Monthly Archives: May 2009

How to Configure Your System: The Command Line vs. Esoteric Dialogs

I keep read­ing things online about Linux that say “peo­ple shouldn’t have to EVER see the command line.” I cer­tainly see where these peo­ple are com­ing from, but I’m just not sure I buy it. The argu­ment is that the com­mand line is scary and you should be able to con­fig­ure things via a GUI window–it’s less intim­i­dat­ing and [...]
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Solve Video Flicker on Jaunty with ATI X1250

I have a fairly new Acer Extensa 4420 that I run Linux on. The new ver­sion of Ubuntu, Jaunty, runs really well, except that the default ATI dri­ver for my Radeon X1250 card gives me weird flick­er­ing and poor performance. This is because ATI decided to drop sup­port (ie. stop updat­ing dri­vers) for these cards. This is [...]
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Tree Style Tabs — a follow up

A lit­tle while ago, I blogged about how I was going to try out Tree Style Tabs for Fire­fox on my laptop. It offers two inter­est­ing things: Grouped, hier­ar­chi­cal tabs  Mov­ing the tab bar to the side of the screen.  I was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the latter–on my 14″ widescreen lap­top screen, I’m always look­ing for ways to [...]
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Why KDE4 Is Cool: Folderview

I’ve always thought KDE4 was pretty cool, par­tic­u­larly the idea of the fold­erview wid­get which lets you put a thing on your desk­top which shows all the files you have in a par­tic­u­lar folder.  This is what most people’s desk­tops do ordi­nar­ily, except that you’re stuck with only one folder. Unfor­tu­nately, every time I’ve tried Kubuntu, they’ve [...]
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How to Make a DIY Coffee Degassing Canister for Free

UPDATE (8÷19÷10) this design might be great for degassing, but it also has the unfor­tu­nate effect of mak­ing cof­fee taste like superglue. I’ve posted an improved DIY cof­fee degassing can­nis­ter here. If you roast your own cof­fee, you know you’re sup­posed to let your cof­fee degas for a few days after roasting. But find­ing a good one-​​way [...]
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A Review of Ryan J. Lane’s Conversations of The Leisured

I down­loaded Ryan J. Lane’s new album Con­ver­sa­tions of The Leisured (or at least the part of it that he posted on noise­trade) recently. It’s really good.  It’s backed with catchy beats with this obscure lo-​​fi folksy thing on top of it, giv­ing it a sort of Suf­jan Stevens feel. Bizarrely, there’s some They Might Be [...]
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Free Cool Ubuntu Stickers from System76

Ok, this is cool. If you send System76 an SASE, they’ll send you some really cool Ubuntu stick­ers for your laptop: Here’s the address: System76, Inc. (Free Stick­ers)1582 S. Parker Rd. Ste. 310Den­ver, Colorado 80231
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A Review of David Achata’s Psalms By David

I down­loaded David Achata’s album Psalms by David from noisetrade.com the other day. I didn’t really notice the title at the time, but it’s pretty clearly “Chris­t­ian Music.” Sure, the guy’s name is David, but each song is taken directly from a Psalm. In fact, the song titles are things like, “Psalm 63:1–8 NIV.” With that in [...]
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Building a TV Antenna

Ever since Fab from Linux Out­laws men­tioned it on the show, I’ve been want­ing to build one of these really cool, DIY TV antenna. Today, I pulled the plans for the TV antenna, picked up some Romex cable when I was at Menards and went to town.  Here’s what I came up with: DIY TV antenna I def­i­nitely get bet­ter [...]
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