Found out about a site this week - Centsless Books that lists books available for free on Amazon. Apparently the list is updated hourly. Here is the sci-fi list. Now I see some pretty good stuff here that is available other ways - via Baen or Gutenburg for example. But if you have a kindle it is rather handy.

I'm reading Drake's "Redliners" right now and I'm enjoying it immensely. But I've always been partial to his military sci-fi. I love all the Hammer's Slammers stuff and such. Anyway - it's a handy site that I thought some of you might enjoy.

I'm a Fedora user as I've mentioned before. I do not run the default de, gnome though. I'm a KDE user. I recently moved my main work machine to Fedora 18. I had a bump or two but I've gotten things mostly dialed in. Today I tried to use the Gimp to do some work on an image but it would not start. I tried from the launcher first and that failed. I moved to the console and was greeted by an immediate segfault.

These attempts kicked off the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT) and so I decided I should let it send in a report. It did it's thing and informed me that the bug had already been reported with a link to this bug. This was rather nice.

I looked at the bug report and saw that this is an issue dealing with the theme KDE was using for GTK+ apps. Well - I'm just using the defaults and didn't even know where to look to change this so I googled. The answer is to go to System Settings -> Application Appearance (not Workplace Appearance) -> GTK+ Appearance. On the page there I had a few choices for Widget style. For now I've chosen Adwaita. I'll keep an eye on this bug and switch back when it gets fixed.

So if you are a KDE user and Gimp wont start - there you go - that should fix it.

The only thing I can think is that this stuff is for domestic consumption as the farce is so easy to see. Is there something I'm missing?

I wanted to read The Diamond Age by Stephenson and I heard it is built in a world that follows Snowcrash. So I re-read Snowcrash. Man I love that book.

My daughter is really into a series right now The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel. She loves it. I think it is o.k. It's a bit repetitive but I do enjoy the locations the author uses and the way they are described. It's not bad for a juvenile series. I was also looking to do a little comfort reading (speaking of juveniles) and knocked back Space Cadet for the umpteenth time. Which has me wondering. I know you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a metric crap ton of juvenile fantasy - but what about juvenile sci-fi? The Fun Guy - get on that. When you are filthy rich from writing the equivalent of Harry Potter in Space, I want a cut for coming up with the idea.

I don't know if I mentioned the Hobbit film here. We liked it a lot. Looking forward to the next one. Went the next week to see Les Mis with my wife. I had to fight to stay awake and engaged. Sorry - I am a Philistine. But seriously - I took her to see Carmen at the state opera this fall and enjoyed that a lot more. Les Mis just felt long. I did like the sets and costumes. Just didn't care for the music so much.

I liked the new Bourne movie. It delivered what I expect from a Bourne movie. Though I think the first one is still my favorite. I haven't seen the others in a while so it did take me a while to figure out that this one was taking place concurrently with one of the others. (second or third? all 3? I don't know. or as I like to say now, nem tudom.(that's a nice one, didn't even have to switch my keyboard to Hungarian))

I think Scalzi summed up the situation with Abrams and Star Wars rather nicely. But he is a super smart dude. I am not buying Human Division an episode at a time. He says getting it as a full book at the end will cost about the same as buying each separately but I'm hoping that at some point that is not the case as that is a bit steep for me. Maybe I can weasel my way into a review copy like I did for Last Colony.

AND - I just wrapped up watching Season 8 of Deadliest Catch. I've watched every episode of that show there is. I've spent more time watching some of those guys than I have with people I'm actually related to. What a horrible sentence, the grammar not the content. Anyway I like it on account of all the waves and stuff. Now I'm liking the facebook pages of some of the guys and trying to squeeze more out of it. April I think the next season comes out.

I've been fending off the cravings for Breaking Bad by watching Malcolm in the Middle on Netflix. I'm a sad little junkie.

All right - I've got to get back to real stuff. I can't entertain you all day. I'll leave you with two music videos that are so gorgeous it actually hurts to watch them.
Little Talks
King and Lionheart

I'm kind of an IDE junky. I really like messing around with them and trying them out. This probably offends real programmers who are actually productive. I don't blame you and I'm sorry.

So I've never used KDevelop before on account of I've never really written much in C or C++. In fact while I'm being offensive to those of you with legit skills the biggest thing I ever did in C was part of a project I did in VB 6.0 There was one section I couldn't accomplish in VB so I wrote a little thing in C that I could call from the VB code. I don't even remember what it was - it's been a few years now. I wonder if I wrote about it in my journal here? I may go look later. I'm the programming equivalent of the rich white kid with all the 'bling' who styles himself as a hard core rapper guy.

Well, I'm on Reddit and there is a post in r/python about a python plugin for KDevelop. And as I'm investigating that I see that there is also one for PHP. The PHP plugin must have been stable a while back because it is available via the Fedora repos. The Python one is pretty new so I had to compile that sucker from source. I felt pretty manly doing that. (manly is a bad word for this but I can't come up with another one that describes how it made me feel. i'm sure this is a product of my upbringing and culture and not due to a personal failing on my part.)

Anyway - it's cool. I mean really cool.

I got it installed, played with getting KDEDIRS right, running kbuildsycoca4 a few times and then figuring out how to get this variable set right in a permanent fashion - and then I could use it. I fire up KDevelop, click on "New Project" and I see that I have choices, one being "Python". Upon choosing Python I learn that I have even more choices. Simple Python Application, New Django project and Simple Qt GUI application using Designer. Verbiage and capitalization inconsistencies aside I was pretty pleased to see more choices than I would have expected and doubly so over the last. I chose it and created a project called test.

What did I get in my project called test? Well again, a whole lot more than I expected. It created 3 files. test.py, mainwindow.ui and mainwindow.py and it was capable of running right out of the box. This is pretty freaking cool in my opinion. When you run it there's a little window with a push button and a progress bar. Pushing the button increments the progress bar. Really - it doesn't matter what it does, the point is that everything is there that one needs to get the ball rolling I really, really like that.

It does bunches and bunches of all the IDE stuff you would expect. Syntax coloring, code completion, debugging stuff - all that junk. I'm pretty impressed. I'm a brand loyal person. I love feeling like I belong to a team. This is not a positive attribute on a number of levels but I don't care. It's a truth about myself I've learned to accept. So I really like the idea of becoming a more KDE person by using KDevelop. I've also dropped pidgin for Telepathy and learned to embrace Dolphin. I'm all about the buy in. Though I do not browse with Konqueror. I can only go so far. And my love affair with google takes precedence here. But now I'm rambling.

Another Python IDE that I haven't looked at in a long, long time is Ninja IDE. It comes with a dark them as the default setting and I feel like a rebellious hacker type person straight out of a Gibson story every time I fire it up. It's a Python IDE written in Python. I respect that. I haven't messed with it a lot but it is available via the Fedora repos now and at some point I may give it a more serious spin. I wondered how it would go when they first started and they seem to be hanging in there and building a nice product. The name as a recursive acronym thing is annoying but I'm willing to overlook it. They have packages for Lin, Win and Mac. How nice is that? Try it out. Write a plugin for it.

So with all that Valve is doing your Linux PC can now be your complete solution for development and entertainment. So many good tools just sitting there waiting to be used.

**Technical Note about the KDEDIRS thing. I am (if you read these regularly you already know) of course not all that smart. Fortunately I live in an age where I can get away with it. I followed the install directions and that left my plugin stuff installed into /usr/local but by default KDEDIRS (at least on my system) just has /usr. My initial gut reaction would be to modify it in ~/.bash_profile but I googled it and this was not the right answer. The right answer was easy though. I created ~/.kde/env and in there put a script that set KDEDIRS to include /usr/local and all was well. Though this is why I really look forward to this plugin getting to the repos because then I don't need to worry about this stuff any more. I just fire up apper, search by title on "kdevelop" and clicky-clicky she is installed. Or if I feel like being 1337 I su to root and type yum install kdevelop-python You know what I mean?

Netbeans, Intellij Idea - both look craptastic on 64bit Fedora. I've tried just about every vm option there is and a number of different fonts but none of it looks very good. I think the Python plugin for KDevelop may be a turning point for me.

Participated in a Hangout for the first time today. I've watched some that were recorded on youtube but this was the first where I've been a participant. I've got to say that it was pretty slick.

The weak point was the audio. It was o.k. but sometimes there was a lot of echo. Other than that though it was pretty impressive. As our organization moves to Google Apps I imagine I'll be using it a lot more. When my kids see the goofy little graphics that can be put into the video they are going to flip.

The other two participants today were on Windows 8 - I was using my Fedora 18 machine. I had to install something to get it to work but Chrome helpfully gave me a list of options for the install and one was a 64 bit rpm. Nice.

I'm not naive about Google - and things could go all square shaped fast with them but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I love the convenience and functionality they bring to my life.

Last time I looked, the only webcam program I could find that sort of worked for me was Cheese - which is a Gnome application. I don't mind running Gnome stuff but I do like having KDE programs to use with KDE.

I checked again today and ran into Kamoso which is working really well for me. There really isn't any lag, it saves videos and photos very nicely. It's super slick.

I never did get Cheese to properly record video on this machine - but I do have the video card in there now so maybe it would work fine too. But I was really surprised by how snappy Kamoso is. Very nice.

I wrote earlier about how everything worked so well with my new multi-monitor setup. Then I started noticing issues. The title bar on windows would get borked up. Right click menus would start to look wierd. I tried loading the Nvidia drivers- they would cause the system to lock up and crash. I went back to nouveau but had issues still. Especially if I started up Firefox. The article on the front page today had a link to Eric Schmidt's daughter's write up on their trip to North Korea. Just going to that page would blow up Firefox. Then when I closed Firefox everything else would go wonky.

I messed with it a lot today and then did something I should have done right away. I went into my settings for KDE, started poking around and turning off all the desktop effects stuff. I want to cautiously say that I think this is the ticket. I'll keep working tomorrow and see if anything goes askew. This is really annoying. I have zero problems with intel stuff - but (and I don't know a lot about this stuff) if you want to run multiple monitors off a desktop machine then that means nvidia or ati and both seem to have their share of problems. I think I'm o.k. now but I should be able to load decent, open drivers that will just work. They don't have to be the greatest - just give me some stable basic functionality.

I can't remember if I mentioned it here but my wife got me Ticket to Ride Europe for my birthday. Pretty exciting. The instructions in the box were in Hungarian but downloading the English version was a trivial exercise. Actually playing the game requires no reading beyond the city names and they are all in what I assume is supposed to be the local name for the city at the time of the map - though they don't use non-latin character sets. If I remember correctly the time is 1901. Hungary and Germany are HUGE. Really - super big and worthy of all caps. There are a lot less countries than now and it's kind of fun from that perspective.

I've never played the original game on the American map. I watched the Ticket to Ride TableTop episode though and that's what made me want to get the game. I think the Europe version is actually better for our family. The addition of the train stations makes it a little easier to complete routes and that really helps my kids. I want them to have fun playing, not just feel frustrated all the time.

It's a fantastic, well designed game that is nice to look at. It works great as all 5 of us can play and the rules are pretty easy to grasp. That said, the fun of playing scales up well with the ability of those playing I think. With my kids it's all pretty straightforward, but I'm guessing with more adults there would be a whole additional level of trying to figure out what others are doing and stopping them if possible.

The game can be played on-line but I haven't tried that out. Not sure that I will. My favorite thing about table games is playing them with friends and family and just hanging out together.

Got to work this morning and I started up my machines. I went to start synergy but it didn't start. I thought I had fixed this. It wouldn't start because it didn't recognize the machine name. I thought I had changed it from localhost.localdomain in a permanent fashion but I was wrong. I determined to track this down once and for all. I finally did. Here is the solution. (sort of)

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net

I say sort of because that didn't totally work. hostnamectl sets up a static hostname and a pretty hostname. When I ran the command without specifiying which I got jr-acerdesk.this.net as the pretty name and jr-acerdeskthisnet as the static name. So the output of hostname is jr-acerdiskthisnet and that was not going to fly with synergy. So I had to do it again but this time specify that I wanted the static name to match the pretty name.

hostnamectl set-hostname jr-acerdesk.this.net --static

If you are curious - changing /etc/hosts had no effect on this. Poking around I think maybe changing /etc/hostname would have fixed it but I'm not sure. Unless I missed something, and I don't think I did - there was no opportunity during the install to choose a host name.

Next issue was my firewall. It was blocking the synergy client trying to connect on port 24800. There is a gui for managing the firewall daemon so I went with that. The problem is I couldn't get the changes I made via the gui to persist. It took some digging but here is what did it.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=work --add-port=24800/tcp

I had to specifiy the zone because I have the ethernet connection on this machine set to a zone that is different from the default zone. If it was default that could be left out. I think there is an xml file somewhere I could have dug into but that's not really my idea of a good time. Hopefully the gui tool for managing firewalld will improve soon.

The kio_mtp work is available in the F18 repos. I am having a very difficult time getting it to work consistently with my Galaxy S3 though. I'm not sure why. The Nexus 7 devices I've tried work flawlessly. Something is up with the phone. I'm not sure what. I'm trying to contact the developer and see if I can help provide information that might point a solution.

Downloaded Fedora 18 yesterday and installed it on my Acer desktop. Everything is pretty sweet.

And all that messing about with the video card that I couldn't get to fit in the case? Yesterday I was looking for a usb cable at home and found a video card in my desk that I had totally forgotten about. Looked at it and thought, "I bet this will fit in there if I put the low profile plate on the end and slide the VGA port down to the other slot opening. It did! So I bought a $40 video card for the little short metal plates that came with it. Well - my partner here in the office is building out a new system so I gave the card to him. He'll make good use of it.

So I'm up and running a new os - with both monitors -- which I have to say just worked. So sweet.

I've got more space on my desk now - which I like and I think this will actually help my work flow a bit by simplifying things. 1 machine to work on - 1 machine for email and junk.

I think I've figured it out mostly. I've got the mechanism down I believe and now it is just a matter of nailing down some specifics. I used a program called cvt to find the modeline for the resolution I wanted. Then I tried it out with xrandr and that worked pretty well. I did all this with the guidance from this Arch wiki article.

Then I used the layout they show for creating an entry in xorg.conf but I didn't do it in xorg.conf I created a new file in /etc/xorg.conf.d as per this post.

I logged out, logged back in and had the option to change the lcd to the desired resolution. The only remaining issue is that while everything I can find says this monitor is 1440x900 - when I maximize stuff it goes off the right edge. But I can figure that out.

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My original post is below:
I've got a cheap LCD monitor that I use at home. It's decent but it does have one real pain in the butt issue. It doesn't report itself properly to computers. I don't know the details - I just know that regardless of what I connect to it and regardless of the OS - I have to go in and straighten it out.

Today I started using it with my laptop running Fedora 17 and sure enough I don't get the correct resolution as an option. Fedora doesn't use xorg.conf any more and the tools I've found all just give me the same set of options that don't include the right resolution.

I'm open to suggestions on how to get it to handle this correctly.

So - I took the Desktop Acer home, opened it up to start planning surgery and realized even with the top open, the video card wont fit because of a big row of cables that plug in to some pins pretty close behind it, as well as another above it towards the front. I don't know if any video card would fit in that slot.

I know the one below it can be used because I have another Acer that uses a mobo with the same layout and it has a wireless adapter plugged into the lower one. Of course it's a tiny, tiny card.

So I wont be running two screens from that machine any time soon - probably not ever. Instead I'll just move the linux laptop home and use the second monitor from the little Acer laptop. I'm moving the Acer desktop at home to the entertainment center. It solves a few problems, like the really bad time we've had getting netflix to work consistantly from the wii. I can also get rid of the transformer that was letting us use our dvd player as I wont need the dvd player any more. That was my last piece of equipment in there that couldn't handle local power.

I hooked up the pc to the tv with hdmi and it looks and sounds great. I could do better I'm sure with more work and equipment but we aren't audo or video philes - we're pretty easy to please when it comes to that stuff. Now I just need to get a wireless keyboard and maybe a remote. The front of the acer is all black except for a silver acer badge. I can probably pry that off without too much trouble.

Well - I do dumb things a lot. I hope a byproduct is your entertainment.

So I have an Acer Aspire X3810 on my desk. I'm typing this post with it. It's my primary work machine and I like that little guy. Next to it (I just described this the other day - sorry) is a docked Latitude that's pretty old. It still works good though. BUT I started thinking that I'd like to free up some desk space and it really isn't necessary to have the laptop. I just need to put a video card in the desktop and then I can drive both my big monitors off that. I'm not losing much really - the laptop screen is not that bright and I never use it. Whatever I'm actually looking at gets shoved over to the big lcd.

The Acer case is small so I went on-line and looked at low profile cards. I ended up buying an ASUS GeForce 210 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Low Profile Ready Video Card, EN210 SILENT/DI/1GD3/V2(LP) from Amazon. That was the dumb part. I didn't even think to crack open my case and take a moment to look at the setup. I just read "Low Profile" clicked add to cart. I had it shipped to a buddy who went back to the states for Christmas and he brought it back to Hungary with him.

SO - I get it and I'm like a little kid on Christmas. I unplug everything from the back of the case, slide it open and realize immediately there is no way the card will fit. It's got this honking big heat sink on it. The slot it has to go in is millimeters from the top of the case. If the heat sink were on the downward side of the card, it might work, but it's on top. Well - I thought about it and I've decided I'm just going to cut a hole in the top of the case. It can't be removed. The case is one wrap around piece that provides top, bottom and one side - then the other side slides off. Tomorrow I'll bring my Dremel (and the big fat transformer I need to run it) and I'm gonna cut a big hole right in the top. I'll take pictures of course. I think it's actually gonna look cool in the end.

A guy I work with in the office said, "You'll have dust problems." I reject this view. The whole side of the case is pretty much full of all these round holes for air flow. If I keep things tight I don't think this will be that much worse.

Of course the kicker will be if I do all that and it doesn't work well. It's been a while since last time I tried running multi monitor with linux using a second video card so I'm hoping it will all be better than it was then.