I used to love KDE and thought it was so much better than GNOME. Especially after discovering Superkaramba, I was sure nothing could beat KDE in terms of cool factor. Later I started using more GTK applications so I gravitated towards GNOME, fluxbox, and XFCE. Also, I ended up not really using the SuperKaramba widgets that much because they were always buried under my other windows….where I was doing real work!

I went to the Maryland State Fair Monday to get some time lapse shots of the rides and various fair settings. Here are some of the highlights:

I kept referring to ReactOS as version 2.9 and 3.0 in my review, but it’s actually 0.2.9 and 0.3.0.

Ok, so with 3.0 there are still some major reliability issues. I blue screened a bunch of times just trying to get to this blog and it was quite slow. However, it did seem to work a bit better than 2.9. I will be testing installing some Windows programs to see just how far they have come. Pretty soon I’ll be able to be free of Windows. The funky-looking page has to do with the size of my ReactOS screen vs the size I normally view my blog at. Apologies for those with crappy screen resolutions who see something like this.

I decided to revisit ReactOS to see what had changed from 2.x that I reviewd before to the 2.9 release candidate. So I fired up VMWare and ran it. I was a bit dissapointed in the performance. I know it was VMWared and only had 128 MB, but Ubuntu was running beautifully VMWared with only 192 MB of RAM. It kept blue screening whenever I tried to visit this blog, for example. However, they are making really great work at binary compatibility. As a test, I went to the Mozilla website and downloaded Firefox. It installed and ran pretty well.

As I was reading the latest Linux Format Magazine, they had a great tip for a low tech way to remind yourself of different time-sensitive events. The best part is that it works under any window manager! (ie it doesn’t matter if you’re in Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Fluxbox, or any other) The trick is to use xmessage and at. at is cron’s little brother, for scheduling things that will happen in the future, but not be a recurring event. xmessage presents a little dialogue box with whatever message you give it. Here’s a screenshot with an example!

Sometimes my wife is allows me to use her as a model in my photography. Here are some recent shots as she tried various techniques with eye makeup.

I just love black and white portrait photography!

This whole time, flickr has been technically beta software. Well, as they went gamma, they have decided to add a great new feature based on mashups that people were already doing using Google Maps API - they are providing a map of the world where users can drag their pictures to the spot it was taken. It then gets geotagged with that spot. So for those of us who don’t have some GPS method of figuring things out, flickr has made it easy for us. And, any photos you have previously geotagged with long/lat will automatically be mapped. So far people are complaining that there’s only good coverage in the USA map whereas Google has good coverage world-wide. I expect this to be fixed soon, though, as more and more people complain. I know that a good portion of the pictures I like to visit are created by non-US nationals.

Photo Sharing

Photo Sharing

One of my favorite shots!

As we all know, Linus Torvalds created Linux out of his frustration with the lack of features in Minix, a teaching OS meant to duplicate a POSIX-compliant Unix system. Well, as a great followup to Saturday’s Post, why not check out Minux yourself? A new group has begun developing Minix3, in the hopes of getting into a niche somehwere between FreeBSD and Linux: tiny, old computers. All you will need is the VMWare Player and Minux source. Typing root at login gets you in without any passwords. Tinker with Minux3 and tinker with a bit of history. It’s not EXACTLY the version Linux used, but it’s still pretty darned cool!