valshak.com

I recently upgraded my phone from LG's enV2 to Motorola's Droid. Wow, what an upgrade. Now, my reasons for wanting a Droid since they've been released is because I've always wanted to have an iPhone but never wanted to have to deal with switching carriers. Not to mention, I'm a computer programmer and the Droid's operating system is open-source which means I can make my own programs for it... eventually. The fact that it's open-source ALSO means that other programmers out there can give away their programs for free, legally.

Summary::
I'm usually a pretty reckless linux user. At least as far as my choice in distributions. In the past, should the urge arise to try a new distro I'd be more than willing to replace my current install with something new. Over the last few years though, I have not followed that style, I have been a one distro user.

After 3 years in the same house, I'm finding it hard to fully envision myself NOT staying here. Though this is something I need to get used to because I am going to vacate the premises in 4 days.

Alright so, what you see is Firefox with Outload.net, Outlabs, and Valshak.com open. Pidgin connected to XMPP. My customized fluxmenu where I have a lot of tasks automated (ie. connected to wifi spots, mounting networking partitions [ala NFS], launching WINE-requiring software, etc). My Conky setup, which I am very pleased with.

This is an article for all of those college students who need Blackboard for any of their classes and would rather NOT have to use Internet Explorer or Windows then follow these steps:

1. Install this plug-in:: HERE. This will immediately install the plug-in for Firefox.
2. Set Tools->User Agent Switcher->IE 7.
3. Visit the Blackboard/WebCT powered site.

I'll be the first to admit that I love television shows. Not much can improve my day more than stepping out of my life and into the episodic life of such profoessionals as Dr. Gregory House and his team, Dr. Temperance Brennan and her team, Chuck Bartowski and his handlers, or Sheriff Jack Carter and the town of Eureka. That's just to name a few of the shows I watch... largely, the fictional ones. Some of my shows have come to their respective ends and so I do not get to travel to their universes any more, except for when I'm feeling nostalgic.

It would appear that a resent update to Nvidia's drivers has allowed for audio to be transmitted via the HDMI (or DVI) port. This would seem all well-and-good except that, for whatever reason, in my situation it totally disabled audio being transfered via an analog signal (ie. the way PC speakers are hooked up to your computer). This caused quiet a problem for me because I had not delved into getting my audio over an HDMI cable so I had no idea the issue was coming. But, anyways, here's what I've recently done to get it working.

If you are a Linux user like I am then you've probably gone to a site that was constructed using a plugin or library that does not come natively installed or is not available in your distrobution's package repositories. So here's some instructions for getting some handy features up and running.

So, once upon a time I used to run Slackware Linux using the Fluxbox windows manager. It was an awesome setup and oh so fast and simple. Now, many years later I'm using Arch Linux and Gnome. No regrets either, Gnome is much more powerful and much more polished than it was in those days, but on my laptop (with a max resolution of 1024x768) Gnome is a bit cumbersome.