Since I switched our family completely over to Linux, I’ve been looking for a replacement for Publisher.  I’ve looked at Scribus, but although it is powerful, it is too cumbersome to use.   My wife and I have been using Openoffice.org for simple documents, envelopes, business cards, etc but it has its limitations.

So one day when I needed to do some graphics I installed Inkscape.  I really liked it when I started playing around with it.  I liked that you could just select an area and change its color by clicking on a color in the palette across the bottom of the screen. I also like that you could grab shape and pull on a handle and deform it.  It reminded me of Google’s Sketchup.

Then a few days later I wanted to make a CD jewel case back cover.  I Googled for Openoffice.org templates and I found a page with Inkscape templates. I was hooked.

Inkscape may not be a complete solution, but it’s a very versatile program that should be in everyone’s toolbox.

Here are a few links that helped me learn and use Inkscape:

Inkscape Documentation Page
Inkscape Stuff
CD Templates

Posted by bens-ipod as Inkscape, OpenOffice.org, linux at 2:33 PM UTC

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When I reinstalled my laptop, of course it reinstalled all the crapware that came with it.  I could have easily just removed most of it with the Add/Remove control panel applet, but I decided to see what all the fuss was about with the PC Decrapifier.

It’s a small download and it doesn’t install any software on the computer.  I was disappointed that it found only two pieces of crap, and left me with basically a checklist of programs to choose to uninstall.  I still had to babysit the uninstall process, clicking through the appropriate dialogs for every programs uninstall.

It did save me some time by running all the installs at once, so I didn’t have to choose each program to uninstall individually, so it wasn’t a loss.  To their credit,  my laptop is from 2002 so I honestly didn’t expect it to catch too much.

The PC Decrapifier

Also to their credit — they’re running thier site with Drupal, my favorite CMS.

Posted by benjamen as Drupal, Windows at 7:48 PM UTC

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Not being consistent is frustrating. Windows XP service pack 2 will install on unpatched XP, or XP SP1, but SP3 won’t install on an unpatched install.  So for future reference here is the upgrade path  you need to follow when reinstalling Windows XP.

Windows XP  -> SP2 -> SP3 -> Windows Update
Windows XP SP1 -> SP3 -> Windows Update
Windows XP SP2 -> SP3 ->Windows Update
WindowsXP SP3 -> Windows Update

Posted by benjamen as Windows at 7:42 PM UTC

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I’m restoring my laptop back to its orginal state with a new hard drive — hopefully it’ll speed the thing up.  I like to dual boot into Xubuntu on it, but the restore disk just creates one giant partition filling the whole disk.

I tried GParted a while ago and it wouldn’t even recognize my hard drive.  So I was a little weary of trying it again.  I downloaded and burned the Live CD (0.4.3-2).  I was pleasntly surprised at how fast the Live CD booted  and started running GParted right away.   I let me graphically resize the partition and it was done in 20 seconds.

A little note, next time you boot Windows, it’ll want to run checkdisk .  I think this is because it recognizes that the partition size has changed and it freaks out.  Just let it run and it’ll be fine.

GParted Webpage

Posted by benjamen as Live CD, Windows, linux at 3:53 PM UTC

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I’ve been having problems with Adobe Reader eating up all the available memory and taking tons of cpu cycles.   I really would rather use an open source program like KPDF, but printing from it is broken and they have no intention of fixing it according to something I read on their mailing list or on a bug report somewhere.  So for now I’m stuck with Adobe.

I found a possible fix.  This post on the practice mark perfect blog tells you to turn off two option in the adobe preferences.

Edit->Preferences->Internet-> Allow fast web view & Allow speculative downloading in the background

I tried the fix and am now witing to see if the problem occurs again.

Update: The fix seems to work, but for some reason my settings were reset to being checked and the problem cames back.  If the problem starts occuring again double check the settings and make sure they are unchecked.

Posted by benjamen as Adobe Reader, Hardy Heron, PHP, linux at 7:55 PM UTC

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I’m experimenting with the WPtouch plugin for Wordpress on this site.  I’m very pleased with how it looks on my iPod Touch.

Posted by benjamen as Wordpress, iPhone/iPod Touch at 8:03 AM UTC

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My Mythbox only records HD stations and the CW doesn’t come in all well at my house, so I’m lucky if I get a choppy version of the show.  Usually I get a five minute block of noise.  Trying to watch shows on the CW website leave me with the message that they only support Windows machines even though it’s browser based.

I found this site that lets me watch Reaper episodes along with a big list of other shows:

http://www.freeonlineepisodes.net/watch-tv-shows-online/

It has its limitations lke you can only watch about 75 minutes at a time before having to wait an hour, but it gets the job done.  I’m not sure about the legality of the site, but if the CW is going to go out of it’s way to discrimnate against people who don’t use Windows I really don’t care.

Posted by benjamen as TV, Windows, linux, mythtv at 6:53 AM UTC

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Why should I have trouble purchasing minutes for my tracfone on their website running Firefox on Linux?  Admittedly I didn’t try Firefox on Windows or another Linux browser, but if your server software is so broken that when people try to purchase things from you it spouts messages like this:

You need to fire your web developer and start using a real platform like LAMP.

The thing that really makes me mad was that I was able to fire up Windows 7 in VirtualBox and finish the transaction with no problem.  In this day and age where we pretty much live in the browser, why do we still have to put up with this?

Posted by benjamen as Apache, Firefox, MySQL, PHP, Tracfone, linux at 1:44 PM UTC

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I’ve recently become addicted to Sudoku on my iPod (previously it was Canfield solitaire).   The version I like to play is Sudoku from Mighty Mighty Good Games I found a really good site explaining different strategies for solving puzzles.

Sudoku Dragon Strategy Page

Update:

Here’s another good site for Sudoku strategies:

The Castraware Sudodu site

Posted by benjamen as Sudoku, games, iPhone/iPod Touch at 8:24 PM UTC

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For some reason my MythWeb interface just up and disappeared a few days ago.   I went to the place the web page was supposed to be, but I got a blank page.  The machine served other PHP pages just fine.  After poking around I found this ubuntu forum post.  I just followed these instructions:

sudo apt-get remove –purge php* apache* mythweb*
sudo rm -rf /etc/apache2
[reboot]
sudo apt-get install apache2-dev php5-dev libapache2-mod-php5 apache2-doc mythweb

I also had to reinstall the mythtv-backend package.

Basically what it did was uninstall Apache,  PHP,  and MythWeb completely (also Mythtv-backend) and reinstalled them.

Posted by benjamen as Apache, PHP, Ubuntu, linux, mythtv at 8:09 PM UTC

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