Make your band’s album cover meme:

1. Go to Wikipedie’s special random page. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.
2. 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.
3. Go to Flickr’s explore the last seven days page. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.
5. Post it to FB with this text in the “caption” or “comment” and TAG the friends you want to join in.

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

— scmartindale

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.

More updates as I actually use it properly.

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

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…

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

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.

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