Category: technology-and-computing

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

Evernote take notes from Dropbox and Rescuetime

I’ve said it many times but Evernote really winds me up no end. I even went down the completely open route for a while using Tomboy Notes and there online service. To be honest the only reason why I switched back was because of Nevernote and the fact Tomdroid, couldn’t sync with any online service unless you transfered the notes via SD card.

However I started thinking via Dropbox, it would be trivial to do the syncing part. The only issue left seems to be about the fact tomdroid doesn’t seem to support editing or anything like that.

Anyway, the thing is going back to Evernote. Is I’ve been looking around some of my other apps I also pay for. Dropbox is the key example here.

Dropbox does support Linux but to be fair there a little behind the windows and mac versions. Not by much but its understandable. Rescue time don’t officially seem to support linux but they do unofficially support someone elses linux uploader, it would seem.

The fact is Evernote could really help there dominance by helping Nevernote. If they don’t Tomboy notes isn’t that far behind and will rise up and become the choice for many people.

Hacker friendly: Microsoft turns over a new leaf?

I never thought I’d see the day but it seems Microsoft have really got into the hacker spirit recently. I mean what would Bill Gates say about this new leaf of openness, who knows… but I can imagine a shudder of fear slowly tingling up his spine.

Remember Hacking the Xbox: An Introduction to Reverse Engineering by Andrew bunnie Huang

"Hacking the Xbox" confronts the social and political issues facing today’s hacker. The book introduces readers to the humans behind the hacks through several interviews with master hackers.

"Hacking the Xbox" looks forward and discusses the impact of today’s legal challenges on legitimate reverse engineering activities. The book includes a chapter written by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) about the rights and responsibilities of hackers, and concludes by discussing the latest trends and vulnerabilities in secure PC platforms.

Its not just phone 7, Kinect kicked off a new attitude for Microsoft. Good on them, but I do wonder how long it will last?

A side point

I was a little excited when I discovered Rafael Rivera was one of the people behind the phone 7 unlocking. But of course he’s not to be confused with the new BBC director of Future media Ralph Rivera. That would be so weird if it was…

Apple OSX App store grumble

In a recent Techgrumps podcast we ripped into the notion of Apple including an App Store in the next release of OSX Lion. This is from the Apple…

We took our best thinking from Mac OS X and brought it to the iPhone. Then we took our best thinking from the iPhone and brought it to iPad. And now we’re bringing it all back to the Mac with our eighth major release of the world’s most advanced operating system.

When I first heard about the App store I laughed it off thinking well you know what Ubuntu has a app store as such (repository) but the major difference is in the way they are run.

Ubuntu’s repository is a pretty straight forward open democratic place and if you don’t like it, you can remove there repository and put in your own. I have for example in my app store (as such) ubuntu’s ppa, canonical partners, covergloobus, gloobuspreview, handbreak snapshots, jessyink, ubuntu desktop, gwibber daily, xbmc, dropbox, getdeb and opera ppa’s. This is very similar to the approach Boxee has done with its own repository. So ultimately I choose what I want and where I get it from. However, the question is, will the Apple OSX app store also follow this route or will the paranoid Apple force developers to go through Apple’s own process to get apps into the app store?

Something tells me the answer is very obvious…