mintCast 50 is now available!

In a podcast that should be heard by anyone who is unhappy with Ubuntu Linux, as well as anyone the least interested in giving Linux a try, the good folks at mintCast interviews Clem Lefebvre, the creator of Linux Mint, for their 50th podcast. This makes a podcast aimed at the general Linux community even better for people who don’t use Linux Mint specifically.

This final mintCast by the initial team of podcasters allows them to finally speak with the person responsible for creating Linux Mint. Among the questions answered by Lefebvre is news that the newer Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) can be great for people with older computers that can’t handle the demands of the current raft of releases of Ubuntu and Mint (the main Mint distro is based on Ubuntu Linux), and the fact that the newer versions of Linux Mint actually rolls back some of the decisions of the Ubuntu devs like moving to Unity and changes to the UI itself. Also included is the potentially fantastic news that they’re looking into bringing some much loved Windows features to Mint 11 like restore points to undo problems created by newly installed software and even the possibility of being able to rollback upgrades that can cause problems for some computers. This may even make mintCast Episode 50 worth hearing for people who haven’t switched to Linux yet.

Future episodes of mintCast will be made by a new team of users, and it sounds like the next episode is already recorded and being edited. It also sounds like mintCast may finally become the weekly podcast that the producers of mintCast have long wanted it to be.

At 36.7 MB and over an hour twenty minutes in length may make this the longest mintCast ever but the information in the podcast makes it worth hearing. mintCast is available on several platforms including MP3, Ogg Vorbis and even iTunes so it may be one of the easiest podcasts to get. You can find mintCast Episode 50, as well as the older mintCast episodes, on the mintCast website.

Peng’s January 2011 desktop

I had a special holiday look on my desktop but now that the Chrismukkuh season is officially over it’s time to change back to my normal desktop settings.

Earlier this week I made a major change in my wallpaper settings, going from a rotation of images I’d collected from across the ‘Net but before I show you my new background I want to post once more shot from the rotation.

This pic is actually a custom modified picture I made from a pic I saw with Webilder. The original pic of the Tennevik Aurora by Arild Heitmann uses a lot of green, and while it would have gone great with a Linux Mint logo I retinted it blue with Gimp to go with the logo for Mint Linux KDE.

Earlier this week I saw a post on Facebook from OMG! Ubuntu! about getting real-time wallpapers of the earth with xplanetFX. It took me some doing but I finally got it working on KDE and I love the way it came out.

xplanetFX gives you a handy graphical user interface for setting up xplanet for putting it on your desktop.  Among the settings you can tweak is whether to center the earth on a specific place or rotating to follow the sun, whether to put a corona around the globe (I said no), whether or not to show the current cloud cover, plus several other graphical tweaks. I opted to use one of the Hands theme variations but there are a lot of other theme possibilities you can pick from.

xplanetFX doesn’t completely play well with KDE4, but a user named Sebastien shared an easy fix. I’ll share it here to let people find it a little more easily since I’m sharing the screenshots that resulted from using it.

1. create a new directory somewhere in your home folder (hidden, if you want)
2. configure xplanetfx to export single image in this directory (menu Settings, Output, File); don’t use the KDE feature of xplanetfx which is broken in KDE4
3. configure KDE to use “slideshow” (instead of a single image) as wallpaper and reference the created directory; the slideshow should refresh frequently

The main thing is to specify a directory to put the finished images that xplanetFX creates and using that as the location for KDE’s desktop slideshow to get images from. You can set the image change delay however you want, I set it to every 30 minutes because xplanetFX runs really slowly on my old system.

Here’s one more image to show how my desktop looks with some apps. The specifics of my system are

• Linux Distro: Still Linux Mint 9 KDE. Linux Mint 10 KDE is currently in testing and hopefully we’ll get the update released before too much longer
• Desktop Environment: KDE 4.5.3, although KDE released an update yesterday that I haven’t gotten yet.
• Window Decorations: Bespin, with the Bespin Blue -Animated theme
• Desktop Theme: AG-Plasma, although the clock, Notes, Run Command Dialog and Shutdown Dialog use the Blend theme to make them easier to read. I’m debating using the Blend Panel Background to make my panel’s clock show up better.
• Widget Style: Bespin
• Color Theme: Bespin_Blue, I think from KDE-Look but I can’t remember where I got it from
• Icons: Mint-KDE

If you have questions about what specific things are just ask in the Comments.

New year, new hackergotchi

It was time to change my profile picture on Facebook to get rid of my holiday pic, and I decided it was also time to create a new hackergotchi to serve as my avatar on websites. It uses the pic I’ve used for the past year or so but I pulled the Mac4Lin Tux since I don’t run Mac4Lin anymore.  In Tux’s place I put the KDE logo to promote my favorite DE, plus I added the Linux Mint KDE logo to show off my fav distro.

I also changed my Facebook profile pic with a slightly modified version of the best pic that has been taken lately. You may notice a little “pin” I superimposed on the collar of my jacket.

We finally changed the fonts we use

Last month we changed the theme we use on the blog and we said we wanted to look at the fonts we use. The main thing is to limit the load time since using custom fonts from Typekit, but we were also thinking about changing the font we used for the headers. The more we looked at fonts to use we decided the load time it took to get fonts from TypeKit is worth dealing with and not specify a nice open source font such as DejaVu that may not be available on Windows and MacOS systems.

We decided to stick with the Calluna font we use for the content but since we want to go back to selling tees via Spreadshirt we had to change the header font. We were using the Cody Web font but we’re unable to get the font to use for graphics and wanted to go with a free font we could use for both the website and graphics for other sites and in SecondLife. We looked back at the fonts on our shortlist back in May when we first started using TypeKit fonts and decided to go with Fertigo Pro. Not only is it a nice decorative script font but we’re able to find it for free so we can get it on our computers. We were originally going to use Fertigo Pro Script but decided we were too cheap at the end of the holiday season to buy it if the plain version is available for free.

What do you think of the new font? Would you rather we stuck with using whatever fonts may be installed on a reader’s computer to get the site to load faster? Let us know in the comments.

2010 in review

Nanci asked me to post this so more people would see it. Thanks to everyone for all the visits! -Peng

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow. (Damn! Whodathunkit, especially since neither Nanci or I posted all that often this past year.)

Crunchy numbers

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 70,000 times in 2010. If it were an exhibit at The Louvre Museum, it would take 3 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 64 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 698 posts. There were 62 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 22mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was February 14th with 777 views. The most popular post that day was Valentine’s Day tees are HERE!. (This post is from 2008. Maybe one of us should start making these tees available somewhere, eh sis? I bet it would sell IRL as well as on SL.)

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were tuxmachines.org, ubuntuforums.org, languagetool.org, lifehacker.com, and stumbleupon.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for mac4lin, drunk, moonlight ubuntu, anti valentine, and global menu firefox.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Valentine’s Day tees are HERE! February 2008
1 comment

2

[UPDATED] Moonlight got easier for Ubuntu users January 2009
2 comments

3

[UPDATED] Get the GlobalMenu without all of the hassle November 2008
30 comments

4

Update the GlobalMenu in Ubuntu 9.10 November 2009
5 comments

5

Fixing the borked numeric keypad in Ubuntu Hardy March 2008
74 comments