a conversation about transportation with Sherry’s four-year-old nephew who lives in Utopia, the land time forgot
Nephew: What kind of truck do you drive?
Me: I don’t drive a truck.
Nephew: Well then how do you get to work?
Me: I ride my bike.
Nephew: [facial expression indicates mind is blown]
To be fair, in Utopia, everything with four wheels is called a truck, except things that I call “four-wheelers”, which the Utopians call bikes.
suit to kill
My dad needed a suit on account of certain people are getting married. After hitting the usual suspects on the main drag and finding a very promising suit at Moores, we hit the Big/Tall store in the south end of town just so we could say we’d done our due diligence. Also because that store is Starbuck’s-adjacent. My parents love that place now. It’s like I don’t even know them anymore.
The shop was staffed by a taciturn and unhelpful man who didn’t even bother to pull out a tape measure or help us reach the merchandise, and a teenaged boy wearing a black suit who loitered behind a cash register. After my dad tried on a few jackets and we began to doubt that the place had anything we were interested in, the teenager stepped out from behind the counter and I saw the red flag that meant we had to leave immediately.
Poor little apprentice suit seller had done up all three buttons on his jacket. We made haste toward the parking lot.
I dreamed this and everybody wants to read about other people’s dreams on the internet
I was hanging around in a cul-de-sac that was very similar to the cul-de-sac where my parents live. All the garage doors were open, and all the garages had cars in them, and all the cars were stacked on top of things. One garage had 50’s-era Corvette propped up on two chest freezers. Another had two Pontiac Grand Prixs stacked one on top of the other, both a little crumpled and crushed. Their bumpers had metal adhesive lettering on them that read “EAT MEAT”.
How to upgrade Deluge BitTorrent client in Ubuntu Lucid
Deluge is a BitTorrent client available for Linux, Unix, Windows and Mac OS X. It is my preferred client for Ubuntu. Unfortunately, the version (1.2.0) included in the repositories for Lucid doesn’t want to stay running for more than half an hour on my machine.
The quick and simple fix is to add the Deluge team’s PPA (personal package archive) to the list of repositories in Ubuntu’s package management system.
- In a terminal, run
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deluge-team/ppa - Now update your list of software sources by running
sudo aptitude update - If you already have Deluge installed, upgrade to the newer version by running
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade. If not, runsudo aptitude install deluge.
Now you have Deluge 1.2.1 installed and it should keep running till you tell it to stop.
Why, when we read left to right is the most destructive action first?
— Ivanka Majic, on the serious thinking that went into the decision to rearrange window controls in Ubuntu Lucid [via ars]
Benjamin Humphrey: 16 things that could be improved in Ubuntu 10.04 →
“It’s not easy for the average user to change [the window controls] back to the right (Gconf is NOT easy!)”
Benjamin hits on a few things I had noticed, and a number of things that passed me by — I eschew gnome-panel and its terrible applets, and they feature heavily here. One thing I had missed is that the new window control placement and order breaks many existing themes.
They’re fit-and-finish issues, but important ones, not only for providing a smooth transition for adopters, but for continuing to improve the experience for established users. Plenty of time before the end of April to address these concerns.
[via omgubuntu]
How to Fix the Window Buttons in Ubuntu Lucid
Window buttons in Ubuntu have always been at the top right of the window, arranged, left to right, Minimize, Maximize and Close. Like so:
In the most recent Alpha release of Ubuntu, the window buttons have been moved to the top left of the window and rearranged, like so:
Here is how to move the buttons back to their original location and order.
- Press Alt-F2 and run gconf-editor
- In the tree on the left, navigate to apps/metacity/general
- Right-click button_layout and click Edit key…
- Change the value to :minimize,maximize,close and click OK
- Quit gconf-editor
- There is no step 6
The colon in “:minimize,maximize,close” represents the window’s title. You can shuffle those elements around however you like. No one will yell at you.
ubuntu finally replacing xsane scanning app with something that doesn't hurt my face →
This is good, because xsane is friggin’ complicated and gnome-scan never really got off the ground.
