I had a moment of clarity when I heard about it. Several people have suggested I sell some of my stuff to a stock photography company, and this is exactly why I will never do that. It's easy for photographers to say "well he had it coming". Yes, he was certainly on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps wrong to use the photograph without paying for it. And one could even make the argument that by using this image with attribution to the photographer but not paying the royalties, was exactly identical to charging into the photographer's house armed with a couple of AK-47s, grabbing their kids' meals, spraying diarrhoea all over them then shoving them into the dustbin. You'd be fucking stupid and I'd hate you for it, but you could make that argument. Before telling me that, though, I hope you get an opportunity to say it to the face of one of your friends when their ignorance lands them with a letter demanding that they fork over either nearly a thousand fucking pounds or face a costly legal battle they will lose. I don't hope that they will refrain from spitting in your face and disowning you, nor do I hope that you don't die of a massive heart attack a few seconds later. Trust me, totally fucking people, or allowing other people to totally fuck people on your behalf, is all well and good until that shit comes around and sinks its shark teeth into someone you know personally. Then you'll realise that being a massive cock hurts everyone, in the long run.

(see here.)

So I have a tiny Acer Aspire One A110 craptop and I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Edition for a few weeks now, and I am impressed. Here's some thoughts, tips, and things that I would do differently.

Shit just works. It took the Linux world a long time, but we're finally at the point where an average computer user can stick in a USB stick, reboot, answer a few questions and then have an installation that just works. This is better and easier to install than Windows which rarely has all the drivers for all the hardware you need (let alone up-to-date ones). Hooray!

It's fast. Like really fast. See this?

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it is. Much faster to boot than Karmic, for one. I've also noticed less application hanging on disk I/O, which happened a lot under Lucid (I'm not sure if this is a problem with my SSD disk or with the OS, but I suspect the latter). I'm going from hitting the power button to a fully working, logged-in system in about 27 seconds. Sounds slow, except that probably five or more seconds of that is taken up by the BIOS, and that's a logged in, ready-to-roll system without all the other shit that has to load after "boot" on lesser operating systems. I'd call that pretty impressive performance for a baby notebook with about half the processor power of my 5-year-old Pentium 4. I might have shaved a few centiseconds off it by disabling a whole bunch of startup programs (bluetooth manager, "check for new hardware drivers", Evolution alarm notifier, etc etc).

The default media player is rude. Clicking the X on the title bar to close Rhythmbox does not close Rhythmbox, but sends it to the system tray (or whatever Ubuntu would rather call it). No fuckers, "close" means "close", seriously. Oh did I mention that behaviour is not configurable? Awesome.

I can't disable the social stuff. Or at least not by any obvious method. That's rude, too, since I don't use it and it just takes up space. The mail notifier applet is also not removable, and assumes that you use the Evolution email client. If I could set this up to check my Gmail without adding that account to Evolution I'd be fine with that, but I can't, and I'm not.

Firefox sucks. Firefox sucks in so many ways that I won't even go into it here, other than to say that if your web browser actually sucks more than Internet Explorer, something is seriously wrong, and Firefox really does suck that much. Chromium is much, much better in every way. Fortunately for those of us who don't like crappy web browsers (and my faith in the human race takes a huge dent every time I see a person who not only uses Firefox, but actually likes that shit), there's a PPA with nightly Chromium builds. Despite being nightlies, they're actually more stable than every version of Firefox I've had the misfortune of using. Did I mention that Firefox sucks? Because if I haven't I'd like you all to know that Firefox sucks. The Ubuntu people know that Firefox sucks too, which is why they'll probably be sending it to the glue factory in the next version, and replacing it with Chromium.

OpenOffice.org sucks as well. A bloat-monster like that on any operating system is a bad idea, but that's even more so on a operating system designed for computers with less than six terabytes of RAM and four processors, let alone one designed for little 1.6ghz-or-less netbooks. For the two times I've actually needed a word processor, I'm a huge fan of AbiWord which is awesome, fast and light-weight.

All in, though, you can colour me seriously impressed.

I have a Voigtlander Vito B cuddly toy, therefore I am better than you.

Left to right: boxed and mint Nikon Series E 70-210mm f/4 (manual focus, same optics as the AF 70-210 f/4), dead Nikon FG (I think I can get it working; if not I'll use it for spares), boxed and mint Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8 (same optics as the AF 50mm f/1.8). Rear: some 1980s thyristor auto-flash. Not shown: three expired-in-2005 films which I fully intend to use.

Man, I love it when people give me free camera shit. Thanks Mark! Even though the 50mm f/1.8 (a great lens) looks silly on my D2H:

I'm gonna put this out here as some Google bait: the focus ring on the Series E 50mm f/1.8 is a bit tough to turn. Is this how the lens should be or is this in need of a service?

TL;DR: If you're having sound and frame-rate issues, use the OpenAL sound module. You'll need to create a symlink libopenal.so.0 to libopenal.so.1, since Warsow is expecting the former. Noob instructions follow.

So like, I have an ATI Radeon RV516 and a Pentium 4 HT, and I was using Ubuntu Lucid, right? And I wanted to play Warsow but I was having all sorts of issues with stuttering sound and a very low frame rate, right? So then I was like, OK I gotta fix this, right? And so I fixed it and I thought I'd tell everyone on my blog, right?</teenagegirl>

Anyway here's how you fix that shit. I'm using the version of Warsow available from the Warsow website. I haven't tried it with the one in the package repositories, because that's always twenty fucking years out of date. Here goes:

Install OpenAL.

sudo apt-get install libopenal1

Change to your Warsow directory and create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 to libopenal.so.0 .

cd ~/warsow
ln -s /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 libopenal.so.0

Run Warsow with the current working directory appended to the dynamic linker path. (This is how you will run Warsow from now, by the way.)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./warsow.i386

Go to Setup -> Sound options and set the sound module to "OpenAL"

You're done! And it works MUCH better under Lucid than it ever did on Jaunty, hooray! :D