[HOWTO] QuickTip: Is that website up?

The good folks over at DuckDuckGo have launched DuckDuckHack, a way for users to create some amazing instant answer plugins for DDG. One that came out earlier this month that I finally got to check out allows you to find out if a particular website is up or not. To use it just surf on over to DDG and enter your query like this: is duckduckgo.com up. No question mark needed.

Of course your results may have a different color scheme than mine does, but the results will always be the same as anyone else would get running the same search at the same time. Why? Because DDG refuses to track their users or put them in filter bubbles like the other big search engines (not to mention some web sites) will do. Check it out with websites that load slowly for you. You may find yourself wanting to put it in your bookmark bar so you can remember how to use it the next time the ‘net feels like it’s slogging through molasses.

Software Freedom Day 2011 is coming!

Saturday 17 September 2011 is Software Freedom Day, a day to celebrate the joys of Free and Open Source Software in all of its forms. Most people know that the Linux operating system is open source but you can even run open Source Software on Windows and the Mac OS. If you use either the Firefox or Google’s Chrome web browser, and especially the Chromium web browser, you’re already using open source software.

There will be Software Freedom Day events all over the world. If you’re already a member of the open source community you can join in the celebration, and if you’re curious about open source software you can check out their website to see what events are happening in your area. Either way you won’t want to miss out on the festivities.

A great app featured on Make Tech Easier: wxBanker

Yesterday the good folks over at Make Tech Easier, a website with some very nice tutorials for technology users on all platforms, wrote a post called Manage Your Finances (Simply) in Linux with wxBanker. I’ve used wxBanker to help me manage my budget when I had a desktop computer (mine died several months ago and I now run Linux Mint KDE on a persistent LiveUSB) and I think the only thing I dislike about it is that it’s only available for Linux users. It may not have all the bells and whistles of apps you may see on Windows or the MacOS but if you’re one of the growing numbers who run Linux I can’t recommend it enough. It’s readily available on Ubuntu and it’s even in the Software manager on Linux Mint.

Rather than rehash what the article says, including how to get wxBanker installed, I’ll just point you to the article on Make Tech Easier. Their tutorials are always good whether you’re a noobie or an old hand, complete with screenshots to help you see how things should look on your system. You may even find that you want to subscribe to their daily newsletter and that’s not a bad idea at all.

Introduce your Windows using friends to the joy of open source software

When I wrote my post about finding a new Linux podcast Bill Davis told me about The Tightwad Tech’s Everyday Linux podcast. As I was getting caught up with older episodes I heard a mention of Trinidad and Tobago Computer Society’s OSSWIN CD. It reminded me of the OpenDisc that I had tried before I switched to Linux, but OSSWIN looks even better. OSSWIN has the latest version of each program as of the release date and it has an incredible range of programs on it, even games.

The current version came out 6 February 2011, compared with 7 December 2010 for the OpenDisc, and if you’re unable to burn CDs you can buy copies of OSSWIN although you have to do it via email and they only accept cash. I’m not sure how they do this for online, non-local users but if you contact then I’m sure they can help you.

Big thanks to the buys over at Everyday Linux for letting me know about this disk.

Benjamin Humphrey writes a Must Read article for anyone helping in the Ubuntu Community

One of the things I love about Facebook is that not only can I find some great articles but it gives me more information than Twitter does to help me decide if I actually want to click the link and read the article. Today I saw a link to an article on OMG! Ubuntu! written by Benjamin Humphrey. It was actually posted to Facebook twice, and the first time it gave me just enough info to make me want to read the article.

OMG! Ubuntu! writer Benjamin Humphrey shares his thoughts on Ubuntu’s standard of quality: http://goo.gl/fb/FeGmu

Since I’ve been less than wholly pleased with the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx I was definitely curious to see what Benjamin has to say. His first paragraph was definitely written to grab the reader’s attention.

Ubuntu lives in a special place between Windows and Mac OS X reserved only for Linux: more shine than Windows, less than OS X, resulting in a steaming pile of mediocrity.

While I loved the Ubuntu experience with version 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon I can’t help noticing that the upgrades have left me less satisfied with each new release. It seems the last two upgrade cycles have been especially aggravating, with applications that I use on a regular basis breaking to the point where I have to find some hoops to jump through to get even a good measure of the function that I used before the upgrade. With the upgrade from 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope to 9.10 Karmic Koala I found that iriverter, an app I use every day to convert video files to take on my iriver E100 digital media player, can no longer read files from my DVDs to convert them to the AVI  format that my E100 can play. And now that I’ve upgraded to 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx my beloved Webilder was borked and I’m having problems just booting my system thanks to changes in how the boot screens are rendered on my Nvidia GeForce 6200 video card. (I just realized I haven’t written a report on my upgrade to lucid yet. I think I was trying to chase down bugs first and I’ve been getting some new bugs in the past week that have taken my attention. I’ll try to write my report this week for those who are still looking for it.)

If you think Benjamin’s article is simply the whining of a user who is being asked to take some extra steps to figure out how to do things you’d be wrong. Benjamin does take Ubuntu devs to task on what I think are some pretty boneheaded errors, including the fact that some of the newer “features” don’t work nearly as easily as advertised and the lack of documentation on how to use one of the features that are supposedly a big selling point for this new release.

If you are one of the programmers that help develop software for Ubuntu you should consider Benjamin’s article, Many hands make the light work; few make it shine, a Must Read. If you don’t develop code but help in the Ubuntu Forums you should consider the article as strongly recommended. In other words, if you come under either of those two groups go read the article now.  If you’re someone who is simply a user of Ubuntu you may want to read it as well, if only to make yourself aware of what Benjamin has to say.

If you’re simply considering trying Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx you may want to read it as well. And then find either an Ubuntu 9.10 Jaunty Jackalope Karmic Joala LiveCD or grab the disk image and burn it yourself. It’s not the newest and “best” release but you will find it supported for longer than any of the older Ubuntu releases. That’s right, I’m not recommending Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx to new users. If those of us who have used Ubuntu for several years are having big problems with it, it would be a mistake to use it as your introduction to the operating system.

Peng’s links for Thursday, 3 December

I know I promised to try to do a links post each week but last week I was only able to post a few specific articles so since I actually have a little time this afternoon (I will not ask how that happened) and thought I’d post some of the links I’ve found in the last couple of weeks.

• Melissa Draper: How people get involved. A great little piece on getting involved in the Linux and open source community.
• Bodi.Zazen: Firewall Ubuntu Desktops. Windows users have gotten use to the idea that they should always use a firewall on their system (at least I hope they have). While it isn’t quite as vital on a GNU/Linux system due to the better inherent security some users still want to use a firewall, but it can be a bit of a pain in the posterior. Bodi has a nice, easy to follow article on using a firewall on Ubuntu.
• Danny Piccirillo: Can Ubuntu reach over 16,000 anime lovers in April? Danny and the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Team have been busy getting ready to make sure people at next April’s Anime Boston know not only about Ubuntu but also about the Ubunchu! manga. If you haven’t been enjoying Ubunchu! yet the third episode has just come out so it’s a great time to get caught up. You can also check out Martin Owens’ interview on BBC Radio for info on Ubuntu, Ubunchu mange and Anime Boston.
• Roderick B. Greening: Copy playlist files to your Media player in Amarok. How is it that Amarok 2 doesn’t have a way to create a playlist and move it to your favorite digital media player? Actually that’s not true anymore, because Roderick has found a way to do it via Amarok scripting. I do believe Amarok may have just gotten even better, but I haven’t been able to get it running on my Ubuntu box since I moved to 9.10. I may have to look to see if the issue preventing me from using Amarok 2 has been resolved yet.
• Panji Nushantara: Guide to Karmic Koala (PDF). Panji has yet another great post for us as he tells us about a free PDF book with “almost everything you should know about Ubuntu, from partitioning to tweaking Ubuntu.” He’s right, it is a must have, and you don’t even need to shell out hard-earned money to get a dead tree edition of this great resource.
• Julian Andres Klode: Ubuntu Software Center coming to Debian. While it’s not universally loved, enough people love the graphical Software Center that it has been added to Debian unstable. I have to admit that while I usually use Synaptic for adding new apps I do use the USC now and then. I use it often enough, in fact,that I set up an alias for it in Gnome Do so I can launch it even more easily.
• Christopher Blizzard: why open video? Some people wonder what the big deal is about open video and why it’s important. Christopher has found a video that answers these questions quite nicely.
• Artem Nosulchik: 13 Linux lethal commands. There are commands that you should never, ever run in GNU/Linux. Artiomix has compiled a list of what they are and why you should avoid them like the plague. This article deserves to be added to your bookmarks so you can include them in your permanent reference collection.

Before I close out this post I have one more thing to share with you. A number of users of GNOME’s Evolution email client have been bitten by Launchpad Bug 27014: Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync. You know you’re affected by it if you switch folders and get an error saying something like

Error while Storing folder ‘Inbox’.

Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync

Zoran Mijanovic posted a possible fix for the problem.

Just delete file “folders.db” from ~/.evolution/mail/local and start “evolution”. In the first time the evolution needs more time to rebuild folders.db. After that, everything works fine.

If you have this problem you should try his solution to see if it resolves the issue for you.

Love Do but not Docky? That’s cool. Want Docky but not Do? We’ve got a project for that, too.

There have been a few open source projects that have made the GNU/Linux community all happy as hell and one of the best is GNOME Do. While not really a member of the GNOME project many of us will admit to considering it one of the best apps ever written, which you can see on their new Preview page, and once you’ve used it for a while you hate having to use an operating system without it.

When they brought out version 0.8 they added a new theme, Docky. It’s great for people who already use a dock like Avant Window Navigator (AWN) or the Cairo-Dock.  (The Mac4Lin project supports both AWN and Cairo, although I prefer AWN for my use.) While a lot of people love Docky, some of us just don’t. That’s one of the beauties of open source software, you can use what you want and not use what you don’t like. With Do it’s simply a matter of choosing the Docky theme or choosing another theme.

Yesterday I reading a thread on the GNOME Do Google Group that asked why Do isn’t listed as a GNOME project and I saw a comment about Docky being pulled from Do. That’s right, cats and kittehs, members of the Do community got together on IRC and decided to spin Docky off from GNOME Do, making it a project of its own.

If you love Docky please consider surfing over to Launchpad and helping make Docky, The Finest Dock No Money Can Buy, the best it can be.

Peng’s links for Monday, 21 September

No, your eyes are not deceiving you, I finally have a new omnibus links post. I’ve meant to write one a lot sooner than today, but time and my todo list have been busted for conspiracy to deny me the time and energy to do quite all the things I want to get done.

And yes, you are seeing a new hackergotchi on my posts on Ubuntu Weblogs and the Ubuntu Universe, as well on my About page here. Since I finally got some pics of me that I don’t hate I decided it was time to make a new hackergotchi that reflected two of my loves: Mac4Lin and the Los Angeles Dodgers. As I write this the Dodgers are a mere four wins away from locking up their trip to the post season and they’re 8 wins away from repeating as the champions of the National League West.

Some of these links are a tad old, but as I went through the items I’d flagged in Evolution (there’s no way I was including 70 links in a pair of posts, let alone one post) there were a few things I’d found early last month that I really did want to share.

• Panji Nushantara: Digsby: All in One IM Client for Linux (soon). Not everyone loves Pidgin, and Panji has info on a multiple IM client that’s currently available for OSX and Windows. the good news is that the Digsby devs know we’d like a Linux version and they’re hard at work on a native GNU/Linux version. They even have a page you can use to ask them to let you know when Digsby for Linux is available. With Pidgin getting replaced as the default IM client for Ubuntu 9.10, and I’m really not thrilled with what I’ve seen of Empathy so far, there’s a good possibility that Digsby may become a favorite IM client for fans of the penguin.
• directhex: Vive la différence. The person responsible for getting Moonlight easier to install for Ubuntu users has a great post about “Free Software”, including links to how a few others define that term. A must read, and I apologize for not getting the link posted before Saturday’s Software Freedom Day.
• Panji Nushantara: 2.6.30 Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope and Karmic Koala’s Kernel on Jaunty Jackalope. As always, the 9.10 version of Ubuntu Linux will include an update to the Linux kernel. Alpha 6 of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has just been released (see below), but since it’s a really bad idea to install testing releases on computers you use every day, especially alpha versions, Panji has given us a pair of posts on how to update your kernel to the newer version while still running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. I haven’t made the upgrade myself (see the above mentioned conspiracy charges) if you’re interested in making the jump yourself I’d love to hear your responses to it. Just remember the very important disclaimers about what can go wrong if you apply this upgrade. If you make the jump and your computer breaks please don’t come crying to myself, Panji or even Nanci. If you do we reserve the right to use those three words we hate using almost as much as you hate hearing: told you so.
• Colin Walters: Pay no attention to the processes and X Windows behind the curtain… Colin, a Fedora user whose posts are syndicated on Planet GNOME, gives us a nice preview of GNOME 3. There’s quite bit of geek speak in his post, but there’s also a nice glimpse at how GNOME 3 will make being a GNOME user even better than it is now.
• Scott James Remnant: Making a splash. One of the biggest pains in working with the Mac4Lin dev team is that every time Ubuntu rolls out an upgrade there are a number of things that break until we can get the components upgraded. This is the reason getting a Mac4Lin 1.0 Usplash created has been such a royal pain in the arse, and Ubuntu 9.10 includes a major change. They’re dumping Usplash for the boot splash screen, the first splash screen you get when you boot a computer into Ubuntu, and they’re replacing it with xsplash. Scott looks at the matter, including why the change is in fact a good idea. And yes, once I get 9.10 installed on my system (hopefully soon after it reaches beta status) I’ll see about getting a xsplash screen created for Mac4Lin.
• Stormy Peters: 3 ways our awesome habits get us into trouble. Currently the executive director of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy has long been a great source of information, especially on security issues within GNOME. This time Stormy looks at three habits that it’s great to develop if you don’t already have them, but she also points out “gotchas” that can turn on us if we’re not careful.
• Stormy Peters: Stacks of books are disappearing. If you love books you may be aware that libraries around the world are changing, and not always for the better. Stormy looks at the problem and why libraries are no longer the great resource they used to be.
• Dustin Kirkland: Encrypted $HOME Now Offered at Installation. I’m not one of them but some users make a point of encrypting the data on their hard drives. It’s a good idea, but in Ubuntu’s past it’s been a bit of a pain to do it. Ubuntu 9.10 has given users the ability to encrypt their home directories as a part of the install process since the fifth alpha came out earlier this month.
• André Gondim: New Ubuntu Screens Installer. Installing Ubuntu 9.10 will no longer be the rather boring experience it’s been in the past thanks to new installer screens that will finally let you know about some of the programs that are getting installed with the OS. André is kind enough to give us screenshots of the ten new information screens.
• Matthew Helmke: Drowning out what I want to hear. While not a tech post, Matthew has written a must read article on how to present your viewpoints, whether the subject be technical, religious or political. This is an article that should be bookmarked at the very least, and printing it out for future reference wouldn’t be a horrid idea.
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s Ubuntu Wishlist. LifeHacker has some things they’d like to see in Ubuntu, and it turns out the Ubuntu devs are already working on the first item. It turns out that LifeHacker has some very nice words for Mac4Lin, and Jono Bacon has written a very well thought out response to LifeHacker’s wishlist.
• Kees Cook: uninstall sun-java6. The vrms meme that’s been going around the ‘net has brought out an important reminder that there’s a very good open source replacement for Sun’s Java. I need to look into that to see if I could kick some non-free software on my system to the curb. And yes, I know I have two versions of Java installed. There’s a good reason I did that but I don’t recall what it was at this point.
• Jono Bacon: The Art of Community Available for Free Download. Jono wrote a great book about how to build a community of like minded people. While it’s not explicitly a tech book it does look at things that Jono discovered in the open source community. Now you can get a free PDF of the book, although Jono does recommend buying a printed copy of the book (and not just to put some money in his pocket). Whether you pay for your copy or not he asks that you write a review of it on Amazon.
• Christoph Haas: Tired of Nagios and Cacti? Try Zabbix. If you run network monitoring software, or even think you may want to run some, Christoph found an open source app that you should definitely consider.

There are a few more things I definitely want to post before I hit the Publish button. First off, as I mentioned above, the sixth alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala has been released. It’s likely to be the last alpha release, and I’ll try to post when it gets it’s first beta release, but feel free to start taking a look at what’s coming in the new release. The devs are working on a countdown banner that I’m hoping to add to the sidebar here once they have a version that will play well with WordPress.com blogs.

On a lighter note, if you saw the Emmy awards last night you know that the show was taken over temporarily by Dr. Horrible. If you missed it then thank the good people over at the SciFi Wire because they have the video posted so we can enjoy it.

That’s almost it for today but I have one more thing to post that deserves a post all of it’s own. I trust tomorrow’s first day of fall brings you some decent weather.

Peng’s links for Friday, 13 Mar

[Corrected the first link. Thanks to Nick and Keba for pointing it out. -Peng]

I bet you guys thought I wasn’t going to post any links this week. I’ve actually been snagging a bunch of links into a gDocfile so I can share them without clogging up my feed reader with unread posts. Unfortunately there are a bunch of them, so rather than give you the link with my thoughts on each I’m just going to copy and paste the links for you. Feel free to follow any and all links that tickle your curiosity.

• The Fridge: Ubuntu 9.04 Countdown Banners Wanted
• Neil Williams: Goodbye network-manager, hello wicd (I want to check this out some more since we changed out WiFi settings a week ago and I can’t figure out where the hell to update my settings)
• Dirk Demke: Ubuntu Certificate of Authenticity
• Dustin Krikland: Jaunty Encrypted Home Directories
• Stefano Forenza: Microsoft tax on Linux’s horizon?
• Omshivprakash HL: Playing WMA files on Ubuntu
• Sense Hofstede: Oggon your music player with Banshee
• Macenzie Morgan: Link to a shell escaping tutorial
• Ronnie Tucker: Full Circle Magazine Issue 22
• Jono Bacon: LoCo Directory Moves Forward
• Colin Watson: Bug triage rants
• Stemp Xan: WebKitGTK+ 1.1.1
• Stefano Forenza: [HOWTO] Candid theme in 2 minutes
• Omshivprakash HL: Jaunty-Elegant Notifications
• Oxford Archaeology: Evolution is better than revolution (not necessarily referring to the GNOME email client, but still a good read)
• Jeffrey Detras: Ubuntu Evolution (same thing thing applies here as well, and these are two completely different articles)
• Benjanmin Otte: browsing in GNOME
• Gerry Ilagan: Linux Foundation is new owner of Linux.com
• Daniel T. Chen: Triaging bugs in Ubuntu, or How Not To Tee Off The Most Important Person: Yourself
• Dustin Kirkland: Mounting your Encrypted Home from a Jaunty LiveCD
• Christer Edwards: How To Find What Package provided a File
• Colin Watson: Bug triage, redux
• Richard Hughes: Application installing
• David Baucum: Anothther reason I don’t run Windows
• Richard Hughes: Application installing (II)
• Daniel Burrows: Help make aptitude faster!
• Ken Van Dine: Pidgin sucks less for IRC
• Martin F. Krafft: Case Logic cases ruin your CDs
• Johannes Schmid: Filtering in gnome-system-log
• Christoph Langner: Is Ext4 ready for the desktop?
• Stefano Forenza: What’s this Ubuntu thing all about?
• Lionel Dricot: Getting Things Gnome! 0.1 – “Just 5 minutes more”
• Sense Hofstede: Thank a Dev Day
• Matt Zimmerman: Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable
• Greg Grossmeier: Jaunty Release Party – Aprin 25th
• Christer Edwards: New GDM Login Theme in Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty”
• Jeffrey Detras: Completing the MacOSX look – Global menu
• Steven Harms: Make your bash shell cool again
• Joege Castro: Desktop Deployments and Stuff
• Daniel Holbach: Packaging Training
• Christian Schaller: Theora in Empathy
• Michael Lustfield: Ubuntu Drupal 6.2.0 Released
• Matthew Revell: Shutter
• Matthew Helmke: Ubuntu Education
• Og Maciel: So you want to sell open source
• Philip Whitnall: Totem manual
• Tom Dryer: Free Disk Space by Reducing Reserved Blocks
• Bodhi.Zazen: How to Moonlight
• Keniv Kubasik: Making Silverlight Applications Available Offline
• Bastien Nocrea: Our new volume feature
• David Welton: Linux “Just Working”
• Matthew Helmke: French police save millions by adopting Ubuntu
• Scott Wegner: Testing Ubuntu Jaunty and Ext4 WITHOUT Trashing Your Data
• Stefano Forenza: LifeHacker’s best distro contest
• Stefano Forenza: Vote for game support in Linux at Ubisoft forums
• Nagappan Alagappan:  Announce: Linux Desktop Testing Project 1.5.1 released
• Risto H. Kruppa: Pay for your Open Source software!

Whew! That should give you some things to read over the weekend. I know some of the articles are from late last month, but that’s how long I’ve been grabbing these links and I wanted to make sure you guys had seen them.

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to let your favorite open source devs know you appreciate all their hard work. And speaking of hard work, I have an idea for a promotional vid or two, and if all goes well I may have some footage for you guys to check out sometime in the next month or so. See y’all next week!

Peng’s links for Thursday, 8 January

Are you still writing “2008″? I caught myself writing the wrong year earlier today, so if you are doing it too don’t feel too bad.

I apologize for not posting much so far this year. We started the new year with my getting not only a new video card but having our router die and having to move to a wireless network here at home. I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get Ubuntu to remember that I have a wireless USB “card” when I reboot but I’m still needing to open my AWN Terminal applet and run two commands as I get logged in after a reboot. I thought I had it fixed, but a reboot earlier today proved me wrong. I had some issues when I first installed my EVGA e-GeForce 6200 card but I think it may have had something to do with the fact that I forgot to disable the drivers for my current, very old, graphics card first. I was hoping to give the new graphics card another shot today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. It’s now at the top of my list for tomorrow (after I check my email and news feeds, that is) so hopefully I will have some good news tomorrow afternoon.

• Ana Beatriz Guerro Lopez: New year’s proposal: look at your reported bugs. This post from Planet Debian is a great idea. If you’ve filed a bug online anywhere you should check to make sure the information is current. Some bugs may no longer effect you, and some bugs may still need more information so the bug can get resolved. You should take a look at bugs no matter where they were filed or what they were filed against, which means I should take one more look at my open bugs on  Bugzilla, even though I no longer use Thunderbird and I only keep Firefox around as an emergency backup in case something isn’t working quite properly with Epiphany.
• Jorge Castro: Resolutions and mean people. Jorge found someone who was giving Ubuntu a test drive for a week. Jorge does have some responses to things the person is writing, but he says he’s glad to see things like that because it reminds us why we do things to support open source software.
• Ubuntu Productivity: Best of both worlds . Geany, the text editor that so many of us love (it’s my preferred text editor of all sorts of plain-text tasks) is available for Linux and Windows, but not OSX. Jon Beebe found a way to get it installed on his other OS and he is kind enough to let us all know how he got it working with his favorite spotted kitteh.
• Vincent Fourmond: Switching to mpd. Vincent has discovered one of the best parts of using MPD: it isn’t the resource hog that other media players can be. Vincent’s post is short on details, but I couldn’t help sharing the good news that another user has discovered my favorite audio player, even if he prefers using a command line interface rather than my personal favorite front end.
• Felix Kaser: Announcing gnome-format 0.1.0. The GNOME devs are working on a new formatting tool for removable memory devices like memory cards and USB drives. Yes, Gparted handles that task already but gnome-format will be even easier to use.
• DesktopLinux.com: Vietnam mandates open source for gov’t servers, desktops. The minister of information and communications for Vietnam has asked both national and local government IS workers to get all their users on open source software by the end of June. It seems a tad soon for the deadline, but he’s mandated that all government workers use open source software by 2010 in some of the best news in a while for proponents of open source software. I bet the boys and girls in Redmond are trying to figure out who let this happen.
• Sven Muller: About Usability. Another resident of Planet Debian has a great post that I think you guys should read. Sven had seen a post by Sami Haahtinen about usability and while he agrees with most of what Sami wrote there’s one part he disagrees with. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better written post about making things easy not only easier for beginners but also keeping settings available for more advanced users. One of the problems I have with Epiphany is that several relatively easy tweaks I performed with Firefox are difficult, if not flat out impossible, with Epiphany thanks to the GNOME mindset of locking controls down and out of reach of users who could bork things royally by changing the wrong thing improperly.

There is one more bit of news I want to pass along. Back in June I started getting my Ubuntu-related posts syndicated on UbuntuWeblogs, also known as Planet Ubuntu Users. Tiago Faria, also known as Gouki, has added Ubuntu Universe, a new area on the UbuntuWeblogs, that will expand the posts of Ubutu bloggers syndicated to include non Ubuntu related posts. This means that if a person has their technical posts on Planet Ubuntu, UbuntuWeblogs or any of the Planet websites for the Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) teams. Gouki and I sent emails back and forth this morning, and it looks like I have come up with a way to get all of my posts on the new Ubuntu Universe.

For those on WordPress.com blogs with other authors, like Nanci and I have here, I’ll share how we got the URI to submit. Have the owner of the blog go into the blog’s Appearance screen, and have them put up a widget that will let users see the articles posted by each author. Grab the link for your posts and simply add “/feeds” to the end of the URI. That should give you an RSS feed for only that author’s posts.