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.

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…

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!

Hello world!


/* Hello World program */

#include<stdio.h>

main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}


It’s an appropriate beginning, but also a joke. I hated C.