Ronnie Tucker

Updated my Kubuntu 8.04 (with KDE 4.0.3) to KDE 4.1 beta and it is niiiiice!

Got itchy fingers and decided to try Kubuntu Hardy with KDE 4.1 on the EEE to see how good/bad it’d be.

Suffice to say, it is much goodness!

KDE 4.1 beta 1 is now in the Ubuntu repositories for testing. Check Kubuntu.org for full instructions. All you need to do is add a repo, refresh, and you’ll be able to update your KDE 4.0.x to KDE 4.1 beta 1.

Here’s my (KDE 4.1 beta 1) desktop at the moment:

Some things I’ve noticed so far:

• The taskbar can now be semi-transparent (see screenshot above)
• The width, and alignment, of the taskbar can now be altered (by using the little button on the extreme right of the taskbar).
• Comes with desktop themes which skin the taskbar, widgets and widget frames etc.
• PostIt widget can have auto-resized text.
• Couple of new widgets (Folder View, Konq Applet, Kate applet, Lunar, etc)
• Menu Editor
• Widgets can now be locked in place.
• Folders/files now have a +/- icon over their icon to select multiple items without the Ctrl/Shift keys.
• Slight change in graphics here and there.
• Easily switch to classic menu style
• Some new Window effects like wobbly windows, ipod style cover flip, vista style flip.

… and sooooo much more.

Only been using it for a few hours but it seems pretty stable and it was extremely easy to upgrade from 4.0.3 to 4.1b1.

KDE4 rocks!

After my Bubble Bobble mosaics I thought I would try Link from the SNES game Zelda: A Link to the Past.

This one was a bit more tricky since the Zelda sprite has a black outline and a black outline on the shield. I paint the black outline using acrylic paint to save me from using up all my black tiles, so I had to remove the black outline from the sprite (in GIMP) and also remove the black outline between the shield and Link, so it took some preparation before I could even start the mosaic. But once that was done it was full speed ahead, and a few hours later it was done.

Voila! One Link!

For my next trick: a flying Mario from Super Mario World

Initially I was going to do a watercolour or acrylic painting (or a series of paintings) showing some characters from the good old 8-bit and 16-bit era. You know: stuff like Mario (SNES), Sonic (Megadrive) etc etc, but then I thought: why bother sitting painting squares when I could just do them in squares… mosaic tiles to be exact.

Above: Bub and Bob mosaic on my wall
(click photo above for a larger photo)

And lo, it was to pass. After a few minutes finding rips of Bubble Bobble sprites I began to glue the mosaic tiles to a sheet of thin plastic. The tiles are actually 1cm (10mm) square which would have made them each about 15cm square! So I cut each tile in to four and used 0.5cm (5mm) tiles.

First came Bub (above, click the photo for a larger photo). The plan was to cut away any visible while plastic that was showing. But the more I looked at it, I realised it would look better with a black outline but I wasn’t sure if I had enough black tiles to do that for Bub and, the soon to be created, Bob. So I left about 3mm of plastic around the outline of Bub then painted the visible white plastic with some black acrylic paint. Voila!

Now Bob (above, again click photo for larger one). Same idea. Each one took about 2hrs to cut the tiles and glue in place with a further 15mins or so for cutting them out of the plastic sheet and the black acrylic. They are both 16 tiles square and blue-tac’d to my wall, perched upon photo’s of my geckos. 

Next: Link from the SNES Zelda game ‘Link to the Past’.

Coming soon: Even more 8 and 16-bit legends. This is FUN! 

Way back when I were a lad, the cool toy to have was LEGO MINDSTORMS (the robot building kit made by LEGO). But at about £200 it was a bit out of my price range. As I got older and had the money to buy it there was a new version due out, LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT but it was also £200-ish. I assumed that the older version would come down in price as the new version came out. Wrong! It’s so highly prized that the older version is still about £200 to buy!

Now, many years later, I have the chance to play with LEGO MINDSTORMS. I spotted a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT on eBay for only £130 and snapped it up with all due haste! Even eBay has very few MINDSTORM kits on it.

Several days later I took delivery of said prize and, wow, does it look cool!

They certainly give you enough bits!

Everything you see in the photo above comes in one biiiiig box! The only problem is that the LEGO software (to program the ‘brick’, bottom right) only runs on Windows and Mac. But, thankfully: Linux hackers to the rescue! One fellow (John Hansen) developed his own language and compiler to program the ‘brick’ in Linux so, in appreciation, I have bought his book: Lego Mindstorms NXT Power Programming: Robotics in C

I’ve only had the kit a few days so I’ve not built anything as yet, but the book has a few examples in it so I’ll be building them first methinks.

Look out world, the Terminator storyline may still happen! 

Ok so I can’t write to it but at least I can now view my Google Calendar in Thunderbird.

I installed Thunderbird2 from the Gutsy repo and that’s fine. But you try installing the Lightning 0.7 add-on. Won’t go. Apparently it’s because they are compiled by different sources. So I’ve had to make do with Lightning 0.5 (also from the Gutsy repo) which means I can’t use the ‘Provider’ plug-in to write to Google Calendar (it needs 0.7) but, hey, I’m happy with what I’ve got.

<rant>

A while ago I bought an Epson Stylus C44UX nice and cheap, £30.

Few days ago it was flashing its little red and green lights at me. I hadn’t used it for a while so I changed both the black and colour cartridges.

Still flashing red and green lights.

After some Google research it turns out that most Epson printers now have a counter built in to them. The idea being that when you’ve done x amount of print outs or used x amount of cartridges the printer effectively disables its self and signals you to take it to an Epson certified engineer to have it serviced! It signals you by flashing red and green lights. Well that’s just fan-tastic…

Turns out you can open up the printer, clean out the waste tray and sponges then run an application to try and reset the counter. That is of course assuming you have several long screw drivers and six hands to unclip the damn thing…

Screw that. The damn thing only cost me £30 and I can get another printer for that, where as I’m quite sure it’d cost me more than £30 to have the thing ’serviced’ by an Epson rep.

Whatever next: disabling hard drives because of too many write cycles?

</rant>