Brilliance « equivocal ramblings

Archive for the ‘Brilliance’ Category

Make Your Band’s Album Cover Meme

Thursday, February 19th, 2009

The meme has been going around, and here’s my take — click to embiggen :)

Make your band’s album cover meme:

Go to Wikipedie’s special random page. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
Go to Quotations Page’s random quotations page. The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
Go to Flickr’s explore the last seven days page. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

Posted in Asides, Brilliance, Humour, Internet, Memes | 1 Comment »

Internationalisation and Localisation

Monday, January 19th, 2009

Found in the comments for the British English Dictionary pack for Firefox 3:

“My favourite dictionary. COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR COLOUR See? None of those are spelling errors!”

— scmartindale

Posted in Asides, Brilliance, Internet, Software | No Comments »

Windows 7 Beta: Performance

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009

After having used Vista for 2 years since I got my Dell, I’ve to say that it’s the slowest, buggiest version of Windows by far, even beating Windows ME for the title. Random lockups, sluggish UI, more random lockups, skipping audio, inability to delete/copy/move files in any reasonable amount of time (”Calculating remaining time” anyone?) to name a few of the problems that plagued Vista.

Windows 7 seem to have fixed all that. It just works (so far). None of the earlier problems are prevalent in 7. Speedy UI, effortless file operations, and no more skipping audio.

Let’s just hope it stays this way. Sad that I keep applying the (so far) qualifier to anything I have to say about Windows 7 — Microsoft has let me down too many times before.

Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | 3 Comments »

Windows 7 Beta

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

So I installed Windows 7. I guess most of you have watched the videos (and if you haven’t go do so) by now, and so I’ll just confirm what we all saw: The new taskbar kinda rocks. The system is fast (really fast), and most of my stuff just works out of the box.

More updates as I actually use it properly.

Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | No Comments »

I ♥ Amarok

Friday, December 19th, 2008

I’ve been using Amarok on my GNOME desktop for years now, and loving it all the way. Recently I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora 10, and there’s no Amarok 1.4.x package — just the 2.x.

2.x is still nascent in terms of functionality, and every other Gtk based player I’ve tried (Banshee, Rhythmbox, Quod Libet, Exaile, BMPx, Listen etc.) don’t do it for me.

Long live Amarok 1.4.x. Whilst not quite what the authors of Amarok dream of — they want to turn it into a rich media platform, which is a nice idea — it was (and still is) amazingly good at what it was meant to do. Play and manage music.

P.S.: So good in fact, that I installed the dependencies and compiled the source for 1.4.10

Posted in Brilliance, Design, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »

Fedora 10

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

I’ve been running Fedora 10 since the Preview they released a while back and I must say that I’m incredibly impressed. After switching away from FC 3 to NoNameYet (which became Ubuntu) I’ve never looked back, being thoroughly impressed with it. Fedora has managed to make me reconsider, flaws and all.

First Impressions

It all starts when you boot the computer, and the extremely impressive start-up screen comes on. Not is it just animated, it’s of a blue sun with solar flares. I rebooted 2 or 3 times to just look at it. The show is all too soon over though, since Fedora 10 boots quite fast, almost matching Vista.

Freedom at a (really low) price

Now, Fedora is of course geared towards Freedom in the somewhat narrower than usual definition of software freedom — Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Now this comes at a bit of a price for the typical user — you’ll have to spend quite a few minutes installing bits and pieces of proprietary, or otherwise un-free software like Nvidia drivers, MP3 playback, Java and so on. This isn’t particularly difficult thanks to RPMFusion.

Shiny new stuff

Fedora certainly does deliver on its promise of an up-to-date, easy to use desktop. The latest GNOME, and all the latest GNOME/Gtk/Mono applications are included in repositories, and are merely a click and some automated downloading away.

The bad

One complaint I do have about Fedora though is yum and PackageKit, the package management duo of choice. Compared to apt it is downright sluggish. All the waiting required makes me pre-plan(!) my package management.

Thoughts

I find that Fedora makes for an able desktop, wonderful development environment, and presents a good chance to contribute to the free software community. I haven’t even been trying and I’ve filed bugs and spent a couple of hours with the SELinux people discussing minor problems in the Preview. For some reason it seems to encourage me to give back shrug.

Maybe it’ll even convince me to start contributing code again…

Posted in Brilliance, Reviews, Software | 1 Comment »

Deep Character Skills

Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I saw this ad on a gaming website and was rather amused:

Yes, I’m sure deep character skills are a big part of the game.

Posted in Brilliance, Design, Entertainment, Games, Internet | No Comments »

Merging Kopete Contacts

Tuesday, August 26th, 2008

For Google and my forgetful self:

To merge two contacts in Kopete into one, right click on the contact you wish to be added to the other, go to the protocol menu (usually last) and choose *Change Meta Contact*. Now search and pick the one you want to add it to.

I’ve had to redo my contact list a few times, and I’d been doing it to most braindead of ways: Removing contacts and readding them under the right meta-contact… Still this isn’t the most obvious of workflows.

Posted in Brilliance, Internet, Software | No Comments »

openSUSE 11

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The installation process for openSUSE 11 is quite impressive. LVM, package selection, desktop selection etc. were all top-notch without any hiccups (unlike my past experiences with Fedora). Post-installation set up was quite smooth as well, except for the part where I wanted a static IP — took 15 minutes to figure the GUI for that out. Seems more geared towards network administrators than end users.

I can’t say I expected the green to be pleasant, but I can’t complain — looks very nice. Overall, solid stuff.

Posted in Asides, Brilliance, Reviews, Software | No Comments »

How to Synchronise a Sony Ericsson K610i with Evolution

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Before I forget how to find this article again, I’ll just blog it. By the way this works fine for a K850i too — Synchronising a K610i with Evolution.

Posted in Asides, Brilliance, Hardware, How To | No Comments »

equivocal ramblings