Easily Distracted

(Online) Comics I’ve been reading

• Butternut Squash – Start at the beginning. Polished style. Crude humour. Hilarious. (Thanks for pointing this out, Jon!)
• Kukuburi – Start at the beginning. Elaborate style. Adventure. Bit of a slow start. Actually the plot’s still unravelling, but the art is pretty and the story is getting interesting. (By the same guy as BNS.)
• Octopus Pie – Start at the beginning. Well written. Funny. Simple style.
• Basic Instructions – Start Anywhere. Sterile “instruction manual illustration” style. *gasp!* Kinda wordy, but has its moments.

Some fascinating TED videos I’ve been watching

• Colour and pattern changing sea life (the octopus is amazing!) All the following videos were in the “related” section.
• The Mantis Shrimp will kick your ass. I remember my diving instructor pointing one of these little guys out to me, but warning not to get too close, because it could crack my mask. 😮 Very cool.
• The odd Mola Mola fish. Great presentation and presenter.
• The life of ant colonies from someone who’s been studying them for 20 years.

Some books I’ve been reading

• Python – Essential Reference by David Beasley: This book is exactly what it says; an essential reference. The first section is an incredibly concise introduction to Python and should be read by everyone. The rest is nice to scan over to see what’s available and keep as a reference. I’d compare it to the K&R C programming book. This book is meant for programmers.
• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: Pretty much considered required reading material for usability folk. Well written, lots of examples, and often entertaining.
• Character Design for Mobile Devices by NFGMan: I’ve looked at every beautiful, full-colour page. Some great pixel art and history in here. But I’ve read almost nothing. I didn’t really get it to read, I guess. Makes my desk look h-a-w-t.

I signed up for Twitter. If you ever wanted to know what I had for breakfast, now you can! Yay. I also updated my blog’s sidebar with custom widgets; something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I broke up the standard “Meta” widget into a Subscribe and an Admin/Login widget, and shoved the admin/login right below the Pages. I also made a replacement tag cloud widget that can specify the maximum number of tags to include… I’m not sure why the standard widget (which defaults to 45, and gets quite big) wasn’t created with that option. Also, taking Twitter’s motto to heart, I added my new Twitter feed as “Sutff I’m Doing” using a standard RSS widget. I might have to modify that widget to strip off my username from every post, though… it bothers me. And I should do something with the search….. I just haven’t figured out what. Anyway, I think it looks much nicer now.

I’m sure widgets probably already exist to do what I want, but I wanted to play around with WordPress and PHP a little. ^.^ Being neither a WordPress nor a PHP person, How to Create WordPress Widgets and WordPress Widgets with Control Panels were very helpful.

Radial menus in GNOME! libsexier, indeed! Awesome. I was wondering when radial menus would creep their way to the desktop. After watching the video, I enabled Desktop Effects in Feisty and ran the demo, but the performance wasn’t very good. I’m not sure why. Should I be using an updated Cairo or other lib? Does my computer just suck that much? 🙁

iwant iphoto and imovie. F-Spot devs, please check out the iphoto demonstration, particularly the usage of “events.” (version 4 is out! I still need to try that…) Anyone capable of working on a movie editor for linux, please look at imovie. 🙂 I’m totally jealous of these 2 particular pieces of software… as I would use them a lot.

The Office 2007 UI Bible documents the history of Microsoft Office’s UI and various decisions that were made. I’m not done reading it, but it’s quite interesting.

Compiz Fusion is lookin nice…

More worthwhile links

• Some nice tutorials with the Gimp and Inkscape to get started with these great (Free) tools.
• BOOKS!! Lots of Books! Free!
• Ghosts of Cité Soleil (Ghosts of Sun City) looks very interesting.
• 130 hungry cats in a small room with one person tossing food!
• Hitler’s live account gets banned.
• Did you know college republicans are especially prone to medical conditions preventing them from enrolling in the army and the Antichrist will be someone that promotes peace?
• Absolutely awesome documentary on Host Clubs in Japan. Saw it on Shirley‘s shared items.
• Learn about yourself and others from blackjack? Yup. 🙂

I think my laptop has officially died. I knew the hard drive was going, and it finally went. Knowing that day was nearing, I didn’t have any important information on it, so that’s ok. Anyway, I bought a new 2.5″ hd to replace it… but it doesn’t always work. I know, that sounds strange, but depending on how I keep the hd in my laptop (manually, with my hand seems to work more often than actually putting the cover on) it seems the drive does not connect completely, and most definitely not consistently. 🙁 I know the new drive is ok, because I also bought a 2.5″ drive enclosure to hopefully salvage my old laptop drive (not able) and was able to test it out fine. Yesterday, I got fed up and decided to take apart my laptop and see if I could see a problem of a loose connection or something. Unfortunately, disassembling a laptop is not very straight-forward. Even after removing every screw I could find and prying at the snapped edges I could not figure out how to completely remove the back cover from the laptop – it still seem connected somewhere in the centre. I didn’t want to force anything so I thought I’d better put it back together. After putting the HD in again, and booting it up, I saw “IDE #1 ERROR” which means there is now something wrong w/the DVD drive. Great, I either loosened or damaged something while trying to take it apart. Oddly enough, it then pretends to work and boots…. I can use it for a short while, and then it gets read errors and I must restart, unsure if it will start again. *Sigh*

I’m not sure if I should take it somewhere to get repaired. The laptop is over 4 years old and no longer covered by warranty… so the service alone would likely be costly, before looking at any replacement parts. The battery has been dead for quite a while so that’s another thing to replace… It’s probably a better option to hold off on anything laptop-related until I need one, then just get a new one appropriate to my needs at the time.

Maybe I’ll try taking this thing apart again….

some links

• photosynth
• excellent video on UI design
• nice site for guiding laptop upgrades
• cheap replacement batteries!

Gatherings

Had a nice get-together with the gifu-crew, on Sunday. Chinese-Taiwanese-Japanese fusion hot-pot shabu shabu. 😮 The pot was courtesy of Shirley (thanks!), despite her not being able to make it. Unfortunately, I don’t think there were are any pictures captured in the digital medium to show. But it was good times!

Ubuntu Feisty

My Desktop PC was not able to complete a dist-upgrade of Ubuntu from Dapper to Feisty, and consequently has trouble booting. Yes, I tried skipping Edgy, and I advise you not to do the same. I’ve decided I’m just going to start with a fresh install, because my system was very cluttered with stuff I don’t use or need. So I started going about backing stuff up, from a live CD boot onto my external USB drive… it was becoming very apparent that this would be painfully time consuming, as I was quickly running out of space. Easiest solution? Get another hard drive. I did that and am now running Feisty. Most of my settings and everything have been transferred and I must say I’m very impressed with the latest Ubuntu. Videos seem to “just work” on Gstreamer Totem, and many things seem much snappier. It will be making its way to my laptop soon, as well.

goals

When my computers are all back and healthy, I plan on regulating a few short-term goals:

• Reading a chapter a day in my Python book, Dive into Python. I think I’m on Chapter 6 or something, at the moment.
• Blogging every 2-3 days. I don’t need to have earth shattering news to report (do I ever?), but if I can’t say a little something every few days, then I’m certainly not doing enough with my time.
• Update blog aesthetics. ’nuff said.
• Enjoy the sunshine, when it comes.

I was planning on making a nautilus extension for easy image resizing, but someone beat me to the punch. It uses ImageMagick, is pretty much what I had in mind, and seems to work great. 🙂 I just tested it out with my meal from the Cloud 9 rotating restaurant, on March 8th. (I went there to take advantage of their extended Dine out Vancouver with a couple friends.) I now demand that you become hungry, with pictures of FOOD!

links of the day

• Western Perspectives on Japanese Game Development – Interesting Gamasutra link John sent me.
• Family Guy vs Christianity – I swear, Family Guy is the Kevin Bacon of Youtube.

Some very cool stuff in the wonderful world of software(tm):

• Flash 9 beta for Linux (finally!)
  OMG OMG OMG – so much better.  faster.  no (or way fewer) sound issues.  GTK standalone player available, as well.  Now I don’t have to cringe when I receive a link to “that really cool flash site.”
• Gaim 2.0 beta 4 multi-protocol IM client (cross-platform)
  Vast improvements.  File transfers on MSN still teh suck, tho.  And, of course, it doesn’t support the anything complicated.  Now I will use aMSN for complicated features, and Gaim for minimal chattiness.  Like when I’m supposed to be doing homework.  ….  Like now.  🙁
• Songbird 0.2 webby music player/manager (cross-platform)
  If you’re still of the 1) Find music file in filesystem 2) double click to play in audio player mindset, please come to the current generation.  You need a library manager.  You do.  This is based on Firefox XUL and it’s pretty slick.  It’s even quite snappy!  It browses the web, collects media files from web pages…. oh just click the link and watch a video about it.

Note: Posted in Deepest Sender. Which seems to prefer ‘BR’ tags over ‘P’ tags.  Eewww….

FAZED – Videos

Jesse linked me to this. Hilarious. I think I’d be willing to pay a small sum for someone to digitally enhance it and add a white wifebeater to the horny turtle. That would just be awesome.

Posted as a test of flock. Pretty cool. Seems fast too. Almost motivation enough to get a flickr account for the photo uploading-blogging-easiness. Still not gonna switch from Firefox, though.

Technical diagram of technicalness

I renewed my domain name for another two years. For some reason, I felt inclined to make this:

Some random links

• Peek at next gen Linux desktop
• Jack Bauer Facts
• Chuck Norris Facts