While I don’t generally regurgitate YouTube links here, there comes a point after a good 7 minutes of pseudo-painful laughter (you know that silent gut-hurting laughter) that I feel like I have to share it. There are far too few times in my life lately when I get to enjoy such a good laugh (well it was for me anyways).
It’s clearly no surprise that SCTV had so many talented people rise out of it.
Well this is a first. I’m actually composing this post on a laptop. Yes indeedy, the first laptop I’ve ever owned. Since this is my first, I won’t pretend to know all about them and give you a 5 page in-depth technical review. Instead I’ll just give a hopefully quick run-down and then get back to procrastinating about posting new stuff about Blender, my new handheld video camera (the Kodak Zi6), and a couple of magazine ads I’ve recently done. Never mind doing a new Inkscape screencast or two among many other things.
It’s a shiny black fingerprint magnet of a machine. It’s a Dell Studio XPS13 laptop which you can check out here: http://bit.ly/uIPM0
It’s boatloads faster than my aging P4 desktop PC. It has 4GB of ram, a dual core P8600 processor running at 2.4GHz and an Nvidia 9400M G card, a 13.3” WLED display, 320GB harddrive, and a lot of other bells and whistles (like a very slick backlit keyboard).
I’m still getting used to it, but I can say that I love the keyboard and although I’ve managed to come to slight grips with the touchpad, I will definitely be buying a little corded mouse to go along with it.
It came with Vista (they don’t offer this one with Ubuntu yet, at least not here) and I ran that for as long as it took me to download a Jaunty demo image and burn it to CD. Vista was shiny but I found it hard to believe how little functionality actually comes with a stock install of windows.
I was a little nervous going into the Linux install (leaving it as a dual boot for a while just in case I have to test out any hardware glitches), but shouldn’t have been:
1. Jaunty installed flawlessly in about 18 minutes (impressive).
2. Everything seems to work from the webcam to the touch key volume and media controls above the keyboard area.
3. Wireless worked no problem at all for me.
4. Hibernate, suspend and resume all work fine.
So there it is. So far I love this laptop. The bootup speed of Jaunty seems really good (around 20sec from the Grub loader to the login screen and then about 5 sec to a working desktop). And the speed at which stuff actually installs (aside from download speeds) is vastly superior to my old PC. I feel so spoiled. 
Now to get back to “work”. I’ve installed Inkscape, and just realized that v2.48a of Blender is already in the Jaunty repos so that was nice. I’m looking forward to doing my video encoding chores on this little speedster. I had to do a little search to get Dropbox going in Jaunty (see http://bit.ly/15UM9) but that works great now too (I’m sooo dependent on Dropbox these days). Installing RecordMyDesktop and getting my screencasting setup working and tested is likely the next order of business.
Let’s hope the next blog post isn’t so long in the making, I’ve been working/playing with lots of stuff lately so there should be no shortage of ideas and information to share.
One of the things I’ve always enjoyed doing is creating desktop wallpapers. I don’t know if it’s just my way of flexing my creative muscles, but I enjoy doing them. For the last little while I’ve spent quite a bit of (maybe way too much) time in the Crunchbang forums posting ideas and images in their artwork section. (They’re also in the midst of a logo design process too which has been great fun - for more info see this thread.). Anyway, I’ve probably posted almost 40 (!) of them so far (I did say maybe way too much time didn’t I?), so I thought I’d post some of the nicer ones up here. They’re looking at getting a community artwork team set up on Launchpad which I’d love to participate in. Also, I may get them up into a proper installable package (for Crunchbang) if I ever make the time to figure it out.
Incidentally, #! is the logotype for Crunchbang.. so you’ll see that symbol in many of the wallpapers I’ve done.
Also, I’m using the jQuery Lightbox plugin for WordPress to do this post. And while it does seem to function correctly, I can’t seem to get the thumbnails to display properly below. There seems to be a mile of whitespace between the first row of images and the rest of them. So you can either click on one of them and get the flash slideshow or scroll way down to see the thumbnails for the rest of them. If anybody’s got a better suggestion or any tips to help me out in this respect I’d really appreciate it.
If you like any of them, you can download an archive of the full size versions right here: http://rfquerin.org/cbang/cbangwpapers.zip
As usual, I’ve half-assed it, and mostly done them in 1680x1050 format. I probably should do at least 4:3 and 16:9 versions of each one but have wussed out in this respect.. at least for now.
