YouTube breaks third-party apps again, but Minitube got a quick fix

Earlier this year YouTube rolled out a site redesign that broke every video downloading addon out there, although Firefox’s addon devs rose to the occasion. (I do with my gChrom extensions would get fixed so I don’t have to fire up the Fox so bloody often.) Recently YouTube devs did it again, rolling out an upgrade that broke third-party YouTube apps, rendering my beloved Minitube able to find videos but unable to play a one of them.

Luckily for us Ferramosca Roberto, Minitube’s creator, found the bug and rolled out Minitube 1.1, allowing us to once again enjoy YouTube vids without opening our web browsers. As of this writing he doesn’t have a Windows installer yet but he does have binaries for Linux and OSX, although OSX binaries require a small fee to help fund the development and support. Minitube users on the other platforms are more than welcome to donate what they can to help fund continued development as well, because Ferramosca still has bills to pay while he works in open source software development.

GNU/Linux users have a handy set of install instructions since it’s going to take time to get packages built for the various distros. The instructions list dependencies and notes about what you many need to do to get it working on KDE, as well as notes for people with 64 bit systems and those who don’t get video.

Ubuntu users have it even easier because while it will take some time for GetDeb to get an updated package build Ferramosca has a Launchpad PPA that already has the update available.  Info for adding the PPA is on the PPA link if you need it.

While you’re at Ferramosca’s website you should also check out Minitunes, Minitube’s new sibling that could become your new favorite audio player. I haven’t fired it up yet (KDE has yet to add it to my app menu after installing it for some reason) but check out what their entry in the Ubuntu Software Center says. (You’ll need to add the PPA above to get it to show up in the USC.)

I do like the way they word that. Give it a whirl on your own system and see how you feel about it.

My first week on KDE, part 2 – A Review

(Sorry to take so long to get this posted. I’ve had it written in rough form since early this week and just got the chance to finish things up. You can see part 1, with a half dozen screenshots, here.)

When I started looking at moving away from Ubuntu I was leaning toward KDE after the wealth of great screenshot I’d been seeing in the Ubuntu Forums monthly desktop screenshot threads. I was especially interested in the possibilities of Bespin, a theme/widget style for Qt4 that has knocked my socks off in some desktop screenshots. I’ll admit I haven’t played with Bespin much yet but I definitely need to track down the info I was given before so I could look into it. On the whole I’m really liking KDE. There’s a lot to learn, and I do have to relearn how to do some things in KDE but it’s definitely a learning curve worth climbing. One of the things you learn pretty quickly about GNOME is the fact that a lot of the configuration tasks are hidden away from the general user, and while the GNOME Configuration Editor and Ubuntu Tweak do help a lot there are some things, like screensavers, where all but the most basic things are not available, and even then you can easily have to deal with the command line to make further tweaks. If the tweaks are even doable under GNOME. With KDE there are user changeable options for just about everything, if you can figure out where to look. Unfortunately finding information isn’t as easy in KDE as it is in Ubuntu, which lets you search one in the Help app and get results in every installed app. In KDE I first have to know where I want to look and I’ve started in the wrong place a few times. I’ve also found the KDE help files aren’t nearly as in-depth as GNOME’s are so I’ve had to turn to my web browser a few times to find the information I need.

I’ve been running some KDE apps under GNOME so I knew the reverse would be possible, and simply installing kubuntu-desktop would being in a lot of the packages I’d need to use KDE. The Psychocats website has instructions for installing KDE on a GNOME-based Ubuntu system and even getting rid of the GNOME packages if you decide you want a pure KDE system. While I’ve ditched a number of the GNOME packages on my system I’m holding off on clearing house completely until I can make sure I don’t want to hold off on doing it until I have all of my data from GNOME apps, like Evolution, before I do. I still haven’t even fired up Kmail, Kontact or another email app because I haven’t done a proper backup of my Evo email data yet and I’ve already gone through the hassle of importing my old emails the manual way once. Believe me, once was way more than enough times for that.

One of the joys of KDE is the fact that I no longer have to worry with Compiz, thanks to the built-in KWin window manager. Kwin lets you set up a number of effects like translucency, snapping, the desktop cube, and more. I used the Expo effect on Compiz to see all of desktops at once, and while KWin doesn’t have that option as far as I can tell, Gareth Francis showed me something almost as nice. I can move my mouse to the upper left corner of my desktop and it shows previews of all of my open windows, including my Google Gadgets, although I may want to find a way to get the gadgets skipped. In fact KDE has so many built-in goodies and components that some may want to call it bloatware, but I like how McKenzie Morgan put it in her comments on my initial post on looking at other distros, “Some people call it the blue-headed stepchild. I call it leaving well enough alone.”

The built-in configuration utility, System Settings, is a centralized home for tweaking everything on your system other than the actual goodies on your desktop like your wallpaper. The hardest part was figuring where everything is, but that’s also part of the adventure in moving to KDE.

I was also able to stop using Avant Window Navigator in favor of using Fancy Panel. I can still use AWN if I want, but I’m trying to use as many KDE apps as I can. Although I’m not 100% happy with Fancy Panel. For some reason I can set up my launchers where I want them but when I launch Chromium it moves to the task section. It’s a bit of a pain but It’s nothing I can’t get used to. I also miss some of AWN’s applets like the system monitor and the terminal applet. I didn’t realize how spoiled I was by having a pop-up terminal in my dock until I didn’t have it anymore. Now I have a terminal plasmoid (widget) that sits on my desktop but I can’t tuck it out of the way when I don’t need it. Actually, since I started writing this I found a wonderful replacement, Yakuake, thanks to Gareth Francis’ comment on part one of this post. It sits out of the way above my desktop window, from which a simple F12 brings it out of hiding.

Speaking of plasmoids, I’ve been like a kid in a candy shop as I’ve explored the plasmoids that are available. With GNOME, and even AWN, when I’d find a widget I want to use I have to find the install file, download it, and then open the appropriate app to use it, whether it’s for AWN, Screenlets or something else. Not with AWN. You can still peruse the goodies on KDE-Look and KDE-Apps, but now I right-click on my desktop, unlock the applets if they’re locked, and click Add Widgets. then click the Get New Widgets button and select Download New Plasma Widgets. A window comes up that will let you search and select any of a number of plasmoids that you can install right from that dialog box. Installing all sorts of new goodies can be added that way, whether you want new plasmoids, themes, icon sets, wallpapers, and more. The only big thing I’ve noticed I can’t install that way is screensavers.

Speaking of screensavers, KDE has some great screensavers although as far as I can tell the Skyrocket screensaver that comes with the Really Slick Screensavers (RSS) package don’t show up under KDE. I did a search through the CrunchBang Ubuntu Search tool and discovered that if I want the RSS screensavers in KDE I needed to install xscreensaver. Once I did I found a number of new screensavers on the list but not the Skyrocket screensaver so I purged my system of rss-glx and reinstalled it but still no Skyrocket. On the plus side I did get my all-time favorite screensaver back: Electric Sheep! I had tried adding it according to the instructions on the electricsheep website but it wasn’t showing up. It turns out reinstalling xscreensaver, which I had dumped in my move from GNOME to KDE, was the missing element. As John Lurie says at 1:30 into the longer version of Stink from the Get Shorty soundtrack, “Now I’m happy!”

I was glad that Chromium worked without a glitch when I fired it up on KDE because Konqueror, the default KDE web browser, is definitely not ready for prime time. The biggest deal breaker is that Gmail falls back to the older version of the interface, and I had forgotten how much Gmail’s interface improved over the old version. I also tried Rekonq, which Jonas recommended in my original post on the possible operating system change as “the KDE-version of Chrome/Chromium” but with the latest version of Flash Rekonq crashes as it loads any site with Flash content. Again, a definite deal-breaker.

Dolphin, which shares the job of file manager in KDE with Konqueror. Konqueror is kind of like how in Windows you have Explorer and Internet Explorer, giving you a similar interface for both tasks, but Dolphin and Konqueror share some of the settings to get the interface how you like it. A big plus in Dolphin is the ability to split the main file area into a separate view with it’s own location. It can do tabs like GNOME’s Nautilus but I love being able to split the view just by hitting F3. You have to be careful disabling the split because it wants to use the right pane’s location rather than the left pane like I expected since it is the original pane. It’s much easier to drag and drop files between locations with the split feature, and any time I tried to drag files to a tab nothing happened. Dragging and dropping is also easier because it asks you whether you want to copy the files, move them, or create a link to the original location unless you hold down the Ctrl or Shift key as you drag the files, rather than having to hold down the Alt key to get asked what you want under Nautilus.

A big plus in KDE was pointed out by MrTom, Fitzcarraldo and Monty on the first part of my DE switch thread, namely the ability to make your desktop show the contents of your ~/Desktop folder like you can do with GNOME distributions of GNU/Linux, as well as on Windows, or you can set your desktop up as a “desktop containment” with no icons. The latter makes it easy to simply have plasmoids on your desktop, although you can use a Folder View or QuickAccess plasmoid to give you access to your desktop. KDE defaults with a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop that you can use to basically give you a file manager window right on your desktop, just without the rest of the file manager interface to get in the way. You can set the Folder View to use any folder you want very easily so you have the directory you want on your desktop. I prefer using the QuickAccess plasmoid, which lets me pop up a menu of the file contents when I need them but stays out of the way the rest of the time.

You can also set your desktop to duplicate your basic set of tools on all of your virtual desktops or you can set your system so that each desktop is for different tasks. The downside to the latter is that you can forget which applets on which desktop, plus I noticed that the settings got shifted so that my primary desktop was instead on the second desktop, and so on. It also broke the wallpaper changer as far as I could tell. It’s great if you want to have a different wallpaper on each desktop, but if you’re like me and have a number of wallpapers you want to rotate between I don’t see that you can do that with specific desktops for different tasks.

That’s right, Compiz lets GNOME users have different wallpapers on different virtual desktops but it breaks the ability to have icons on your desktop. From what I can see (although I haven’t tested it) you have the ability to have icons on your desktop or not, all while enjoying different wallpapers on your desktops.

Wallpapers on your desktop is a whole other thing in KDE. You can use a scripted image, simply have a colored desktop with no image, use one of of several effects, a starfield (think Star Trek, and yes, it’s animated), a pattern, a globe, or even a video. You can also set up a sideshow of different wallpaper images on your desktops with the built-in option or you can use a program called Wally to not only change your wallpapers on a schedule you set but it can also go online and get new images from a wide range of sites from Picasa and Flicker to Photobucket, Buzznet and Panoramio. I used Webilder on GNOME to use images from Webshots on my desktop, although Webshots recently rolled out a site upgrade that broke that feature, but you can also snag pictures from Flickr that match the tags you choose. Unfortunately it’s a known issue that Webilder no longer works properly on KDE4 so I’m unable to let it go get new Flickr images or change my wallpapers. The Webilder dev is willing to help anyone who wants to try to fix the bug so if you’re a dev that runs KDE we’d love for you to help get Webilder working on KDE4. (Since I first wrote that something wonderful happened. Webilder was updated on the 20th to version 0.6.8, which includes a fix for being able to download new images on KDE. You’ll have to install it manually, but there’s step by step instructions on the Webilder downloads page. Now all we need is to get it to be able to change KDE desktop walls.)

Installing software on Kubuntu can use either the Ubuntu Software Center or KPackageKit. KPackageKit is a little easier than Synaptic, which you can also use, and is the tool for installing updates on KDE. Unfortunately KDE doesn’t seem to have an easy to use tool like Update Manager, in fact updates are applied with KPackageKit. There are a couple of problems with this. There’s no easy to see icon in your system tray that I can find, plus the interface for applying updates is quite different. KPackageKit doesn’t sort the updates by the type and source like Update Manager does, and rather than having a separate panel for information on the available updates you just have to click the package name to see the details. You also have to remember to close the details pane before getting details on another package or you’ll find the content overlapping and making things hard to read.

I did run into a problem with TweetDeck after I moved to KDE, but as I already posted there’s an easy fix for it. I was able to find some great replacements for some of the programs I run often. I normally ran the Gthumb Image Viewer for quick looks at images but Gwenview is a great replacement for it. I can even use Gwenview for some basic editing, thus keeping me from having to launch a separate image editor just to crop or resize images. I haven’t done much with watching videos yet, but Minitube is working beautifully for catching YouTube vids without using my web browser. I haven’t used my old favorite Amarok much for listening to audio files but since I have my music library available via the Music Player Daemon I can continue running Sonata to get at my music files just like I did under GNOME. Kate isn’t bad for editing text files but I still love Geany, in fact I’m doing some preliminary writing for this post with Geany and keeping my browser for other tasks as I write.

Of course Gnome Do isn’t nearly as handy on KDE, but Krunner is so nice I changed the default shortcut for it to use Do’s Super (the Windows key) + the spacebar, adding the Alt key to Do’s shortcut. I miss being able to launch an app with a single letter like I could with Do, but Krunner only requires 3 characters before it starts showing possible results. Need to do some quick math? Type it into Krunner and the results are right there, and unlike Do it won’t disappear as soon as you click something else.

I included more information with the screenshots on the first part of this report but I have to say that I’m liking KDE so much I may finish things up with my GNOME software, including possibly getting my email info into a KDE-friendly email client and checking Pidgin (I don’t foresee a problem there though), and then simply give my computer a fresh install of Kubuntu to clean up my system. That way I’ll get my system cleaned up, move away from the decisions of The Spaceman, but still keep full access to the Ubuntu community when I have questions or problems. Which is a really good thing because I checked out the Kubuntu Forums and I have to say I’m not thrilled with the way they’ve set up the software powering it. Maybe I’m spoiled by the UForums, but the KForums look a little amateurish by comparison. I may not like how The Spaceman changes Ubuntu, but they have a good forum. That’s okay though, because I can not only use the UForums but there’s a whole other world of KDE community sites that I can draw on to get my questions answered. And more KDE community sites can’t be a bad thing.

If you’re wondering about moving to KDE I found two pages that may be helpful for you. One is a like the KDE Application List, the list of all of the official KDE apps. The other is the Table of equivalent applications, although while it’s great for people moving from Windows or Mac OSX, it’s not so great for people moving from GNOME to KDE. It is helpful if you’re looking for similar apps, just not if you’re looking for matches for specific GNOME apps. I’ll have to see about starting a GNOME-to-KDE list, although I don’t know a lot of the GNOME apps to be able to get comparative apps.

You may notice our sidebar has changed a little

Frequent visitors to our blog may notice that there’s something missing from our sidebar.

It’s no surprise that Peng has become dissatisfied with the GNOME-based Ubuntu Linux and was looking at another distribution. What we haven’t said on the blog is that he’s not the only one. I may have been even more dissatisfied with some of the changes I’m seeing in Ubuntu, and the more Peng has told me about the possibilities of the KDE desktop environment the more curious I’ve become. I went over to see my brother over the weekend and before the new week began I, too, began running KDE. My desktop isn’t as pretty as his is, but I’ve already asked him to pass along some links with more information. Some of the links will be in his upcoming review of KDE, and some are just general KDE info links. (You are going to put those in your post, right Peng?)

With our move away from GNOME we found ourselves with a decision to make. We’ve had a button in our sidebar to support GNOME for a while now, but should we continue promoting it like that when we don’t use it anymore? It was a hard decision, and we went back and forth about it for days, but we finally decided it might send mixed signals to keep the button in our sidebar.

We’re not saying GNOME isn’t good anymore, because for many users it’s still the desktop environment they use. What we are saying is that we don’t feel right promoting GNOME when we’ve moved to KDE. We’ll look into adding a KDE button on our sidebar once my brother gets his review posted.

[UPDATED] Starbucks VIA Iced Coffee: A review

I’ve been a fan of Starbucks coffee for some time now (except for their House Blend and some of their milder brews) and I was tickled pink when they came out with their VIA Ready Brew. Being able to snag a cup of Starbucks coffee without having to hit a local store? Oh yeah, especially when they started selling them in my local grocery store. The one thing I thought was missing, a VIA for the days when what I really want is an iced coffee.

They heard our pleas, and late last month Starbucks rolled out Starbucks VIA Iced Coffee already sweetened and needing only a bottle of water or a glass, water and ice. It’s $5.95 for five packs, which seems a tad high although you can save a dollar with a coupon through the end of the month. You can buy it online or in the Starbucks stores, but the stores should have the coupon. If you buy it online the price is marked down so you don’t have to pay the full price. I was finally able to buy a box yesterday and looked forward to giving it a try this morning as I started my daily commute.

I hate to say this, but I was disappointed. It already has sugar, and form the picture on the box I figured it has some cream, or at least non-dairy creamer,  in it so all I had to do is fill up my water bottle with nice cold water, pour the packet into my bottle, put the lid on, shake it up and enjoy it. It turns out I’m wrong. It’s black with sugar, which isn’t a bad thing if that’s how you take your coffee, but my coffee is with cream and sugar. Usually that’s no problem, but if I start my day too early that may be an issue.

There’s one other problem with it, and that’s the taste. Starbucks knows their coffee so I figured it would be a good, if dark, bottle of coffee. Their hot VIA is pretty good, especially the Italian Roast, and the iced box says it uses Arabica beans to make the iced VIA so it should be good, but it tasted a little bitter to me. My first thought was it’s due to the sweetener, but it’s sugar not a chemical sweetener so that’s not the problem.

If you like a good iced coffee I still think you should give it a try. It’s not as good as an iced Americano (espresso and water), and it’s nowhere near as good as an iced caramel macchiato, but it may just be your cup of brew.  (I can’t say cup of joe anymore, thanks to some absolutely nasty stuff Burger King passed off as coffee under that name.) I’ll try the iced VIA again with some milk or half & half and see if that helps.

I know I owe everyone another part of my move-to-KDE post but I have a couple more images to get ready. I’m hoping to get it posted tomorrow.

Updated 22 July: For some reason my roomies decided to buy 2% milk this week and no half & half so I wasn’t able to give the VIA Iced Coffee a proper creamer test. The good news is that adding a creamer-like substance to my VIA iced did help the taste quite a bit.  I suspect using either whole milk or half & half will help even more.

The Bad News: It simply confirms that Starbucks really missed out on making their VIA Iced Coffee better by simply selling it as a black with sugar iced coffee. Having to add milk or cream pretty much ruins the convenience factor for anyone on the go.

TweetDeck died when I switched DE’s, but there’s a fix

I usually use the websites for keeping up with both Twitter and Facebook but sometimes I want to post something to both services at once., For those times I fire up TweetDeck (TD), a great cross-platform microbloging solution that uses Adobe AIR to deal with the details for each operating system whether you’re on GNU/Linux, MacOS X or Windows. TweetDeck can be used for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and other social networking sites.

When I switched from GNOME to KDE I didn’t expect a problem but when I fired up TweetDeck last week I got error messages. (Sorry, I forgot to snap a screenshot of the errors.) Yesterday I was posting the first part of my posts on the migration to KDE and decided to try reinstalling TD to see if it would resolve the issue. It didn’t, but there was a URL (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/492/cpsid_49267.html) in the error message so I entered it into my web browser.  The page is about problems with their Encrypted Local Storage (ELS) and a little more than half way down the page I saw a section about Using ELS while switching desktops. This is exactly what I was looking for.

Currently ELS supports a single desktop environment either Gnome or KDE on a machine. If the desktop session is Gnome and an application stores some data in ELS, when the desktop is changed to KDE, the same application will not be able to access the data that was stored earlier when the desktop session was Gnome.

This is because AIR Linux supports GnomeKeyring on Gnome and KWallet on KDE, and there are no standard method to transfer data among these two password managers.

I needed to reset the ELS by deleting the directory where it’s stored, ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS, with ~/ standing in for your user directory (/home/[YourUserName]/). I deleted the folder in Dolphin but you can do it by very carefully running this command in a terminal:

$ rm -rf ~/.appdata/Adobe/AIR/ELS

Once you delete that folder you should be able to run TweetDeck without a problem.

My first week on KDE, part 1 – Screenshots

Last month I mentioned that I was looking at switching my desktop environment (DE) from GNOME to KDE and I was considering a move away from Ubuntu completely. About a week ago I installed KDE on my computer and started tweaking things to see how I like it. It’s not too bad, actually. As you can see from the shot on the right I’ve been able to make my desktop a combination of eye candy and functionality. I killed the top panel but was able to keep some of the applets thanks to plasmoids. On the left is a shot I took for last month’s monthly screenshot thread over at the Ubuntu Forums. In the top panel is an application menu on the left, centered are a Force Quit applet, system monitor (for the RAM, network and swap space) and a timer, with the right side holding an icon for the Webilder desktop, the date and time, and a quit applet. I kept my Google Gadgets but traded AWN for the Fancy Panel plasmoid. I was also able to ditch my Clock, Countdown and Graphical System Stats Screenlets for similar plasmoids. I couldn’t find a force quit plasmoid (I haven’t looked yet, honestly), but the rundown on the gadgets on my desktop (begging at the lower left hand side of the screenshot) is the Simple Countdown plasmoid, a Digital Clock plasmoid, Analog Clock, my WeatherBug Google Sidebar Gadget, Bubblemon plasmoid, System Monitor – CPU plasmoid, Shutup plasmoid, two No-frills Google Mail Google Gadgets, and a System Tray plasmoid, with the Fancy Panel sitting on the bottom of my desktop. The wallpaper is an adorable pic I found on Webshots called Summer Cat Nap. The System Tray plasmoid isn’t that easy to see, but I’ll talk about it more in a bit. I know I may not need both the Bubblemon and the System Monitor-CPU plasmoids, but after playing with the Bubblemon for a day or so I decided it was just too cute to remove. A “clean” screenshot only tells part of the story, and on the Ubuntu Forums monthly screenshot threads we have a habit of showing both “clean” and “dirty” shots to give a better idea of how our desktop looks. I don’t use Compiz anymore since KDE includes the KWin window manager. I have to relearn some things, like how to zoom into my desktop, but I just have to get the shortcut keys set properly and remember what they are. I do wish I could start effects with my mouse, like zooming in or rotating my desktop cube, but I may simply not know how to make it work. Thanks to the Translucency effect I was able to make the windows I’m not using at the moment partly transparent. I have to admit it’s a nice touch and does a great job of helping me to see at a glance which window is active, especially when more than one window can be seen in its entirety and I’ve had to step away from my comp for a minute for another task. As you can see I’ve still got Chromium as my web browser, and Minitube and Sonata still work properly regardless of what DE I run. Another change I had to make with the switch from using GNOME to KDE is the fact that I could no longer throw files on my desktop for quick access but that’s no big deal, in fact I found a workaround that I’ll show you below. I also couldn’t use Webilder to manage and change my desktop wallpaper anymore since KDE changed enough that Webilder doesn’t know the proper way to change the wallpaper. That’s okay, because KDE has a few ways to do wallpapers. Not only can you do your basic wallpaper image in KDE, with the right add-ons you can set up a slideshow for you wallpaper, use patterns, specific wallpapers for the time of day, Mandelbrot images, scripted images, even animated starfields or even videos! There’s also an app called Wally that can use a collection of wallpaper images on your hard drive and can get new images from Picasa, Photobucket, Flickr and other online image (and image sharing) sites. Unfortunately I’ve had problems getting Wally to work like Webilder does and it doesn’t seem to have any way to select a specific wallpaper so I just use the slideshow. I decided to tweak my desktop a little more and made a few more screenies to show the changes. I moved the digital clock to the bottom of my desktop, mostly to keep it visible if I maximize an app window and can’t see the time in the original position. I also added a Timer plasmoid to replace the timer on my GNOME panel.  It doesn’t work as nicely as my GNOME timer did since I can’t set up times associated with a specific task, and I haven’t figured out how to get a sound played when the timer reaches nil, but I do get a nice obvious notification so it’s not so easy to miss as long as I’m at my computer. I also moved the Shutup plasmoid to the lower right corner to make better use of my screen real estate. I added two plasmoids on the lower left to switch my wallpaper and to give me quick access to the files I used to keep on my GNOME desktop. You can also use a plasmoid to show the widgets you have running on your desktop, or you can just use Ctrl-F12. As you can see in this shot using either the icon or the hotkey will dim everything on your desktop except the plasmoids, making it easy to find any plasmoid you may have lost track of. Showing the plasmoids can also be handy to see the icons in your system tray, which for some odd reason don’t always want to show up properly. The icons in my tray are for Wally (which doesn’t work for some unknown reason), Google Desktop Search, Kmix (the KDE sound mixer), Dropbox (I have nautilus-dropbox installed, but I don’t know exactly how it’s working for KDE) and Google Gadgets.

One final screenshot shows how some of my other apps look. At the top left is Dolphin, the KDE file manager. I really like the Information panel, which I move below the Places panel rather than the default of being on the right of the file pane. At the bottom right is KPackageKit, the KDE equivalent to Synaptic. You can still run Synaptic if you want, but I’m trying to get used to using KDE apps as much as possible. To the left of this is the KPackageKit update dialog, which has one of the things I like least about KPackageKit. Using the details option in Synaptic (the Terminal button) shows useful information on what’s going on, showing the current task running in a command line interface that can be extremely informative about what’s going on. In KPackageKit all you get is a progress bar that moves back and forth. That’s detail?

I’ll write another post with my thoughts on the move to KDE, with both the pluses and minuses, but I didn’t want my move-to-KDE post to get too Jabba-sized. Watch this space, I’ll try to get it posted in the next day or two.

HELP! My mouse has gone completely idiotic!

For the last month or so I’ve noticed off and on that my mouse has had it’s sensitivity settings dramatically changed. I’d try to click a link or a button in my web browser and I’d end up clicking two links, which is a real pain in the rear if I’m in Gmail and all I want to do is remove the Inbox label but end up removing both of the labels on a piece of email. Or I’d click the menubar of a window to bring it to the front and find the window suddenly maximized. Hell, just clicking the category tags for this post is almost impossible because every time I click a checkbox the system treats it as a bloody double-click and trying to click to edit a word turns into selecting the whole frigging paragraph! Grrrr!

I tried resetting the mouse settings in GNOME to no avail, and when I installed KDE on top of GNOME to begin using that DE a week ago the problem seemed to have been resolved. “Seemed” being the operative word. Today the mouse is back to being a complete PITA and I don’t know what to do to resolve it. I’ve tried Googling and found nothing. The same results specifically searching Ubuntu, KDE, and even other distro resources. I could start a thread on either the Ubuntu or Kubuntu Forums but I don’t have a clue where to even post it.

I know the issue reared it’s ugly head after getting an update from lucid-proposed or a PPA but I don’t even know what package to look at. Can anyone make a suggestion (or ten) for things I could check? I know I can try a fresh, clean install of Kubuntu but I’m not at the point where I’m ready to show GNOME the door. I still have data in GNOME apps (like Evo) to bring into a KDE app plus I’m not really sure there are no GNOME apps I want to hold on to, although I haven’t used Gnome Media Player since I moved to KDE and even Do has lost it’s preferred shortcut keys so I could assign them to Krunner.

The NL finally wins another All-Star Game!

Congrats to the National League players for winning their first All-Star Game since 1996. The credit goes to catcher Brian McCann from the Atlanta Braves, whose bases-loaded double in the seventh inning brought in the NL’s only three runs. The only run for the AL, the host division for this year’s mid-summer classic in Anaheim, was brought in by the Yankee’s Robinson Cano,  who’s deep fly out to left field allowed Tampa Bay’s Evan Longoria to come home.

The seventh was an unfortunate inning for LA Dodgers’ reliever Hong-Chi Kuo, a late addition to the All-Star roster when Braves right fielder Jason Heyward was injured and became unable to play last night. Kuo started his inning with a leadoff walk to Longoria and allowed the Minnesota Twins’ Joe Mauer to safely reach first when Kuo took Mauer’s come-backer and almost threw it into the stands behind first base.

Other Dodgers fared much better as the two players voted to the roster by the fans, Andre Ethier and Jonathan “Ox” Broxton, as Ethier lined a single to deep right field in the fifth in his first All-Star appearance and the Ox earned the save in the ninth. Broxton allowed Boston slugger David Ortiz, the winner of this year’s Home Run Derby, to single to right field for a single, blew away Ortiz’s teammate and former Dodger Adrian Beltre with a 98-mph fastball, gets Toronto’s John Buck to hit a weak fly to right field that results in Ortiz being caught at second for out #2, and gets Ian Kinsler of the Texas Rangers to fly out to the Diamondback’s Chris Young in center field.

The other Dodger to make a late substitution was shortstop Rafael Furcal, taking the place of Jose Reyes from the New York Mets , who entered the game in the bottom of the  sixth and went 0-3 at the plate with a walk in the top of the seventh but took a grounder by Toronto’s Vernon Wells and caught Kinsler at second base for the second out of the inning.

Congratulations to all of the National League players on a very well played game. Since the tie of the 2002 All-Star Game made the winner of the mid-summer classic the home team for the world series (a decision I’m still not happy with) this year’s NL Champs will get the home field advantage in deciding who will be the season’s top dog. Of course I’m hoping my beloved Dodgers, 49-39 and two games out of first place at the mid-season break, will finally make the series this year after getting knocked out in the National League Championship Series two years straight.

You can read the coverage of this year’s All-Star Game from the LA Times, along with a live article with play-by-play coverage, as well a complete coverage from MLB.com.

Looking at KDE, and looking at apps

Late last month I said I was looking at the possibility of moving from Ubuntu to a different GNU/Linux distribution. While I haven’t had a lot of time for checking out other distros I have I’ve managed to create a spreadsheet to compile information on the distros I’m looking at. It shows the current version of the distro, the website, and which distro it’s based on, along with what kind of packages it uses, which Desktop Environment it uses (GNOME, KDE, etc.) and whether it is available on a LiveCD. I’ve also got the comments the people made to my earlier post just to help me remember what was said.

It looks like I’ll be at least making the migration from GNOME to KDE, even if I don’t leave the *buntu family of distros, so I needed to make a list of what apps I use regularly and see if they work under KDE (without needing to install libraries) and if not what apps may do the job. Apps I now use are listed in BOLD text if I absolutely need to use it regardless of what distro I use, although if I can keep the same features in a different program that will be acceptable.

I’ve been asked to share my spreadsheet  and I’ve put it on my Dropbox. I’ve included links to many of the apps listed in case you’re not familiar with them. If you know apps that will fill any of the empty slots please let me know. I’m hoping to make a final decision on whether I’m staying on Ubuntu and with GNOME by the end of this month. I’m planning on checking out my Kubuntu LiveCD in the next day or so, and I’ll be adding info to my spreadsheet as I do.

There is one thing I’m wondering about using KDE. I know it’s possible to have both GNOME and KDE on a single computer, but if I do that should I use different user profiles for each or will the settings info be safe as I bop back and forth between DE’s?

Google redesigns it’s News service, and a user gives a great alternative to consider

As many users have found out the hard way, Google News ran a test in May on a possible redesign and asked their users for their thoughts. Despite almost unanimous replies that the new design was worse than the rollout of New Coke the devs rolled out the changes for US users last Wednesday. Needless to say, the users were neither happy nor amused.

The announcement of the changes on the Google News Blog has a pair of comparative screenshots, and I wish I had a screenshot of how my gNews page looked before the change, but on the right you can see a screenshot of what my page looks like after the change and a few attempts at tweaking chat I have chosen to call “the abomination”. You have to scrooooooool down the page to try to read the offered coverage of the topics you had selected rather than having them split between two columns. You also had both World Cup coverage and weather image shoved down our proverbial throats with the new layout with absolutely no chance to remove them. Needless to say, before we even reached the 4th of July, let alone the observed holiday today, users had their axes and pitchforks sharpened and looking for the ability to revert to the old settings. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like even Fred S., the Google employee credited with starting the threads in Google’s Help Center, is even bothering to see what the users are saying about the changes.

Some of the users reading Fred S.’s latest post have been offering alternatives, including the similar service from Microsoft (not even a viable alternative to just about any user who has specifically decided not to use their operating system) and Yahoo (again, a service provider a number of us have finally decided to use after way too many of the companies’ purchases of popular only to see them canned in favor of Yahoo’s preferred code). Ask.com’s news service was also suggested, but this user wasn’t really eager to create an account with them after intentionally using them so little in the past.

Earlier this afternoon gNews User tollcrusher suggested a free service called iCurrent. They have a nice video preview of the service, and after checking things out I decided to sign up. Adding topics was easy enough, and while I’m not 100% thrilled with the way my front page looks I have to say I am pretty happy with them so far. They can even email your topics to you if you want, although I decided against that for now. At the bottom of the post you’ll see a screenshot of what my current front page looks like.

If you find yourself looking for a new website to use for getting your news I heartily recommend checking out iCurrent. I’m not seeing any indication that it’s open source, and it may not be your cup of espresso but it may be better than the other centralized online news alternatives. It’s definitely better than what Google’s offering us, and it may be saving me the task of throwing together a news links page for my local computer that uses iGoogle gadgets to pull in the news sources I want to follow.