWM looking for Bling/Compiz/Emerald/KDE3 love
Dear Lazyweb,
KDE NetworkManager workaround
In case anyone else hits this.... In one of the more recent releases of our beloved KDE, code was added to more smoothly integrate with networking. Namely, the attempt is now made to be aware of NetworkManager-initiated network connections, as well as know when NetworkManager doesn't think it's connected so as to not keep trying network activities when there might not be a network connection. Excellent idea, honestly.
However (you knew there was one), I have a love/hate relationship with NetworkManager and knetworkmanager. When they work, they work great. When they don't it's supremely irritating. Case in point: I'm at a friend's house. He's using standard WEP and a non-broadcasted ESSID. I tried all manners of asking NetworkManager nicely for a good 10 minutes to join the network to no avail. In the next 30 seconds, I manually iwconfig'd, ifconfig'd, and dhclient'd my way onto the network and things are working swimmingly. Almost. You see, with the changes we made (see paragraph #1), now KMail and Konqueror, etc., think that I don't have a network connection because NetworkManager told them I don't. However, I've discovered that I can coax KMail, Konqi, and friends to try using the network connection that I really do have (honestly!) but NetworkManager couldn't provide for me by doing this on the CLI:
Thinkpad T61 and Iogear 4-port USB KVM Switch
This, the next exciting story in my Adventures With the Thinkpad T61 At Work (TM) =;).... So I got a really sweet-looking IOGEAR 4-port USB KVM Switch at work. But when I plugged it into the T61, although the nVidia driver was able to find the external display (auto-detect button thingey), it only gave me 2 options for resolution, the larger of which was 640x480, which obviously is rubbish. So I stumbled across this helpful ubuntu page which gave me the clue I needed:
$200 Ubuntu Linux PC Now Available at Wal-Mart
This is pretty darned cool. I bought a $300 desktop from Walmart a few years ago and it's still running OpenSUSE and serving as a pretty capable desktop machine for the family. Definitely worthwhile to put our FOSS dollars where our mouths are too, imho. Let's support the companies who are actively putting the software that we think is best out there! =:)