Procrastination Works Again

My compiz-fusion desktop effects on my lap top are working again. As you know after an update on the 13th of September it had stopped working. Last week another update still not working. This morning another update to compiz and shazam it works. I was hoping this was going to happen, since compiz-fusion is still in development.

So the power of positive thinking wins again. I believed that compiz-fusion would fix itself and voila it happened. Buy the the book “The Secret” and wonderful stuff will happen to you, better yet just think and believe you will get “The Secret” and you get the book just by the power of wishful thinking.

Enough of this bull.

New Name Blog

For those of you that are regular readers of this blog, you will have noticed the new name. I have gotten rid of the “… and life” in the title of this post. If you want to read my quirky views of life, you’ll have to go to the No Name Blog.

You’ll notice that there are a lot more posting on that blog than this one, and that is because I have less time than I used to with which to experiment with my computers.

Anyways there is nothing new on the compiz-fusion front. It still does not work on my lap top. I have tried Foresight linux for about half an hour last night, I wanted to see and try gnome 2.2. It is alright, but for some reason I was not comfortable with its package manager. I’ll try to work with it some more at a later date.

I guess that is it for today. Go to the No Name Blog later today for a brand new post. I have Posted four times this week already, it is a marathon of posts. Will I stay the course. Go and see. Bye.

A Quick One

Just a quick one to keep you up to date. I still haven’t gotten compiz-fusion working on the lap top. I haven’t really tried to do anything about it yet.

I like what I can do with Rockbox on my iPod but after trying it for half a day I noticed that it is harder on the battery that the original firmware from Apple. I’ll be using the original from Apple for my everyday use, and Rockbox will be to impress people and something to do in my spare time. I hope that we can update our firmware so that we have the same as the iPod classic.

As I said this is a quick post. No pictures this time.

Damn Those Updates

Last post I was proud to announce that I finally got compiz-fusion working on my lap top. Yesterday their was an update for compiz-fusion. It don’t work no more! I haven’t taken the time to try and fix it, hopefully it is nothing major. I can turn it on but after a few seconds it kicks me out back to my regular metacity windows manager with no eye popping desktop.

The desktop effects the compiz-fusion are totally useless for productivity but they keep me amused and happy, and you know what they say: “an amused and happy Norm is a lot better than a pissed off and angry Norm.” It’s true they all say that, I’m not lying. Check it out you’ll see.

That it for now. I had a long day and in a few hours I have to be at work.

With A Little Help From My Friends

I finally have gotten compiz-fusion working on Kramer, my Dell Vostro 1500 laptop (as if you didn’t already know). I hadn’t tried installing it until yesterday because when I tried running the desktop effects I lost the borders and headers, so I knew that I would lose them again if I tried compiz-fusion. Also this is the second computer that I have installed the nVidia drivers through Envy and when I try compiz-fusion my computer freezes. Kramer was no exception. I had almost decided to give it a rest and try another day when I found this site (click here). I try the few trouble shooting he has at the end and low and behold everything works. Thank you Kevin van Zonneveld, I am happy and so is Kramer.

Now that I have started writing more, the thing that annoys me the most about a laptop is that when I am typing and I accidentally brush the touch pad I change the cursors’ position and I am typing at the wrong place. The Vostro does not have a “turn off” function key for the touch pad so I had to find something else. With the help of Christer Edwards I have a solution for this. You have to make sure that in the xorg.conf you have SHMConfig “On”. The run the command: syndaemon -d -t -i 2 which basically turns off the touchpad 2 seconds after the last keystroke, so no more accidentally moving the cursor when typing.

From these two examples of solving annoyance in Ubuntu you can see that the is community support. If you are willing to try Ubuntu and willing to stick with it for a few weeks you’ll be glad you tried.

On to other matters, since I started writing the No Name Blog this one has no contained allot of life segment, only the computing segments are present. I’ll sorta want to keep it this way, but let me mention that tomorrow I’ll be giving blood and I would like it if most of you could donate when you can. During my fathers last few month he was getting at least 2 pints a week so I intend to pay the Canadian Blood Services back with interest. 26 weeks time 2 pints equals 52 pints. I can give 1 pint every 3 months so that is 4 pints a year, so in thirteen years I’ll start paying the interest. Please give.

Last week I decided to lose weight and I’ve started. I want this out there so that I cannot deny it in a few weeks if I don’t see results. If there was a Canadian Weight Services I would be glad to them some of mine.

That’s it for now, see you next time.

Rockbox and iPod

Today I was going to tweak the Rockbox installation on my iPod. My Plan Changed. Rockbox is a firmware for iPod and other media players. I had installed it four days ago and I installed a few themes. I expected to install patches to show album covers and stuff like that. The Rockbox firmware allows users to drag and drop files directly in the iPod. Rockbox users can play more music formats then with the original iPod firmware, more games (Doom), even screen savers. If you have a mp3 player you should try Rockbox. For those of you that are not sure you want to switch over when you install Rockbox you don’t get rid of the original iPod firmware you can switch from one firmware to another quite easily.

I have learnt something new today. One must at least learn something new everyday or everything becomes stagnant. I learnt that when you plug in your iPod to your computer and on the iPods screen you see displayed “Do Not Disconnect”, well follow that instruction to the letter, even if you have waited half an hour for some date to be written on the iPod. My iPod could not read the information that was on it. I had 25GB that was on the iPod but I could not play it. Can you believe it I crashed my iPod. At first I decided to drag the music files out of the iPod and on to my computer, but when I saw that it would take 7 hours I decided to revert my iPod to factory state and start anew.

At this point of the day about six hours have past and I am currently installing songs on the ‘Pod I ‘ve already installed Rockbox and while I was waiting for songs to upload to the iPod I found a build of Rockbox already patched with a few. You can find it at this link: here. I have a bunch of work to do since I have to go throu my CD collection and convert some files to mp3 again. I guess I’ll have my hands full for the next few days.

I really enjoy my new laptop, aka Kramer, but I am disappointed with Dell. I also ordered a carrying case and a wireless mouse which originally should have been shipped on August 29. Dell pushed back the shipping to September fourth. Then to September 14th and yesterday when I checked they delayed it once again, this time until October 16th. I guess I’ll have to wait. I am very happy that it was not my computer that was delayed for so long. I’ll still recommend Dell for their computers, this is my second one from them and so far I am satisfied with their products.

Well I guess I’ll call it quits for today and upload more music to the ‘Pod. Until next time.