Why use GIMP, when you can use Photoshop? I love my little Linux box. I needed to do a bunch of image manipulation fast, and while GIMP may be this incredible program, it isn’t one I have spent the last ten years learning. I downloaded WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator), installed and ran Photoshop using that, and… just worked perfectly.
I was browsing through Slashdot’s FAQ, and discovered that, far from just being a boring list of hows, whys and wherefores, it was actually a set of rules for a Slashdot metagame. This game is based entirely on improving your karma - which is, in short, the likelihood that articles and comments you write will be seen by other people, or lost in the hundreds of low-karma posts nobody but the moderators read. ...
The Warehouse manager tried to print out a tracking sheet, but IE bluescreened on him. I’d seen this on another computer… It worked fine in IE on my computer, and in Firefox, which got me thinking… I installed Firefox on his computer, and it worked fine. Now, I don’t know why IE crashes, and Firefox does not. The printer driver is the same, the FedEx site is (presumably) the same, the computer is the same… ...
After two delays and controversy over the plutonium shipped along with the probe, New Horizons lifted off today on the first leg of its ten-year trip to Pluto, Charon (pronounced SHAHR-ON I found out this morning, not KARE-on, as I’d pronounced it), and the two smaller moons recently discovered. Nine hours from the Earth to the Moon. A year to Jupiter. This thing is moving. I remember following Cassini’s launch with my daughter. By the time it arrived at Saturn seven years later, she had lost interest but I continued to be amazed. ...
I finally got sick of the default skin for this blog, and after having skinned the Prophetic Fate version successfully, decided to go for a new look here. I had this vision of an illuminated (like monks used to do) title against parchment. So step one was: make a nice parchment texture. So what is parchment, anyway? Well, it’s the stretched, pounded, shaved and coated skin of a young, preferably unborn, calf or lamb. ...
Prosthetic Feet will require Ventrilo for major raids from now on. So, my challenge is to get this working with Linux. I used to use Cedega, but that stopped working for me. It was one of the many oddities I faced with Ubuntu. It worked, then it stopped working. Nothing I did could make it come back to life - so I let my subscription run out. Cedega was previously known as WineX - the Direct-X version of WINE, the open source Windows-compatible libraries. (I don’t know offhand what WINE stands for, but considering the source (geeks), it’s probably something like WINE Is Not an Emulator. Acronyms have this great need to be recursive, in Unix.) ...
Any of you who are also in Crimson Eternity may have seen my looooong series of postings about getting Linux running on my second computer. MAN, it’s hard. There was an article today, either in Digg or Slashdot, but I can’t find it in either now, about how Linux is not meant to replace Windows… Okay. That would have been a good link. But to summarize: When Windows and the program I paid money for refused to play DVDs any longer, I decided to abandon Windows rather than pay MORE money to buy that same crappy program over again. I had some WinDVD software which came with the DVD player for my main computer (this one), but that only seemed to show anything in 16 colors. ...
I had some mod points to spend on Slashdot, so after reading CmdrTaco’s frustration at recent flames and stern instructions to moderators, I resolved to do my best to keep topics on-topic today. Figures that the next article to come up would be one claiming recent research into bee flight put the nail into intelligent design. Now, I both believe in God and think ID is bunk. ID people have the central tenet, as far as I can tell, that we are the final, most perfect of God’s creations, and that all else was put here to serve us. This is, after all, more or less said in Genesis. ...
Serenity is out on DVD. It’s been out for awhile, but any store I went to had it only in “full screen” format. With the edges cut off, they mean, because some people can’t handle letterboxing. FULL SCREEN! AAAAGH! The reason stores only had those is because NOBODY WAS BUYING THEM. IDIOTS. No special-effect film like Serenity should EVER be released in “full screen”. Come on. This is for fans. We want wide screen and get ANGRY when we don’t get it. ...
I had no idea what an Echo Boomer was, when I saw they were being singled out for advertising. What is WITH all these demographics specifically set up to make you spend your money, anyway? I suppose I slip in at the tail end of the Baby Boomer marketing generation, which supposedly ended in 1964. So, of us four kids, Val and I are boomers, and our sisters, born in 1969 and 1970, are some wild new generation we cannot understand (Generation X, I suppose). ...