Time Unknown

I'm currently using Konqueror and Firefox 3, mostly because Konqueror is not as tolerant about page quirks as FF and FF on the other hand is still somewhat hoggy. I'd like to change to just one of them for most of my uses, but kind of feel I'd be giving something up in the process. It might be I still like Konqueror better, for some reason. Hmm. Any hints to ease the transition?

According to the answer I got from Universal Laser Systems, the makers of Versalaser, they have no plans to release a Linux driver for the device and zero plans to ever release specs so that an open source driver could be developed.

There seems to be other Windows-only laser engravers/cutters out there, I wonder if some of them might be a bit more Linux friendly. I'd assume tech geeks to be a non-tiny potential market.

My next targets for inquiry are IEHK, Epilog and GCC. Feel free to point me to another companies too, or let me know if you know any to be Linux friendly.

Powertop result with idling Firefox3:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 22.1W (2.6 hours)

Without:

Power usage (ACPI estimate): 19.2W (2.9 hours)

That's one needy Fox!

My friend's housemate has an amazing glider necklace made of peyote beads. It looks way sleeker than in the photo, a beautiful piece indeed.

Lately a big part of my time has gone into coding Clueshare. It feels nice to be on a roll.

Much fun can be had with

an -m 5

and variants an a quiet afternoon. Thanks Danie!

I've decided I'm eating way too much candy, and thus I'm stopping buying any for the next 365 days. I'm not necessarily stopping having candy, just becoming a candy beggar or a charity candy case. I'm sure that will cut my licorice consumption down to a very reasonable range.

Plugging in Saunalahti nettitikku Huawei 169 worked fine, and I could browse the web and ssh out. Soon, however, I realized that Akregator was failing to fetch feeds. I tried again and then fetched some feeds manually with Firefox.. that worked so it seemed unlikely .rss was somehow discriminated against. When I tried fetching podcasts with Amarok, that did not work either! I closed and restarted both apps, but no cigar.

Turned out both started working when I closed Knetwork-manager. I guess they believed it too well about there not being a network.

Now and then I notice I went away from my irssi without setting myself away and no messages got logged as the result. That's annoying and inconvenient. However, the autoaway.pl or even away.pl didn't look like they'd play nice with randaway.pl and I was not about to give up my randomnness for this. Luckily screen_away.pl does all I want it to and does not mess with my random aways. That's happiness.

Seems I ridiculously overestimated the difficulty of getting an external monitor working with my HP NC8230 laptop in Kubuntu. I fiddled with the GUI settings. I fiddled with the xorg.conf. No image. I pressed Fn+F4 (the button for external monitor) till my finger was sore. Only a login screen, then nothing. I asked for help in#kubuntu and they fiddled with the settings with me. Occasionally I got settings that worked worse than my originals and had to revert. I tried displayconfig-gtk with miserable results.

Then I thought to try xrandr --auto and it just worked! Not only did it work, but when I closed my laptop, the image on the external monitor just briefly blinked off and then came back. I'm one happy geek now.

2008-05-02:
Alas, later I discovered this too easy fix might not been all without drawbacks. I needed to switch the video.driver setting in Xine to get video playing work again in Miro and Kaffeine. For Kaffeine it was easy, just modify the settings from within the app, Miro however does not offer a human-writable config file, so I ended up adding --xine-driver=xshm to Miro's flags.

Population Growth: unnatural, unnecessary, unsustainable is a beautiful but sad video on population growth.

If after that you feel tempted to say we can solve it by colonizing other planets, read this insigthful article on the math of population growth and think again.

Most people probably buy a new computer in one go, new monitor, keyboard, components and all. But is this the route to the optimum techtoy satisfaction?

Let's think about the alternative and assume that the current computer is a somewhat old but still functioning laptop. First you might upgrade to a new and fine 24" monitor. It's a pleasurable new toy, though the laptop video card might not be modern enough to use it with the full range of colours. Next you maybe get a new keyboard and a better mouse and enjoy snappier typing and speedier response in gaming. Eventually you get the new main unit, with fancy new CPU, a modern video card and other components, except it has just 2G of memory compared to your planned 4G. The next month or so the rest of the memory gets inserted. At each step you experience some techtoy pleasure.

This gradual approach feels maybe less appealing than the "everything right now" way of getting all you want in one go, but I do think it's likely to provide greater amounts and longer time oftechtoy joy than the one-time joy of getting a totally new system.

A moment ago I got a phone call where a youngish female voice asked me to repeat my name as she was uncertain she had called the right number. Only after hanging up I realized that my name is probably not at all recognizable to someone who knew me before my first name changed in 1994. Eventually I called back, just to inquire who she were trying to reach and it indeed was me. This time I didn't miss a high school reunion, but this left me wondering if I've missed somethings like that already.

I personally ended up taking my husband's family name, and I'm happy with the decision (as his does not have Scandinavian letters in it) but if I were to give advice for others I'd recommend career orientated women to keep their own family name so that their earlier work can be connected to their current name.

Today I visited Wowio, a site that offers DRM-free PDFs of books. Real books. I spend an hour on the site ooh-ing over the books and adding gazillion of them into my queue. When I was finally done, I went to the queue section to download. I was asked to register. That's ok, they have to form some sort of idea who visits the site if they ever want to have any revenue.

However, they did not let me register. The site told me it's currently only for people in USA, and cannot serve me. I did not even get access to my queue listing, so I could not even take the list and go buy the books. What a waste of time! Why couldn't they let me know of this limitation when I first entered the site?

So, if you really want to annoy people visiting your site, make them jump through hoops and then tell them 'gotcha' and deny them the service.

Today there was an unpleasant surprise from the audiobook seller Audible in my inbox. They wanted to bill me for membership renewal despite the fact I had cancelled it online according to their instructions last year. I went to cancel it again, but the cancellation link was not there. Their support section said that if I have already cancelled, the link will no longer be there and in that case I should call them to some exotic foreign number during exotic foreign hours to sort it out.

Damn, that could easily cost more than the yearly membership! I emailed them instead through their customer service loops. Wish me luck.

I'm so disappointed in Audible turning evil this way. I liked them still before, despite the fact I could no longer listen to their products (no support for Linux or for my digital audioplayer).