A Man and his Penguin

Not really a lot to say at the moment. I’m going too e-mail Kym back near the end of this month - the reason she gave was that it was stressful talking to a virtual stranger while having to go through the stress of exams and assignments and stuff (she has mild depression and anxiety about social situations), so I think it would be good to wait until the other sources of stress for her are over before I complicate things again.

I’ve never had such an instant connection with someone before.

Soppy stuff aside, Hi-5 were on Channel 9’s Abba Mania special. The idea was to get a bunch of well-known musicians together to sing Abba songs. The result ended off being some people who nobody had ever heard of before, performing (barely singing) some Abba songs. What can you say about a musical special where the biggest vocal talent there was Kerry-Anne Kennerly, and most of the other singers were journalists and substitute weather presenters for Channel 9? Admittedly, Kerry-Anne Kennerly was amazing - I never thought that a morning TV host could have such a strong singing voice.

Anyway, as I had to plug my video capture box into the AV Out of my TV (long story) and I got some terrible interference in the audio, I became well aquainted with the noise filter of Audacity. It works really well - I used it in the podcast yesterday too, with good results.

Speaking of the podcast, I discovered Nautilus’ integrated FTP browser. That is one cool file manager. Yes, I know that the Mac OS Finder has done it since version 8.5, I know that Konqueror can also do it, but I still can’t get over the fact that Nautilus treats FTP directories the same as local directories. It just makes things so easy.

In other Gnome-related news (kinda), Aaron from UbuntuOS has switched from KDE to Gnome. The guy is probably the world’s biggest KDE fan, so I think he’ll go crawling back to Kubuntu

Adblock Plus is working great. There are no advertisements on this blog-writing page.

Last night I e-mailed a large file to someone, and I used the At command to tell my computer to turn off at a particular time after they would have finished. But I came into my computer room this morning and found the computer still on. It was stuck on the "System Halted" message. Disturbing, but I think it’s because in the At command I specified two commands - halt and sudo halt, which probably wasn’t clever. On the plus side, I got to try out the kernel command keys - Alt-PrtScr-S to sync all drives, Alt-PrtScr-U to unmount the drives, and Alt-PrtScr-O to power down. The last one didn’t work - possibly a problem of that nature.

Last two things: I put a bunch of pictures of Joondalup and Busselton into F-Spot, tagged them as Places, and then set the Places tag as my screensaver. Sometimes, when I start to think that I need a holiday, I go System > Log Out and click Lock Screen, and just sit there looking at all the photos. It makes me feel better.

Last thing: As the version of Gstreamer that comes with Dapper is not exactly cutting-edge, I can’t use Jokosher. I can open it, but no sound comes out. As a result, I’m seriously thinking of clean-installing Edgy. My Dapper system is a bit gunky; I’ve got heaps of things on there that I don’t need, and Thunar seems to be my default file manager for some commands, and some of my fonts are too big, so I think I’ll end off upgrading. Possibly on the 1st anniversary of my first successful Ubuntu boot-up (December 26th) or the 1st anniversary of my first Ubuntu installation (the 11th of Janurary).

Okay, so I told you that I didn’t have much to say. I suppose I did.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 12:32 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.