Here’s my latest Photojojo time capsule with my most “interesting” photos from late October to early November 2009.

Fedora 14 is out today!  You can get it from the newly redesigned website.  Expect more from me as I explore it.  Probably in a couple weeks as I’m extremely busy right now.

While listening to a recent podcast of This American Life (TAL) it made me realize the troubles that the disabled have to go through in this country.  I don’t mean the way others treat them differently, although that certainly is an issue, but rather the little things we take for granted.  The sad thing is that, from what I’ve heard from friends and family who have lived abroad, the US is one of the top countries in the way we treat those with physical disabilities.  The story on TAL, in case you don’t have time to listen to it, was about how California is the only (or one of very few) state in the USA where the disabled can sue for Americans with Disabilities Act violations and get monetary compensation.

A few years ago I started hearing about ppas everywhere.  More and more, I see developers telling people that if they want the latest of program X, they should load the developer’s ppa.  A ppa is a repository of software that is neither maintained by Canonical nor the Ubuntu community.  In some cases the software available via ppa is also available in the official repositories, just at a much slower pace since distros usually only provide major software version upgrades when they do a full system upgrade.  In between they tend to just provide security updates and bug fixes.  As usage of ppas grows, the user starts to have a system that is more like a rolling release than a snapshot of Debian’s testing branch.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all, a user’s system should do whatever the user wants it to do.  I just wonder if the ever increasing usage of ppas will lead the Ubuntu community to switch to a rolling release style distro.  Arch Linux users do enjoy having such a system, but they do admit that it can potentially lead to some instability if you upgrade right away when a new update comes through.

Here’s the calendar for November - I hope it doesn’t keep you drooling all month!   Click on the image to load it into your desktop.  Then right-click and you should be able to set it as the desktop background.  Alternatively, save it and then manually set it as your desktop.

[caption id=“attachment_3791” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Nov 2010 - 1024x768 - For More Squarish Monitors”] [/caption]

I was on the phone with my dad a couple weekends ago and he asked if I was playing Civilization 5.  He’d heard that Dan was playing it and was surprised that it was still around and Dan and I were still playing it.  I told him I was playing it and reminded him that it was he who indirectly got us stuck on the series.

Back in the old days of the early 1990s, no one gave a second thought to sharing computer software with each other.  Most people didn’t know about the public Internet or BBSes so, for the most part, there was no onerous digital restriction management (DRM) to keep people from sharing software.  Some games had codes that you had to type in which were found in the manual, but manuals could be photocopied - after all, there were no authentication servers to connect to.  I’ve spoken about this before, but those early “wild west” days lay the seeds for my software purchases over the last decade.  A friend lent me 3.5” disks of Sim City 2000.  I played that sucker everywhere.  I’d take it wherever there would be computers and install it there to play until my parents said it was time to go.  To this day, I’ve bought all the mainline Sim City products and expansion packs.  So, who’s to say that today’s illicit software users aren’t building up affinities for software brands they’ll be loyal to when they have the cash.

For the past week I’ve had a huge surge in people viewing the image above. I saw that it was mostly from Google and not flickr. I was wondering why and then I realized I could see the search terms brining people to the image. Here are the search terms bringing people over:

1 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 19 2 tweedle dee and tweedle dum 10 3 tweedle dee and tweedle dum costume 6 4 tweedledee and tweedledum 6 5 tweedle dee hats 2 6 tweedledee and tweedledum costumes 2 7 tweedle dee 2 8 image of tweedledee and tweedledum 2 9 tweedledee tweedledum costume women 2 10 tweedle dum and tweedle dee costumes 2 11 tweedle dee and tweedle dum women costumes 1 12 tweedle dee tweedle dum costume 1 13 woman tweedle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1 14 tweedle dum tweedle dee outfits 1 15 womens tweedle dee costume 1 16 what do tweedle dee and tweedle dum say in… 1 17 “tweedle dee and tweedle dum” 1 18 tweedle dee and tweedle dumb costumes 1 19 tweddle dee and tweedle dum costumes 1

Last time I spoke about Empathy, I was a little disappointed in the project.  I really liked Pidgin and it felt like they were being stabbed in the back, even if everything the Empathy team was doing was koser GPL-wise.  At the time I didn’t give it a second look because it was still missing a bunch of features.  It’s been 2 years, or 4 releases of Gnome, since then and the project has come a long way.  It now supports all the protocols that Pidgin does (and more) and everyone seemed to think it was doing a better job of listening to users, etc.  Now, this shouldn’t make a huge difference unless I missed something, but I’m reviewing 2.30 as Fedora 14 hasn’t come out yet.  I’m sure there wasn’t a massive upgrade or anything.  So, first of all, here’s what Pidgin looks like.

I have a HUGE music collection that I’ve taken the time to digitize, so it was bugging me that I couldn’t listen to it on my sound system on the first floor.  When I raised the volume on my computer speakers I just ended up hearing a ton of bass.  So I took a look around the net and it seems that mediatomb is the program to use.  It was in the Fedora repos or maybe the RPMFusion repos.  It’s pretty easy.  You run it as your user (not root) and it creates a config file.  All you need to do is tweak that file to have it say:

I forgot what post online got me thinking about this stuff, but I really don’t customize my computers’ desktop environments much.  Generally, I tend to change the background image and leave it at that.  I took a look over my desktop image gallery here on the blog to confirm my suspicions.

Starting at the bottom with Windows, you can see that until 2009 I was just going with the default look.  I tended not to add launchers to my panel because, with Windows XP, it ended up really limiting the space for listen the open programs.  I also didn’t have too many launchers on the desktop.  I tend to always have programs maximised if I’m in front of the computer, so the only programs shortcuts I’d leave on the desktop are programs I’d be likely to launch upon starting up the computer.  In fact, whenever I pay attention, I tell the installer not to put icons on the desktop.