As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year.  This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades.  After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot.  This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years.  In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again.  This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system.  It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.

I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete.  So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta.  When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.

[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]

In the past week I’ve listened to the most recent episodes of The Commandline Podcast and The Giant Bombcast. The former was a discussion of those who willingly violate copyright law as a comparison to those who violated the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment to the US constitution both of which made it illegal to sell “intoxicating liquors”. The latter had a discussion during the listener emails section that revolved around buying illegal VHS copies of movies and TV shows that have never been released on DVD (or sometimes even legitimately on VHS). (For my younger readers — VHS is a cassette tape format that held video . It was the precursor to DVDs) Together these different shows got me thinking about how copyright should deal with unreleased video.

Another semi-random photojojo time capsule.

This month’s photojojo is a mix of various things.

Just click on the image.  Then right-click and set as desktop background or save it to your computer and use your OS’s methods for setting the background.

[caption id=“attachment_5115” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Dec 2011 - 1680x1050”] [/caption]

This time around my Photojojo time capsule constists only of photos from Dina’s birthday last year:

My graduate degree has stemmed my play time this month.  This is all I was able to put in.

Mass Effect 2 (1 hr)

Team Fortress 2 (41 min)

My latest photojojo time capsule consists of photos from my Grand Canyon trip.

For people of my generation (and the younger ones of the previous one) video games are cultural phenomenon no less important to the way our brains work than books, music, or movies.  So it’s no surprise that our music, which has been inspired by books and movies in the past is now being inspired by video games.  What was surprising to me were all the different manifestations this inspiration has taken.