Category: technology-and-computing

Free documents and Slideshare

I received this email the other day and I thought it was quite interesting…

Hey cubicgarden,
nomnex sent you a private message on SlideShare.
“Thank you to make and upload your latest presentations in an open source format (.odp) Anyone can view them, anyone can look at the content (pictures resolution, text effect, etc.) All the best, nomnex “
You can view nomnex’s SlideShare profile.

In his/her/it’s profile is this funny little story.

Linux Fedora 15 LXDE. Unfortunately for me, my system freezes when I watch the flash presentations directly on slideshare.net (the Flash plugin is not resource friendly on Linux). I have to download and play them with my player (mplayer)

If I knew I’d get this response everytime I uploaded a Open Document I’d do it more often 🙂

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7++

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

I finally got a tablet from Samsung, the 7.0 plus. You may not know but I was holding out for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 when the 10.1 was released. I remember seeing the Motorola Xoom and thinking that it was a shocking size. Then Apple started getting itchy in the court with Samsung… Anyway after a few months Samsung announced they were creating a 7.7 version but once again it was like gold dust due to the (poor) Apple court case.

I’ve always liked the old Samsung Tab 7 but running Android Froyo (Android 2.1) was never going to be a goer for me. Even with the OS upgrades. Specially because I already have a Archos 7.0, which I bought a while ago for the sake of having a very nice XBMC remote. Even weirder, the Samsung Tab 7 always seemed to hold its value, even with the new Galaxy Tabs.

Finally Samsung upgraded the Tab 7 with Android Honeycomb (Android 3) to a dual processor, lots more memory and space. Then named it 7 plus to avoid confusion with the 7.7 which is still not available in the UK (as far as I can tell).

Long story short – I’m finally got it and am somewhat happy with it.

Everyday I kind of want to root it and put Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4) on it. Honeycomb is nice but I find the Samsung Touchwiz stuff painful. Even more painful than HTC’s sense. I’d heard bad things about Touchwiz but never experienced it till now. I assume it won’t be long till I root it at this pace.

The tablet size is good and fits nicely in the same pockets as my Kindle. Yes its quite a lot heavier but very comfortable to hold and use. Compare to my Archos, its runs super smooth. For what I need it to do, it works great. I also finally worked out how to install apps which I’ve already paid for, which is good to know.

I HATE the proprietary power/data connection. For years I’ve laughed at Apple iOS users for there proprietary connection and now I have to feel the same pain (thanks a bloody lot Samsung) I really hope they also have to do a micro USB dongle for the EU too. I’ve not really found a reason for the IR port yet, but I can imagine it replacing my universal and Wifi remote.

The tablet does sometimes reset its self but reboots quickly, I assume its something to do with Touchwiz personally. Generally the Tablet or slate as I prefer is great and I may have to loose my Archos Tablet to a ebay auction soon. It doesn’t replace my Kindle which still has that super light and amazingly readable screen. Actually its great to push stuff from the Tab to the Kindle for committable reading…

So generally I’m happy and making full use of it at work. Its good, now if only Samsung would bring Android 4 to it, if not Cyanogen is my friend.

Surround Video on the next Xbox?

Lots of rumours about the next Xbox currently… but the most interesting thing I’ve heard is… around the more powerful Kinect and multidisplay output.

I instantly started wondering if finally BBC R&D Surround video could work in real time on consoles? Something I was wondering if the Playstation3 could do a while ago.

I know they maybe thinking about multiscreen type applications but actually surround video is a perfect fit… imho

Gnome Extensions vs Unity Lens

Fedora 16 & Gnome3

For sometime I’ve been trying to get Gnome Extensions (still alpha) going but for some reason most of the good ones failed to install. However when I head home (after Christmas in Bristol) I give it a try, and it suddenly all works.

Its a bit of a hassle to get it working without Firefox but now I got quite a few installed.

Including…

  • Activities Button Text – changed the text to say cubicgarden now
  • Music Integration – useful to know whats playing and change the seek
  • Coverflow Alt-Tab – Back to the Compiz style switching
  • Calculator – Great for quick calculations
  • Journal – Seems to bring up relevant stuff in the overlay mode
  • Jump Lists – You can search for categories not just apps
  • Notes Search Provider for Gnote/Tomboy – Search notes (more on this in the next post)
  • Recent Items – Rearranges the search by recent items
  • App Search – Searches for available apps not just installed apps
  • Status only icon – Removes your name from the top right

Generally I’ve installed many of them but turned off the ones I don’t really like.

Although I really like Gnome3 Extensions, I’m really liking the look of the Unity Lens extensions (for example, Youtube, Piratebay, TomboyNotes Lens) I’m seeing going by in my Google reader via sites like OMGUbuntu and Webup8.

I’m not totally sure how hard it is to create the Gnome Extensions but I gather its mainly Python with a smidgeon of JS and CSS? It would be great to see even more extensions including some of the Unity Lens ones. Certainly could make use of some of the internet connected ones…

Generally I like what the Gnome team is doing, installing a Unity Lens is much more trouble than a Gnome Extension, now all we need is many more of them and a better way to search and sort them.

Which Desktop Environment?

Aplicaciones

OMG!Ubuntu is running a poll on what desktop environment linux users are using…

The results are actually quite surprising on two counts…

  1. Gnome 3 is actually quite high with over 28% of the vote (over 4000 users). Even though you have to install it separately in Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10.
  2. Gnome legacy is surprisingly low (lower than XCFE and KDE) for all the fuss about moving forward…
I know its not anything scientific but its a good sign… not quite sure what it says about Unity?

How I roll at work

I recently filled in a group of people at work about how I work, and I thought it might be interesting to readers of my blog…
I have the Thinkpad X220 which is a BBC R&D laptop and running Ubuntu 11.10 (as of this week, but its going back due to hardware problems).
I switch between the BBC R&D network and the BBC R&D wireless network when I want raw (un-proxyed) internet access. This actually works well because I don’t need to use my BBC desktop machine unless I need to accept a calendar request and send it to my gmail (which is pain, more details about this soon).
I’d hoped to get Gnome Evolution working with the socks5 proxy as it should be able to deal with my Calendar as it has Exchange support but currently no Socks5 support (why I have no bloody idea!). So I’m trying out sockisfy and Tsocks… But right now I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird 7.1 with the IMAP interface to get emails when I switch to the R&D network.
This also means it limits the time I’m in my email and means I get more done… (Something I know from using Rescuetime in the past and tracking my usage at work) I tend to switch to the R&D network about 3-5x a day for about 20mins each time but most of the time I’m on the non proxied wireless network.
This means I automatically get disconnected from IRC, Tweetdeck, Gtalk, etc when changing to the R&D network but I do have the essential things like Twitter and Gtalk on my mobile phone which is always connected to the Wireless network. I could change the proxy settings but I kind prefer it that way, although I did add foxyproxy to Firefox because it was a pain not being able to browse a site someone sent via a BBC email without digging around the preferences.
It does seem a bit of crazy way to do things but I quite like it and means I’m not watching and replying to emails all the time. Now I just have to wait for the Thinkpad X220 to be fixed…

FLOSS software things which I wonder about…

“FLOSS” (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), and “FOSS” (or F/OSS, Free and Open Source Software).

I attended the Floss Unconference fest yesterday at Manchester Conference centre (a location I had planned to use for BarCampManchester2 due to their ability to do overnights and excellent warren like structure).
The event was reasonable but not well attended, which was a shame. It needed about another 30 people to feel more busy and active. Not quite sure why people never came out for it…? But to be honest I only spotted it by hearing a tweet from Teknoteacher. Anyhow, at the end of the day there were lightening talks and I jumped at the chance to talk about software which really needs to be developed on Linux. I’ve adopted this post to apply to most Floss type things…

First up…

  • What happened to Say my name desert? The developer moved to announcefy but frankly its a downgrade and I’m just about to uninstall it because they’ve been talking about plugins for yonks and they still don’t exist. Instead I just installed Call Announcer which seems to do what I want, but we’ll see…
  • In the same vein, locale what happened? I’ve switched to the hyper geeky Llama which operates based on radio cell towers so in theory it shouldn’t eat so much power as locale. But to be honest I’ve not really had time to mess with it and tweak it.
Now to the desktop…

I’m sure theres plenty more but these are my thoughts right now…

Amazon Kindle Fires off

Kindle Fire

First impressions of the Amazon Kindle Fire?

Fantastic! Its roughly a 7inch Kindle/Tablet with some decent power and enough storage for general consumption… And its only 199 dollars!

That means even if they shift the dollars price over directly into pounds its still a very reasonable price. Funny enough its about the same price as the HP touchpad when it was on sale.

Theres still quite a lot which is unknown such as side loading apps, which version of Android and ultimately how hackable the device will be but Amazon have totally blown the Nook Color out of the water ($249). In fact a lot of the tablets will struggle against the Kindle Fire, even the Ipad. The Kindle fire is just so cheap that it will be come a thing people will just have. Amazon have gone for the mass which frankly isn’t a bad idea at all.

Not having the Android Market isn’t a massive deal because frankly its just a matter of getting the developers to submit the same application to the Amazon store instead. Amazon have really taken the ideals of free and open to the maximum, now if only I was in the States! Maybe I can buy one off the back of the amazon account confusion…?

The other Kindles all look good and finally its good to see Amazon releasing a Touch screen version for all those who can’t live without touching the screen. But for now I’m sticking with my Kindle as I’ve not really seen enough to make me switch, plus I like the keyboard anyway.

Revolutionising your desktop one step at a time

Desktop Agosto 2011

Recently I’ve had the joy of taking the tram into work everyday. I keep meaning to buy a monthly pass but having to get a photocard done at the GMPTE (greater manchester transport, like TFL is to London) but forget. Anyway some people may have noticed I’m tweeting a lot of links and passages from my Kindle. This only works due to the wifi hotspot on my rooted HTC desire, because of course the Trams don’t have wifi but have the advantage of being above ground and crossing Manchester City centre.

One of the posts I read via Linux Magazine was about the design choices going into the next generation desktops.

The post talks about the outrage by different communities involved with the next generation of desktops.

This is something I feel very strongly about because of my disdain of Ubuntu’s unity desktop. I understand some of the reasons which make it opinionated software but it doesn’t mean I have to like it 🙂 So I switched to using the very much beta Gnome3 desktop which is a breath of fresh air but also has problems (even on my new thinkpad x220).

At work I tend to switch between the two because I’m driving a 24″ full HD display along side my laptop screen, so keep logging in and out for reasons I’ll explain another day.

In the post, it talks about how Gnome3, Ubuntu Unity and KDE4 have had problems because they all have made some difficult changes. But to be honest this is consistent with Microsoft Windows 8’s move into Metro and OSX’s move into a more iOS type platform. All are tricky and full of people upset and confused.

To be honest they could all learn from the points of the post…

  • Don’t change too much too quickly
  • Build user testing into each stage of the development
  • Whenever possible, leave legacy features in place
  • Don’t impose work-flows from above
  • Beware of designer fads
  • Don’t view function and aesthetics as separate
  • If a design is too noticeable, then maybe it’s too clever to use
  • Talk to your readers as you work
There all valid and good points. I’m sure most of the linux desktops are doing most of these. Interesting point however is the tension between
opinionated software and the last point talking to the users of your work. Being too proud or too precious will ultimately put you in a worst position overall in my book, but I’m sure others would totally disagree…?

UGR Linux: Ubuntu Gnome Remix project

I have Ubuntu 11.04 on my laptop but I’ve added Gnome 3 and ditched Unity by adding repositories which have Gnome3. Everything kind of works but there are problems as described before here.

So I was happy to see the Ubuntu Gnome Remix project is growing and has a couple of releases such as gNatty.

This all comes at a point when I’m seriously considering wiping my laptop drive and building a version of Ubuntu without Unity from the very start. Problem is I don’t really want to loose all the applications, preferences, etc, etc… So I’ll try and get Gnome3 fully working then maybe one day soon, just do the wipe. I am hoping Ubuntu allow Gnome3 to be a part of Ubuntu or allow such projects to grow and establish themselves.

From Ubuntu Classic to Gnome 3.0

Ubuntu 11.04 running Gnome3

I recently got fed up of running Ubuntu classic and decided to give Gnome 3.0 a shot.

Unity had already left a nasty taste in my user experience and didn’t really work correctly, so I thought whats have I got to lose by installing Gnome 3.0 on top of Ubuntu 11.04.

Generally the instructions are simply…

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Gnome 3.0 worked great except all the fonts are not right. I’m tempted to reinstall or do something to my preference configs.

Ah but then I solved the problem with the following commands

sudo apt-get remove gnome-accessibility-themes
sudo apt-get install gnome-themes-standard

Generally I am missing Compiz and that rotating cube but I just couldn’t deal with Unity. Actually I quite like Gnome 3’s interface… I also like the way there going with it. This is from the Gnome site.

Distraction-free computing

GNOME 3 is designed to reduce distraction and interruption and to put you in control. Our new notifications system subtly presents messages and will save them until you are ready for them, and the GNOME 3 panel has been styled so that it is part of the background, not the foreground. These changes allow you to focus on your creative tasks.

Exactly what I what I’m after, I always turn on auto hide on all menus because the last thing I want is stuff clouding my viewpoint. I Unity is distracting and requires too much screen space. And to make things worst, it doesn’t seem to scale for multiple monitors like I have at work.

I do find Gnome 3 application menu a little odd and more like an answer to Unity but its a lot more logical. The only thing which did my head in was the tie to the Super key (Windows key) because I tend to use that key for Gnome-Do. Which makes me wonder where Gnome-Do fits in Gnome 3?

Will I be installing Gnome 3.0 on my work machine? Well maybe… We shall see. I do miss Compiz but seeing how Gnome 3 doesn’t support Compiz and Compiz is now tied to Unity, I’m kind of between a rock and a hard place. I was looking forward to installing some of the experimental plugins including the screensaver.

Now all we need is a new distro which is built on Ubuntu but runs Gnome 3.

Opinionated software

It is opinionated vision-driven software

37signals say Agnostic software is bull…

Some people argue software should be agnostic. They say it’s arrogant for developers to limit features or ignore feature requests. They say software should always be as flexible as possible.

We think that’s bullshit. The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides. When someone uses software, they’re not just looking for features, they’re looking for an approach. They’re looking for a vision. Decide what your vision is and run with it.

To be honest I’d never really heard the term till David Eastman said it on Techgrumps recently…

We were using it in the context of Ubuntu 11.04 but it equally applies to iOS and many other operating systems and software.

Is it a good thing or bad thing? Hard to say, but to be honest I’ve not really seen much advantages to opinionated software right now…

Ubuntu is broken

It hurts me to say it but Ubuntu is broken for me.

I upgraded 2 machines to Ubuntu 11.04 on Saturday night and left them downloading/upgrading over night. One of the machines, my Pentium 4 desktop machine. Upgraded and after a reboot looks and feels pretty much the same as it did before hand. There was a message to say it wasn’t able to run Unity because the graphics card was too low spec and after a click ok, its pretty much the same as it was before, nothing really changed. All seems good.

However my laptop (Dell M1210 XPS) also got upgraded after the pop up came up. After a reboot, I logged into Ubuntu which I assumed had unity installed and I’m left with my usual desktop picture some icons but no menus at all. What makes things worst is the location where I assume there should have been a menu is now black. So down the left hand side is black and along the top is black. Nothing… I would show a screen shot but as I discovered my keyboard mappings have also been lost in the upgrade. Yes even Fn+Print Scrn no longer works. Luckily Gnome-Do still kind of works, so I’m able to open applications, including screenshots with some hassle.

Ubuntu 11.04 Fail (no menus)

I finally logged out and tried running Ubuntu in classic mode (I assume using Gnome instead of Unity). Things are better but still not correct. My keyboard shorts are still somewhat broken and its a nightmare not having Compiz cube switching which I didn’t know I was so use to now. After a little googling I got cube switching back but only using a keyboard short cut. It seems the automatic switching when the mouse touches the side of the screen is no longer available?

Right now I seem to have three choices…

  1. Live without Compiz and run Ubuntu totally plain
  2. Run Ubuntu with Compiz using classic mode and work on the annoying things like (you may have noticed) no chrome/window boarders. (at one point I had no menus! Try saving something with no save menu…) Compiz seems to accept some changes but do random things to some of my settings. Like currently I can’t move windows or even change there sizes.
  3. Reinstall the whole thing from fresh and attempt to get Unity working

Ubuntu 11.04 Fail (lack of chrome)

Its frustrating and I don’t really know what happened but for me right now Ubuntu 11.04 is simply broken… Expect screenshots as when I can consistently take them and upload them.

Ubuntu 11.04 in classic mode

The internet operating system for real

Chrome Extensions

I switched to Ubuntu over 4 years ago, and its been pretty smooth.

But its recently got even smoother thanks to Google’s Chrome browser.

Why? A lot of people don’t even know Chrome supports extensions like Firefox…

Evernote winds me up no end… I started using Nevernote. Its a java client which mainly works with evernote but to be fair its quite bulky and a little slow. However Google launched there web store and a whole bunch of html5 apps have made it into the web store. A few of the apps include Evernote clients which not only connect to Evernote but also keep a local store of the notes. Making Evernote finally fully usable and reliable on a Ubuntu laptop.

As you can also see, its not only Evernote, its also Tweetdeck without installing Adobe Air (because when I last checked the 64bit version was bad, and who wants it on there machine?). I actually stopped using Gwibber because of Tweetdeck in Chrome (sorry to say…) Readitlater, Dropbox, etc are more like Firefox extensions than full applications. I guess Mozilla’s Prism is more like the chrome applications. I did try a while ago to run Evernote in Prism but it really wasn’t built for it, maybe things have changed now but I’m using Chrome more and more, although I also use Firefox 3.6 still for most of my general stuff.

There’s a lot of low level chatter about the internet operating system but google are doing a great job actually making it happen… you can see why the concept of chrome os is fascinating

Reversed EyeFi card almost

Hak5

I was catching up with Hak5 and Darren was doing a few interviews from the RSA 2011 conference. One of the interviews was with Kingston, who were showing off there new secure USB memory stick, called Blockmaster.

One of the features seems to be around the ability to push content to the memory stick. I’m not sure exactly how it works but I assume when you plug the memory stick into a web connected computer it will refresh its content with a centralised kingston service? I guess it works like dropbox but limited to what can fit on the memory stick.

This of course raise all types of hacker type questions but putting that all a side for now, this goes one more step closer to the idea of a reversed eyefi card.

With a reversed Wifi card you could easily push images to a photoframe which would be simply amazing. Bloo from the forums outlines the idea…

I would like to see an Eye-Fi card which pulls photos from somewhere and puts them in a directory on the SD card.

The primary use case for this would be to wifi-enable digital photo frames; however it could also enable those frames to be information displays for other applications: some program stores images in directory on a PC and the frame downloads from there on a regular basis.

If the Kingston blockmaster was add wifi in the future, I believe the reversed eyefi would be done and a whole ton of people would buy it. The closest we are to the reversed eyefi card is Isabella miniusb stick