As you can probably guess, I enjoy tinkering. Mostly with Linux because its not finished. It pisses me off sometimes because of that fact. I also apply use case criteria to it. For me to loudly proclaim its “ready” it has to be able to do what I call basic production tasks. A laptop must be able to suspend and most of all resume. Suspending is only one half. Resuming is kinda handy too. My wife just does not understand how to wake it up or cycle its power. She is the consummate user of a computer. At work, its XP and outlook and exchange each day. At home, I figure I need something else to capture and captivate me. Here are some of the playgrounds I kicked some sand in of late:
- W64codecs – well this is kinda cool news from medibuntu. Yes!! We finally have 64bit gooey goodness of codecs and apt-gettable as well. You can install mozilla-mplayer, mplayer, and the codecs and have streaming WMV working as well as quick-time. It does ship with an older Real 9 codec; but deny it. Instead use nspluginwrapper and use the 32bit real player (which is now called mozilla-helix-player for some reason). This wrapper does flash, adobe, and real plugins very well. What is the reason again for having a 32bit version of stuff like Firefox?
- Adobe Reader 8 on AMD64 Gutsy – this took a bit of work and probably more than necessary. I could not get HTML rendering to work until I got the xulrunner tarball and used it. You want the mozembed library basically. Why does this seem so involved I wonder? Adobe should make a 64bit version of the reader for heaven’s sake.
- Slower Systems? Use Xubuntu – I did this on a puny Celeron Shuttle PC system which I have punted around of late. I finally installed the XFCE4 based Xubuntu on it. This really rocks! It did manage to get the video wrong and created an xorg.conf file which would never work. I had to go back in, kill GDM, and change out the parts. It helps to know basic tools like lspci and friends. The video card it wanted to give me was VESA which was okay bit the resolutions would not work because the card in the Shuttle is not that highly powered. So I did a dpkg-reconfigure xorg-xserver and reset things. All in all, the XFCE4 powered Ubuntu is very cool. Its fast and the Thunar Window Manager seems capable. Capable with gnome and friends means able to hide out and be less than noticeable I gather.
- Life in general? – Is okay. Changes always come around though and I’ve been thinking about change at a few levels of late. We’ll see what we see.
I don’t have a plethora of other news. Waiting to see Beowulf in a few weeks. That should definitely rock the cradle. In the weight arena and its loss, I am down to about 202 pounds. That is 70 pounds gone at this point. I feel better. I never want to gain any of that back. Its taken too long to get it off and I don’t like some of the sacrifices. But I would do it again. There is life and then there is the quality of life. I could go into sordid details about blood pressure, sleep problems, lower back pain. Forget it though. If you are fat; consider the alternatives and I won’t be doing any preaching today 
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