Monthly Archive for September, 2007

added some last.fm widgets

Published
by
Julian
on Thu, September 20 2007
in apps and www
. 0 Comments

I added two last.fm widgets to the left sidebar. One enables you to listen to my last.fm neighbours’ radio the other one, the quilt, shows album covers of music I listened to.

I still can’t figure out how the widget determines what covers to show, as it shows stuff I’ve not been listening to for quite a while and it also does show same covers multiple times. It looks nice and kind of hypnotic though, so I’m probably going to keep it.

Maybe I can get the information of how it works from somewhere, it’s not that relevant but my curiosity drives me nuts.

Existence

Published
by
Julian
on Thu, September 20 2007
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

At last I understand.
We hurt others by our very existence.
That is just the way we live.

We need to learn to forgive,
Need to realise that existence is to be shared.
We’re not just here to exist, but to find the strength to co-exist.

It may start from something small,
It may even seem impossible,
But we have to start from somewhere.

Hope is our legacy

– Casshern

new colours for my pypanel

Published
by
Julian
on Mon, September 10 2007
in Linux, Ubuntu and apps
. 0 Comments

I’m still working on desktop appearance. I just entered the well known orange-grey-phase probably everyone working on his desktop looks should have encountered at some point.

orapypa.png

hex entries of my ~/.pypanelrc

BG_COLOR = "0x000000"
TASK_COLOR = "0xffffff"
FOCUSED_COLOR = "0xffc313"
SHADED_COLOR = "0x00ff00"
MINIMIZED_COLOR = "0x808080"
DESKTOP_COLOR = "0xffc313"
CLOCK_COLOR = "0xffc313"
LINE_COLOR = "0xffffff"
SHADE = 180

looks best on a bright background

FoxNews and the global warming.

Published
by
Julian
on Fri, September 7 2007
in Ubuntu, fun, real world and video
. 0 Comments

Yet again FoxNews found the reason for global warming, and another time it’s not mankind but this time it’s the plant with his friend the tree. *sigh*

Picking up a new study and dropping the relevant lines is the way News are made. At least it seems FoxNews likes it that way.

Enough talk, just see for yourself.

Continue reading ‘FoxNews and the global warming.’

A new beginning - with Arch and Openbox

Published
by
Julian
on Fri, September 7 2007
in Linux
. 3 Comments

Despite recognising the benefits of a major easy-to-use Linux distribution like Ubuntu, which without question is a great OS, people know they often lack the speed of their not-so-easy-to-use counterparts like Gentoo or, in my case, Arch.

Earlier in my Linux life there I had like almost any experienced user a Gentoo period. Setting flags, compiling, speed and Portage in general made you feel leet. But after some year or two and multiple set up Linux boxes I began to wonder if this is really the way to go and if the stability and speed are worth all the pain of waiting some hours for some greater graphical applications to compile - I came to the conclusion it wasn’t.

I decided to give Debian a shot (which is still running on my home server by the way) and stuck with it some time. Setting up a working system was just a piece cake. There is this saying that even a chicken could install Debian if you just put enough grain onto the enter key. Funny enough, it’s kind of true.

Debian’s flaw in my opinion was or rather is the very conservative package policy. Sure, it might be awesome for a working place and really kinky for servers but I still missed something for my desktop usage.

As time went by there came up the rumours of a Debian based desktop distribution, Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a pretty decent distro with great usability and a 6 month stable release cycle, with a huge community and many third party repositories.

The con is that the usability comes hand in hand with a lack of simplicity and foremost speed. :(

So I decided it was time to move on a look for another distro for my main box.

And I found Arch.

Arch is a i686 optimised binary distro, the base installation uses up about 80MB of disk space, and it has no graphical configuration tools, still easy to configure as every important rc is located in /etc .

I decided to adapt this simplicity to X by using Openbox, a very simple and fast window manager in the spirit of other well known *boxes like black- or fluxbox.

Screenshot:

openboxscreen.png

Panel: pypanel

mpd-client: Sonata