Showing headlines posted by dmbkiwi

As an ex-iphone user, having widgets on the homescreen (without having to jailbreak and use kludgy html based widgets) is great – and the grandaddy of all widgets is the weather widget. There are a lot of great weather widgets, but not that many that show hourly forecasts as their primary function. AIX Weather does this in a compact, informative and attractive way – bottom widget in the screenshot, just in case you were wondering. AIX Weather displays a grid/graph showing weather conditions, temperature and rainfall for the next 24 hours in your chosen location.

I’m going to put my conclusion to this review right up front – OpenSuse 12.2 is a solid desktop and server operating system built on the incremental improvements that have been made across the linux ecosystem in the last 10 months. Whilst that sounds rather like damning with faint praise, in the current operating system ecosystem, there will be many who will find such an unspectacular and solid release, reason for wild celebration. OpenSuse is not trying to shoe-horn a tablet UI onto a desktop machine, ala OSX 10.8, Windows 8, and Ubuntu. OpenSuse is putting out a solid OS that provides its users with a system that they understand and meets their needs, is stable and performant, which in this day and age, is rather refreshing.

Having recently converted to Android from my iPhone 4, I have been very happy with the range of apps to replace what I had on iOS. In many cases, I’m finding the apps better. The Android ethos seems to be more about function, rather than design and aesthetics. However, one area where I’ve found the Android to be lacking is in respect of the “todo” category.

Having just bought a Samsung ‘Smart’ TV, I was very keen to take advantage of its built in DLNA media renderer. I already have mediatomb running on my headless file/mail/web/whatever server, so I thought I’d be all ready to go. Sadly, Samsung seems to have not implemented the DLNA standard in a sane way, and despite following a number of guides on I found on the internets suggesting sending custom http headers to the TV, I could not get mediatomb to play nicely with the TV.

So what is going on? To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t follow the KDE development community as closely as I used to (which may be an indication that KDE is just not generating any excitement in its user base any more). However as a KDE user, I worry. I worry that KDE is no longer moving forward. I worry that somehow its developers have lost their passion, their drive and their way.

Then along comes Apple’s Siri. Siri is a command-line interface that’s cool. We know it’s cool, because it’s made by Apple. But do we know it’s a command-line interface? In my view it is. The input method maybe by voice command, but the concept is still the same. Enter a command; generate output. The only real difference between the command-line and Siri, is the input method.

One of the great things about the original Star Wars trilogy, was the “lived in”, junky, hacked together aesthetic of the Star Wars universe. Everything was a bit trashed, as if real people actually lived there. Thankfully, that’s one of the things that George Lucas hasn’t tinkered with in his endless quest to ruin the childhood memories of a generation. So it’s heartening to see this tradition carried on with the playing of the imperial death march on miscellaneous hacked together hardware. Enjoy …

Yesterday, my kids were making a home movie to send to my mother in law. They'd made up some songs, which I'd recorded and were shooting the video to go with them. I suggested that they should edit the video in iMovie on my macbook pro. I figured that they should be able to cope fine with it - they've used macs at school to edit video and together with the "legendary" ease of use and "just works" approach of Apple software, it should be no problem. Sadly, they never got to try.

This will not be the usual list of apps that every ubuntu wannabe thinks are cool after they’ve been dabbling in linux from a dualboot windows box for a couple of months. These are applications that provide me with the reasons that I’ve been using linux for the last 11 years. These are my killer apps – the reason I use linux on the desktop both at home and at work.

So you've been futzing round in the file system, and been over vigorous with the rm command and deleted a crucial file that you or (more scarily) a significant other, can't live without. What to do? After that initial hot flush has died down, you must be calm, and work fast. You have three options:

On the 25th of May 2011, KDE released the first beta of KDE SC 4.7. As an ardent KDE fan – so prepare for this article to be horribly biased – I’ve hunted down the openSUSE packages and installed it on a test machine.

Being a long time linux user, I occasionally find myself as a stranger in a strange land using MacOSX on my wife's macbook. The lack of certain specific keys for common text navigation (for example PageUp/PageDown keys, Home/End keys and Backspace key) makes keyboard navigation of text documents very cumbersome and slow. I hate having to take my fingers away from the keyboard to use the mouse to navigate around a text document. Furthermore, it's not that easy to find lists of key combinations just for text navigation on MacOSX, so I've compiled my own.

This comes from a very cool site – wondermark.com. As a hacker of computers and gadgets – in the true sense of the word hacker, not the media hijacked sense of the word – this is a set of rules I can stand behind.

For a long time I’ve been a big fan of kdenlive. I’ve written a two articles about it. One is a general overview of video editing on Linux and the other is more specific to kdenlive. For a number of years, video editing on linux – at least at a consumer level – has been patchy at best. This is somewhat ironic given the heavy use of linux in major Hollywood block film production.

Learn how to use lynx as a secondary browser for slow internet connections.

Do you like smooth pretty fonts on your desktop? This article sets out how to enable and configure subpixel font hinting on your openSUSE desktop for crisp, smooth looking fonts.

Following from an article about desktop virtualisation, everydaylht.com has published a new article on how to launch virtualised Windows apps directly from the Linux desktop using vmware and unity. This basically means you can use Windows apps on a Linux desktop as if the “belong” there. Very cool.

2011 is the 20th anniversary of the first release of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Since that time, the linux kernel, together with the GNU tools and a whole host of software has been developed by enthusiasts and professional programmers into an operating system that runs on tiny embedded systems right up to the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Having now installed KDE SC 4.6 RC1 on my main desktop machine, running Kubuntu, it seems to be playing quite nicely. Here are my impressions of this latest pre-release of KDE SC 4.6.

The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what’s new, I’ve downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far.