Still here

I’m still here.  Just haven’t posted in a while.

The Day We Fight Back

Today, February 11th, 2014 is The Day We Fight Back against mass surveillance

Visit https://thedaywefightback.org/ for more info.

There’s some legislation before Congress that you might have something to say about.  Check it out.

Ride into the sunset again in Gnome 3.10.1

So there was a bit of a shocker with the default Gnome 3.10 lock screen.  It was pink.  I was stunned the first time I went to unlock the screen after the upgrade and saw this:

I was curious to see how quickly this image would be replaced with something less … girly.  It didn’t take long. Gnome 3.10 was released September 25.  Bug 709425 was filed less than 2 weeks later, on October 4th, just after noon UTC, and was closed, incredibly quickly, early the next evening UTC.  It’s titled, “pink lock screen background considered inappropriate”.  There was even a freeze break.  The email requesting the freeze break described it as “a very visible and poorly timed fix”, and added, “This totally slipped through and currently we ship a pink(ish) lock screen background as a default.”  Gnome 3.10.1 was released October 18, and that image is no longer the default lock screen background.

I’m not surprised that this image is no longer the default lock screen background.  What did surprise me when I upgraded to Gnome 3.10.1, was that it’s gone completely.  Once I got used to the pink, I rather liked it as a lock screen; I decided to get it back.

This is how I did it.  kristof, another Arch user, had linked me to the 3.10 images tarball in the gnome-backgrounds git repo.  kristof had extracted the image, Sunset.png, placed it in ~/Pictures, and was able to select it as the Lock Screen background in the Gnome settings GUI.  But the Gnome settings GUI on my machine did not see anything in the ~/Pictures folder.  I looked at the Gnome help on changing the desktop background, but it didn’t say how to set a custom Lock Screen background.  Hmmph.

Later, Daniel Wallace, another Arch user, kindly linked me to this and this. I copied Sunset.png to /usr/share/backgrounds/gnome, as suggested here, so my wallpaper was in the right place.  But I still had no xml.  One suggestion was to add the xml for the background to /usr/share/gnome-background-properties/gnome-backgrounds.xml.  I was hesitant to put it there; the next time the gnome-backgrounds people added wallpapers, my Lock Screen image would be gone.  I copied the xml for Sunset.png from the gnome-backgrounds.xml file in the 3.10 images tarball, saved it to my custom and originally named gnome-my-gnome-properties.xml file, and copied it to /usr/share/gnome-background-properties.

Yes, the process could be a lot easier.  And yes, I do like my lock screen background.

Can I open Microsoft Publisher files in linux?

It’s possible.

I just did.  I used LibreOffice, as suggested here.

I’m using linux, and I opened a Microsoft Publisher .pub format file in Libreoffice Draw.  The file is read only, and the formatting is off, so I wouldn’t want to print it without some tweaking, but I don’t care.  My need is to quote some text from a an emailed newsletter in a quite different document.  The alternative suggested was for the person who created the .pub document to scan it to .pdf, email it to me, and for me to type the text into the new document myself.  Talk about duplication of effort!

And long live copy/paste.

What makes it read only is that Libreoffice Draw will not save the file in the .pub format, at least in 4.1.1.  It only saves it as an .ODF format document.

Possibly helping a friend possibly redesign a website – a possibly recurring adventure

It’s amazing how much techno fear there is. I was talking to someone I know about his organization’s website. He’s giving me this whole “I know nothing about computers. Don’t talk to me about this stuff” vibe. I finally said, “I know you’ve used a computer; you’ve got one in your house. I know you’ve used the internet, and I’m sure you’ve gone to lots of places you wouldn’t want me to know about. So I know you have an opinion on this.”

Then I asked the real question, “When you go to a site that’s mostly text, not pictures, do you like the text to be mostly on the left with smaller stuff on the right, mostly in the middle with smaller stuff on both sides, or mostly on the right with smaller stuff on the left?”

You know what? He did have an opinion on that. Yay.

Some computer things are not scary. But it’s a secret. Shh!

Still alive

Still alive, but clearly not posting.  Wow.  I haven’t posted to this blog in a year.  I must not have had much to say…

Short answer to a rather pointless but still fascinating question

The answer to “Is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all?” depends on where you are on the loved/lost continuum.

Oreo in 2010

For those of you who are curious, this is Oreo.

Oreo on May 12, 2010

This is what she looked like the first morning we had her.   She was a little scruffy that morning, and had just been spayed.

We got her at the Tri-County Humane Society.  She seems to be a shih-tzu.

Oreo on June 24, 2010

Oreo’s “Glamour Shot”, taken at the vet’s office.  Doesn’t she look great with that red?

Oreo August 1, 2010.

We decided to cut Oreo’s hair as short as possible because of the heat.  This was the first morning of the new ‘do.  She looks so unhappy!  She got used to it, though.

 

There’s no 2011 photo.  The vet switched to giving photos with a sepia tint.  In this year’s photo, Oreo looks like a brown dog!  No offense to brown dogs, but she’s not brown.

 

Depressed?

A reality-check reminder:

Now with drumming!

This drummer is awesome.  Warning: ZZ Top song.  Also, it’s LOUD, even on my laptop.  If you have a large monitor, try this link.

The band is Rick K. and the Allnighters.  Here’s a fun with drummers video from them.

I looked for an awesome female drummer video to balance this post, but after the second drummer in a wedding dress, I got impatient and stopped looking.

But I did find this latin drums tutorial by Kiki Vassilakis, who is not wearing a wedding dress!  Amazing!  Unbelievable!