August 2007 archive

Remarkable Free (as in free culture) Photography by Paulo Barcellos

I’ve had it in mind lately to write some book/music/movie reviews about non-free culture, which I have mixed feelings about. This is a site ostensibly devoted to free software and free culture, after all. I may end up writing those posts, along with some hand wringing explanatory notes (namely that I’m all about “free association and assorted miscellany” also), but I have no reservations about pointing to the work of Paulo Barcellos Jr. over at Flickr:

NYC, Blade Runner Style

I’m continually delighted that he freely shares all his pictures under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 license. (I’m guessing the older v2 license because that’s what Flickr offers as an option.) This is quality work, and releasing it this way bolsters free culture as we gradually move in …

Friday Free Wallpaper Post: Patio

My patio. It was wet. I thought it would make a good desktop background.

This image is free and I’m releasing it in to the public domain. I took a 2560 x 1024 pixel slice out of it to use as dual monitor wallpaper, and of course you’re free to resize it to 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 1024, 1024 x 768, or etc x etc.

2816 x 2112

(An advantage of dual monitors I’ve found in GNU/Linux is that you can have a wallpaper that stretches across two displays. In Windows–by default at least, and no easy way to configure otherwise–I was only able to have an image repeated on both displays.)

system76 creative alternative support

I’ve been happy with the system76 desktop machine I bought last year pre-installed with Ubuntu. I got it partly to support a company selling GNU/Linux machines, and partly to avoid the Microsoft tax and possible complications with buying a cheap Dell machine and replacing Windows with Ubuntu. (This was before Dell started offering Ubuntu.)

I’d consider going back to system 76 before buying a Dell Ubuntu machine. Dell hasn’t particularly earned my loyalty after my past experience with them, although I hope the Ubuntu machines sell well for them and they keep it up.

The machine has worked out great, but then recently there was the problem with the integrated Ethernet NIC on the motheboard. After throwing in a spare card and getting …

GNU/Linux Firefox image display problem caused by CSS padding

Do not adjust the picture on your television set. There is nothing wrong with the horizontal. That’s what the accompanying image is supposed to look like. This image, with this post, but not most of the other images on this site.

Continuing on the theme from my last post of “moving to fewer problems with this web site,” I fixed one more problem that has been nagging me ever since starting to use Mozilla Firefox on Ubuntu (and Fedora) last year. I hope posting about this one will help someone else in their searching, since it seems like kind of an obscure problem.

When I started using Firefox on GNU/Linux systems, I noticed that images would often be garbled on web pages. They …

Toil: Ethernet, Comment Previews, Trackbacks, and WordPress Updates

I love working with computers, but sometimes it can be a chore. You want to work on one thing, but other things break and you have to deal with them sooner or later. It can feel like such a burden. Petty distractions from what we really want to do. Do you ever get the feeling we’re building a big technological house of cards?

But it’s always satisfying to fix things and keep the night at bay for a little while longer.

Ethernet

My wife mentioned Friday she couldn’t get to her GMail account, which I mentally filed as a possible transient connection problem. I’ve had a couple of network hiccups lately where I needed to reset my router and a switch. She wasn’t trying when she told me, or trust me I …

The 35W Bridge Collapse

Living in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis, I’ve occasionally taken the 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in to Minneapolis. I read this comment on buzz.mn that holds true for me also (except for the regular use):

When I heard the 35W bridge collapsed, I couldn’t immediately place it, though I use it regularly. It’s not a landmark by any means. It hardly seems to be a “bridge” at all. When you’re on it, you can’t see the water and you have no sense of where the bridge ends or where it begins. It’s just a stretch on the Interstate with a good skyline view. In order to mentally place the bridge, I could not call the structure to mind–rather I had to think about where 35W crosses the Mississippi. In a way, it makes it all the more

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