endperform.org

I haven’t posted about what I wanted to try to accomplish this year, and we’re almost a quarter of the way through it, so I figured now would be the time to throw them out there so I have something to look back over and see how I did. So, what’s on tap for my year?

1. Continue learning about Emacs and integrating it further into my workflow
2. Continue playing around with Python
3. Continue my electronics experimentation with my Arduino
4. Get a new HTPC built

Not a big list, but something to shoot for.  I’ll have a post coming up on what I’m looking to do with the HTPC, and of course my ongoing Arduino experiments.  I’m currently working on playing with an LCD, with the next step interfacing that to a PC to display some things.

If any of you are following me on Twitter, you may have noticed a Tweet where I mentioned I installed Arch on the desktop. I figured I would go into my reasoning for going back to Arch. I left Arch initially because I got tired of messing around and tweaking things to get them working, but I also missed two big things when I switched to Ubuntu: up-to-date software and the install what you want way of things. I am keeping Ubuntu on my laptop, because now I’m moving back to the desktop for most of my computing at home. This leads me into what I have running as far as a desktop goes. Once again, I installed Fluxbox. It’s small, easy to configure and pretty flexible. I’ve been spending the past few days installing the software I need, and right now I’m working on transferring my music and such from the laptop back home to the desktop. All and all, I’m happy to be back on Arch, at least on the desktop. Ubuntu will work fine on the laptop, although I think I’ll probably end up installing Fluxbox on it as well.

As far as Twitter goes, I’ve been a little lax on my updates there. I’ve been rather busy at work, so that limits the amount of tweets I spit out during the week. On the weekends I’m usually pretty busy with family things, so again, lack of updates. One thing that’s beginning to annoy me with Twitter, though, is that there are a lot of ’spam’ users cropping up. I don’t add anyone that follows me. What I usually do is check out their Twitter page and see if they interest me at all. If it turns out they’re a spammy type of Twitter (spammy being ‘listen to x podcast! buy x!’), I’ll block them so I don’t see them on my follower list. I notice some of my Twitter friends are using another service (Plunk, I believe), so I might give that a shot at some point.

Firefox 3
I’ve been using Firefox 3 Beta 2 for a while now, and so far it seems pretty stable. What’s really nice, though, is that it actually integrates well with the Linux desktop since it makes use of the GTK theme you have set up. All of the plugins I use were compatible, so there was no issue in that regards. In general, it’s a lot faster and a bit more polished, but there is one nagging issue. For sites where images have been resized using HTML attributes, it seems these images do not display correctly a lot of the time. After doing a bit of research I’ve found that this is potentially an Xorg issue. It’s not a deal-breaker for me, really, but it is rather annoying to deal with.

Gnome vs. KDE: Gnome for now
Ever since installing Arch, I’ve been using Gnome as my desktop environment. Those of you who know me know that usually I’m running KDE or something else, but ever since KDE4 came out, I’m not so sure on KDE. I’m not sure what it is, but there’s something about it that isn’t appealing to me as of yet. Sure, I could use the 3.5.x series of KDE, but with efforts being focused on the 4.x series, all 3 will see is bugfixes. A majority of the applications I use are GTK apps to begin with, and lately some of the things with Gnome have been interesting me. Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer how KDE’s settings are more out in the open, but for now I’m going to give Gnome a shot and see how it treats me.

For the past couple of months, Beth has been using my Toshiba laptop since it’s a lot easier to deal with the little one, and it’s more comfortable for her. So, I decided for Christmas that I would just give it to her. She loves it, it does what she needs, and it’s a lot faster than her desktop is. In return, I’m getting another laptop which will most likely replace the desktop (if I do decide to sell it, stay tuned). Here’s what I got:

Dell Inspiron 1705
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 1.66gHz
160 GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
2 GB DDR2 SDRAM 677MHz
256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

Should be a nice machine, and it should be here next week :)

If you bought an iPhone before today’s announcement, aren’t you kicking yourself, at least a little bit? Apple released information on the new iPod touch, and have also revamped the iPod Nano and original iPod (now known as iPod classic). In addition, they cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by 200.00 and are going to eliminate the 4GB iPhone. I can’t say I was ever interested in the iPhone, but unfortunately for early adopters, they paid the price of getting the gadget first.