Danni's Blog

I have a self-imposed ban on blogging about my brain stuff on here. However, this blog is still mine, so I’m going to blog about computer stuff instead

First up: Super Mondays. As always, March’s Super Monday was excellent, and made me want to go out and do stuff. In this case, it wasn’t sign up as an Amazon merchant (the first presentation was about the attempts of an online shop to get onto Amazon Marketplace), but to play with Arduino to make my own hardware toys, especially if it involves pretty lights and shiny.

The Tyneside LUG was on the first Saturday of the month as usual, and it was fun (even if I was struggling to stay awake). We went over the mailing list rules (naughty Danni is no longer going to top post), we watched a netboot from a usb stick, which was loads of fun (and crashtastic at times), and we played with my Thinking Putty. I enjoy going to these meetings, and it’s nice being part of a group who like the same things I do.

Another thing that I saw was KDE 4.2 running on one of the laptops. After playing with the colour settings to see if it could be turned purple (my biggest complaint when I last tried KDE 4 was my inability to turn it purple) and the success in doing so, I decided that it was time to try it again. After backing up everything on my computer (and testing in a virtual machine), I downloaded the Kubuntu 64 bit Jaunty beta, and installed. The first time it didn’t go so well (rebooted in the middle of a kernel config, and it wouldn’t start up) but the second time it went pretty smoothly and everything is now up and running.

I like it so far. It is pretty different to KDE 3, but most of the really necessary things work as they should. I love the new plasma widgets, and my second monitor has loads of them on (just because I can). I also love that each monitor can have it’s own separate picture slideshow from folders that I specify. It also works with folders recursively, which is very nice

I don’t like the new IRC client. Maybe time for me to move over to irssi permanently? I do need to learn how to use it, and it would make my life much easier when I want to chat on my phone. There are a couple of niggles with Kopete, mainly relearning how to do everything to get it how it was in KDE 3. Konqueror is okay, but I mostly use Firefox for web browsing now. I’ve set Konqueror as the file manager, as I still don’t like Dolphin (even though it has a nicer name). The new Amarok isn’t all that nice either, though it’s not terrible. Overall it’s usable, and a huge improvement over KDE 4.0 and 4.1 (Colin doesn’t like it). KDE 4.3 looks like it’s going to be even better.

Johan has been staying for nearly 2 weeks (he came for Super Mondays, then I kidnapped him and wouldn’t let him go back home, though he didn’t seem too upset), and he’s been helping me with various things, including finally installing the 2GB ram stick into Annika. She’s now officially better specced than Matilda, which isn’t great as Matilda is meant to be my gaming machine (though she still has better graphics, being a desktop with a graphics card instead of a laptop with onboard graphics). I’ve enjoyed having him around, but I guess he’ll have to go home at some point next week. Him being here has let me tidy the living room today, so that’s good.