I wonder if any sociologists or anthropologists have traced the history and evolution of Little Johnny (Spanish version: Pepito) jokes.

As KDE 5 reaches 5.2 and many begin to debate its features (this is a small evolution on 4 compared to the difference between 3 and 4) there has been an ever-increasing assertion that Activities are pointless. (At least it appears that way to me) I wanted to share how I use Activities, why they make me more productive, and why they’re the biggest feature keeping me on KDE.

So, I have lots of Activities: Main, Media, School, Photography, Video Games, Video Editing, Programming, and Reading. In its current implementation, each Activity must have the same number of virtual desktops; three in my case. In each activity I make use of different widgets. On nearly all of them are the brilliant folder view and application launcher widgets. These allow me to quickly see the folders relevant to the task at hand. In the case of the Multimedia activity, desktop 1, this is very useful for my workflow. Let’s look at that desktop:

I know there are a lot of weird things in legal documents that aren’t actually enforceable. It’s one of the reasons every contract has a part that says invalidation of one part of this contract doesn’t invalidate the whole contract. But this one makes 0 sense to me for eBooks:

“You may not:copy or burn the book or extract to a device whose principal function is to act as a storage device, for example, a CD/DVD or USB stick;”

Just in case you didn’t read it or watch the movie, each district has a fashion designer who designs the costume for its contestants representing the products the district produces. The narrator mentions that these fashion designers aren’t always creative. In the movie, the logging district girl is dressed like a tree. Then again, maybe Hunger Games was copying Miss Universe - I don’t watch beauty pageants. Either way I think the only way Miss Canada could have been more of a stereotype is if she had a jar of syrup in her other hand.

http://youtu.be/7PCkvCPvDXk

This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to be a positive antidote to the rampant Photoshopping and fat-shaming we’ve been railing about in vain for at least two decades:

Scarlett: I’m not an onion!

Danielle: But sometimes you make me cry.

(Laughter)

Scarlett: why are you guys laughing?

LOVE the new krunner! Can’t wait until #KDE 5 / Plasma 5 lands in Fedora!

On the guest computer I updated to Kubuntu Vivid Alpha so I could check out KDE 5. Looks awesome - lots of polish over KDE 4. Sad that I’ll lose my current settings, but a chance to recreate with a new desktop.

When I first installed my new hard drive with btrfs I was happy with how fast things were running because the hard drive was a SATA3 and the old one was SATA2. But recently two things were bugging the heck out of me - using either Chrome or Firefox was painfully slow. It wasn’t worth browsing the web on my Linux computer. Also, Amarok was running horribly - taking forever to go from song to song.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So, we have book one: satire of reality TV, book two: propaganda, and now book three: the reality of revolution and civil war. This trilogy is a perfect example of how YA and children’s literature is often subversive - this is why there are so many book burnings and book censorships.

The first book is an entertaining satire of the 2000s-2010s told through a futuristic hellscape. But taken together the trilogy is somewhat of a primer for the YA reader to begin to question ideas of propaganda - is everything I see on TV real even if it’s the news? It also is a good introduction to a very hard idea - often both sides of a revolution contain despicable people. To tie it back with the first point, there are no guarantees that the freedom fighters will treat people any better than the “evil” government.