The Perambulator

Ad from x-men #1. Grog grows own tail. Tail planted grows into flowering tree.

If I had seen this in 1963 I would have ordered. Can anyone explain how it works? I assume it’s some kind of willow or poplar twig and was probably totally cheesy when it arrived.

Kubuntu – Hoary Hedgehog to Intrepid Ibex

I discovered Ubuntu In 2006 with the Hoary Hedgehog release. It was an interesting alternative to Microsoft, free, and a great project to help me learn about partitioning. I tried several different configurations; with XFCE, with Gnome, and finally with KDE. This was before I knew about seperate versions like Xubuntu and Kubuntu. To me, it was simply Ubuntu and my choice of desktop manager and packages. I had a large hard drive and ended up with quite the mix. Nevertheless, by the time of the Breezy Badger release my desktop was Kubuntu and I’ve never looked back.

Breezy Badger with Firefox and Elinks

Breezy was a great improvement over Hoary and I rarely ever booted into XP.

Dapper Drake with Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, Epiphany, Firefox, and elinks.

Dapper was mature. With this release the two other computers in the house got their own installations

Dapper Drake with gkrellm, superkaramba, edastro, xmms, and lbreakout.

By this point I never booted into XP anymore and began to think about deleting my Windows partition.

Edgy Eft with XMMS and Firefox.

Edgy was the release that converted my wife.  She found it easier to use than XP and friendlier than Vista.

Feisty Fawn with Beryl desktop cube.

The Feisty release really improved on functionality. Compiz-Beryl worked out of the box. No more messing around with /etc/X11/xorg.conf. This is also when I replaced my hard drive and dumped Windows forever. (or so I thought)

Hardy Heron with VirtualBox running Windows XP SP2. Upgrade to IE7. Window manager=OpenBox-KDE. Background programs are Firefox 3, Kruler, Synaptic, Krusader, and Quanta.

Can this OS get any better? Kubuntu Hardy Heron, all-in-one web development machine. The caveat was that web-design requires cross-browser compatibility testing. So out came the old XP install disk and Virtualbox-OSE. Only now I use Microsoft on my terms.

Hardy Heron with XP on Virtualbox-OSE with Guest Additions in seamless mode.

Kubuntu Hardy absolutely meets my needs. I’ve got my small transparent panels with launchers, an active desktop with real time globe lighting, and the best of KDE.

Intrepid Ibex with Ksnapshot, Dolphin, and Fbpanel

KDE 4.1 as a desktop manager disappoints me. Where did my lovely and configurable Kwin panels go? Here I’ve substituted Fbpanel. The KDE 4.1 programs are snappy and responsive and work better than they did under 3.5. It looks promising but is not ready for me yet. I run Intrepid on Virtualbox and keep tweaking it, hoping that someday I will fall in love with it as I did all the other Kubuntu releases.

Music and Video

Do the Black Bottom

Black Bottom Collective

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My weekly collection of interesting, amusing, important, and stupid links.

It was a rough week for me. Another homeless guy that I know from my work was stabbed to death Sunday night. He was a nice guy suffering from extreme alcohol and drug dependence. Excellent piano player but homeless and mentally disturbed. Some of these people need to be permanently institutionalized. It was a failure of our system that he was out there intoxicated again. People care, the system does not. This is the third person I knew well who has been stabbed to death in the past year.

Music

Funky guitar by Pzychotropic.

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