I picked up an Acer netbook a couple weeks back. Out of the box it came with windows 7 installed. I personally don’t want anything to do with windows, but I still made sure to set up a clone of the hard drive as it came from factory just in case using clonezilla so I could return it to factory spec if I have to. As a piece of hardware I find it to be a solid system to work with. though I know some don’t see the utility of an ultra-portable that doesn’t have an optical drive. I personally don’t see anything like this as anything other then a work system that you take. After all, if you don’t constantly need an optical drive, then why should you carry the bulk for it?
I installed Gentoo linux onto this system, and after a day of compiling the base system I got into a command line and proceeded to get the system operational with the KDE 4.4.3 Desktop Enviroment. I need to go back at some point and try to actually slim down what’s actually on here software wise. I do like the 4.4 netbook setting in the desktop appearence settings for KDE.
I got the chance to install and toy around with KDE 4.4.0 and some of the new program additions. Right now everything seems to function rather well, no real changes in performance from 4.3.0. It’s the new way of selecting plasma apps for the desktop, desktop activities, and desktop layouts that take the cake this time around.
In previous 4.x releases you got a scroll menu of applets for your desktop and panels when you wanted to add widgets. Now you get a filmstrip at the bottom of the screen that you can select your widgets from. it makes looking for things a little easier.
Desktop acivitys are also a good thing. This plays into the netbook desktop layout which allows you to organize your self and your display as well as you can. It also starts out as a netbook layout setup to make your life easier if you have a netook your installing on. I suggest you give it a try and see what you think.
I’ve spent the last few hours trying to figure out some things relating to my blog here and my accounts with facebook, myspace, twitter, all of that. fact is though, it seems everyone has pages upon pages of social networking sites. If you only needed one that be nice. But each site grants different things. And the bitch of it is that you really should try to link most of them together as you can. Hence why I’m having such a headache. I found stuff to help with all of it but it’s difficult for someone like me that’s completely dead to the world on some things.
But the real thing to think of that I’m getting to is this. Do we really need to spread what we post from here to every corner of the net? Does everyone need to know everything at every moment? Are we so in need of knowing that someone is listening that we have to continuously post place after place after place?
Just some questions for you to consider.
I’ve been thinking of all the possibility of using the miccroblogging services like Twitter. Frankly right now I don’t do a LOT of tweating, and i don’t have much I would WANT to tweat about at times. It seems to me at least that the idea is just short snippets of things that don’t really matter surrounding a lot of other things. Not idea if it’s really worth the time to do any of it. It might be good to have twitter when say you at an event and your reporting back to the audience in short spurts to let them know how things are. Personally I prefer the ability to have my entire article here and then edit it. I’m not 100% sure it’s a good thing FOR ME. I’ll work on it some, but who knows.
I have a few new articles that will be going up soon as I write them. A few things to consider and the like.
Started playing around with KOffice 2 today. Honestly I don’t really mind it. A lot of the features that I had issues with from before have been fixed. The program is bringing up OpenOffice.org generated odt files up properly now without an extra blank page at the beginning. The program did crash when I hit undo, which is a bug I hope will be fixed.
As a program I do like how it looks. It still needs to be able to export to HTML properly for me to be really happy, considering I need HTML for Darkscribes.
I saw this on slashdot and was floored by the coolness factor. This is definitely a DIY I would attempt if I had the time, energy, materials, and funds to pull i off.
This Maximum PC Article has all the information you need to create your own basic multi-touch surface computer. Obviously You could take that and modify it as you saw fit, perhaps a different setup for video, change the cabinets design, add ports or drive bays to the outside to make things interesting. Maybe even go as far as o add everything else you want.
Definitely worth reading, if you have the time and money certainly worth trying.
Code,
Linux |
Posted by LD
October 29th, 2008
Was discussing QTScript calls planned for and already in Amarok 2 in the freenode channel tonight. Seems a good portion of the functionality I’d need for my media device script would need to be added into Amarok as it stands. Which means I’m back to C++ for the entire process, and to build what needs to be included into Amarok 2. Little bit more work than I was thinking when I first thought to try this.
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Was tweaking around some of the old links and found a fellow I linked to a while back in a post about the Sony Reader and iRex Iliad. Seems he’s started a few new blogs and posted recently about Sony Reader distribution. He’s posted a lot of articles relating to eBook distribution both in relation to devices and the actual content as well. Frankly as I look at the front page for Amazon.com and look at the ever present Kindle ad on the front page I have to wonder if eBooks will finally have a chance of reaching a larger market. I first started being interested in them when I had access to Microsoft Reader and purchased several books from Amazon.com in that format. They were decent enough, and I had an iPaq at the time so reading off it wasn’t a big deal for me. I enjoyed it. I even had fanfictions on it and read them using pocket word. I so enjoyed my first Jornada PDA.
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I’ve been using KDE 4.1.2 for an extended period and I am very pleased with the setup. The new QT 4 based tool kit has helped improve a lot of perceived issues with appearence and functionality. The elimination of ARTS in preference for Phonon was a good idea for the most part. Several people may have issues with it however, as they would prefer direct calls to ALSA. Considering the intent of making all KDE apps cross platform however I don’t see that as logical or practical.
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Social Networking, communication, and the way we share.
I’ve been hearing about social networks for the last few years. Things like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg. Now, the point of these sites originally was to give people a place they could post their interests, thoughts, and generally get in contact with those they share common cause. I’ve spent some time the last few days pondering the technical merits of Twitter while I sighed up, integrated it with dhampirdreams.com and general added folk to watch. This all started when I decided that I wanted to finally play around with the microblogging plasmoid in KDE 4.x. Thankfully all I had to do was enter the website address and my login information for Twitter. As you can see from the screenshot it just keep the current tweets and such plastered there. I’m hoping to find more people to follow over time. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Commentary, Opine, Social, Twitter
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