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Okay, it looks like you can buy Groceries at Amazon now.

You know what? I hate grocery shopping. I just might try this. I don’t think I’ll be looking for the half-priced used grocery items though… I can see it now; “Corn Flakes: from $0.48 Used…”

You know, after cruising the site for a few minutes… I think I take it back. This would be a pain in the neck to buy your groceries with. Plus, you’d still need to go to the store for milk, veggies, fruit and meat… not to mention frozen foods.

Is anyone going to use this at all? I have my doubts. Maybe someone looking to order a lot of Macaroni and Cheese, but other than that… I don’t think so.

Through some idle web-surfing this morning I happened to find that there is a 47 minute video of Glenn Gould playing J.S. Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations on Google Video.

It turns out that the Goldberg Variations are quite an interesting piece of musical history; more information, including links to other sites and essays about Bach, and the Goldberg Variations in particular, can be found in the Goldberg Variations Wikipedia article.

I’m far from an expert on classical or baroque music (I think this piece would technically fall into the latter category, but don’t quote me on that), but I’ve been listening to it in the background all morning, and it’s definitely enjoyable. Check it out.

The fully qualified directories in this particular “howto” are specific to SLED 10, and will undoubtedly be different on a different version of Linux.

Something you might notice on installing SLED 10 is that, like most distros which feature Gnome 2.12 or 2.14, xscreensaver has been partially or fully replaced by gnome-screensaver. In the case of SLED 10, xscreensaver was installed, but none of its screensavers were available; gnome-screensaver listed only a scant five or six options.

I spent some time tracking down how to make xscreensaver’s hacks available to gnome-screensaver, so here it is.

Continue reading ‘Howto: Add xscreensavers to gnome-screensaver’

I installed an evaluation version of SLED 10 last night. Here are some first impressions:

• The install is nearly flawless. If they could simplify partitioning, it would be perfect, I think. Partitioning is not difficult, but could still be a little tough for the complete beginner.
• The new main menu will take some getting used to — it is completely different from the standard Gnome menu. Rather than the normal menu, you see a preset list of “Favorite” applications (the usual; a browser, a mail reader, etc.), and you can click a button to view more applications (ie, all of them). Adding another application or utility to your “favorites” is just a click away. It’s quite different, and I think I could get used to it very quickly.
• Xgl (read: fancy schmancy 3-D X windows GUI effects, whee) is available, though turned off by default. Again, it was a trivial process to turn it on; it automatically updated my driver to the nividia driver, enabled 3-D acceleration, and then prompted me to log out so direct rendering, ergo Xgl, could start when X restarted. Very slick; this setup could hardly be better.

Is it perfect? No… but so far my only complaint is not Suse-specific, but rather a complaint against the new (as of 2.14, I think) gnome-screensaver app. I miss the “Preview” button from xscreensaver-demo, and so far it is non-obvious how to access all or install other screensavers (ie, all the other xscreensaver ones) — gnome-screensaver only seems to include about 5 or 6 screensavers by default. I want my OpenGL screensavers, darn it.

I would say that it’s the slickest distro I’ve tried so far, ever; and that’s no slight against the beloved Ubuntu or my long-time desktop Gentoo. This one just has a different target: the enterprise. So far, I’d say it hits the mark. This could very easily be a drop in for Windows, the sole exception (as always) being those pesky apps that are only written for Windows.

I think it will be interesting to watch the reaction to this one… hopefully people will give it a chance.

What if Strongbad were a ninja? And, not animated?

You might get something like Ask A Ninja. A little bit of inspired silliness. Enjoy.