Where's god?

We've all been sold the idea that there's a god, the almighty that knows it all, looks over you and answers all your questions. Nowadays a lot of people would say Google is the closest we've ever got to talk to a god which I partially agree but that's not the point now.

What I wonders these days is, where's that god now when people most need him? Don't get
me wrong, I come myself from a Catholic family and religion was an important part of our
everyday, so I know what's like to believe in god, going to church, praying etc.

Many years later now I simply lost the belief and stopped believing in fairy tales, because
that's what I think it is, a fairy tale. Take for example the actual situation, a virus is spreading around the world and already killed tenth of thousands of people, now who's out there fighting and looking for a way to stop this worldwide menace? Scientists! Doctors and nurses are out there taking care of the infected while risking their own lives in the process.

Scientist are actively working in their labs looking for a cure to this virus.These people are working 24/7 in order to regain control of the situation. A big 'thank you' to them all and others who are still working at supermarkets, picking up garbage, police etc, these are the real heroes of this time.

Priests and religious people? They're safe inside their churches and temples praying and
hoping that SCIENCE!! comes up with a cure soon... and while they stay inside how do
they communicate with the outside world? Through science! Mobile phone, computers,
electricity, cameras used for virtual mass etc.

I think they (religions in general) gave in to science the moment they started to protect their
houses of god with lightning rods a few hundred years ago.


That fact alone made me rethink that question, is there really a god? Based on the fact that
history has been mainly written by the powerful who won the big battles of our time I believe
that the bible was written the same way and it doesn't prove the existence of a god more
than a comic book proves the existence of Superman.

Let the believers believe if they need to and to everyone (believers and nonbelievers) stay at
home until science has found a cure for this threat.


Just my two cents.

The end of the Internet

The Internet, the greatest wonder of the modern world, billions of people electronically connected through computers, smartphones and miriad of electronic devices, in it's short life the Internet has evolved into a virtual universe where you can have your own little place, be it on a social network, homepage or a blog and where you can say what you want and share your opinion freely with the whole world.
Did I say freely? That could soon be history, that's the impression many users across the Internet are having now. The reason is called 'Article 13', a copyright reform that proposes the use of 'upload filters' to check the users's content before it is uploaded to a website.

What does it all mean? In a nutshell it means If the content the user is uploading contains copyrighted material, the filter won't allow it to be uploaded and/or published.
While the European Union hopes this way to strengthen the rights of authors, many critics and users see it as a censorship and a violation of freespech.

Should article 13 be validated, we can already say goodbye to what has become a lifestyle and the reason for endless laughs, discussions and shitstorms on countless websites: memes.
Why will memes dissapear? The answer is quite simple: memes are made of images, videos and GIF files, material for which someone else usually holds copyrights on.
Reddit reacted one week before the legal committee in the EU voted, for this purpose they told european users to contact MEPs directly in order to protect the free and open Internet.
In 4chan, another well know meme site, the discussions weren't as hot as in Reddit, but in many threads the discussion went around the end of memes and thus the end of meme sites.
Imgur, a platform that many use as meme storage, took a funnier aproach to the subject: They can take our money and our privacy, but they will never take our memes!

One example of the unreliablity of such filter is already being in use for years, YouTube has invested over $100 millions as of 2018 in their ContentID system which is the most expensive and advanced copyright filter to date and basically a 'small' version of what article 13 could become.
This article by Mike Masnick explains in detail how YouTube's filter works and why such systems bring more problems than benefits to the users.
 So what does Article 13 really mean for the web?

First of all, click here if you want to sign an online petition against article 13. While the vote in the Legal Affairs Committee is an important signal, is not yet a final decision. The voting in the European Parliament will probably take until at least the end of this year.
Another unanswered question is how well such filters work, because they must be able to recognize any copyrighted material and that won't come in cheap. To this day, they are far from perfect and legally harmless content is blocked while questionable content slip through the net as if there was no filter at all.

Moreover, it has not yet been clearly defined for whom the rule applies. While some say it should be only targeted to companies that store large quantities of data and make them available to the public others want it to be on every site and filter all content which is being uploaded. Whether the controversial article 13 really comes and whether Reddit, 4chan and co. then will have to filter content and thus the end of all Memes begins, is not yet decided.

Let's just hope that article 13 ends the same way as ACTA back in 2011

The neverland incident.

Accordding to HBO's documentary Leaving Neverland, Michael Jackson was sexually involved with two children and sexually abused them on a daily basis for years.
Both kids, now adults, talk about how they played 'games' with Mr Jackson, showered together and did other things which i don' find worth mentioning here.
My first question is, why do they start talking about it some 30 years later and didn't say anything right away when Mr Jackson touched them (if he actually did) for the first time?
Furthermore, why did their parents allow this in the first place? What parent trust their children to be alone and sleep in the same bed with an adult man that they basically didn't know?
Michael himself was abused by his father, and everyone knows it, he was himself robbed of his childhood and couldn't enjoy playing out in the dirt with other kids and grow up like most of us did, he didn't have a chance to enjoy being a kid, and that haunted him his whole life.
So let's add it all up and think carefully about it, would you as a parent leave your child alone with a grown man who you know was himself abused as a child?
I'm not defending or trying to say is not Jackson's fault, child abuse is a no go and every child molester should suffer a long an painful death (just my two cent as a side note)
My final thoughts are, is it really worth it? Does it make sense now after Jackson's death to bring all this up? Whose fault is it really? Is it Michael's fault? The kids's parents for leaving their children with Michael alone?
Guess we'll never really know, I won't waste my time watching the documentary, if you do watch it and wish to share your opinion with me leave a comment below.
I am, and I've always been a metalhead and I never payed much attention to pop music, but you just couldn't grow up in this lifetime without knowing Michael Jackson, be it the moonwalk, some awesome bass line, Thriller or simply his out-of-this-world songwriting skills, this man was / is and will always be the foundation of pop music as we know it.
R.I.P Michael, you were one of a kind.

Manjaro Linux report.

After about 6 months of testing and shortly after upgrading my system to version 17.0.2 codename 'Gellivara' I thought it was time to post my experience with this distro.

For those who don't know or are not yet familiar with Manjaro Linux, this is an user-friendly operating system based on the Arch Linux distro, targeted to the less tech-savvy user, for more information, distro download and more visit the oficial Manjaro Linux site here.

Being Arch based, Manjaro is a rolling release, which means no big updates every year or so like other big distros, a rolling distro updates more often (automagically!) so you always have the latest version of the operating system and software under the hood.

After downloading and booting the live distro, you're greeted by 'Manjaro Hello' with links to the homepage, documentation, forums and chat room as well as a guide to help the user find his way around and provides very good information about the installation process.

Manjaro with the official XFCE desktop enviroment.

Installing is a straight forward process with Calamares, the graphical installer, the official Manjaro release brings the choice of a pre-configured XFCE, Plasma or Gnome desktop. In my case, I'm using the gorgeous looking Deepin graphical environment. 

Arch Linux is not a distro for beginners, installing and configuring Arch means a lot of coding and command line work, which is the main reason why many users don't dare trying Arch Linux in my opinion. Calamares is a great tool and a big help for those wanting to try an Arch Linux based distro without having to code and build the operating system from the ground up, kudos Manjaro team : )

While XFCE is Manjaro's 'Flagship' desktop environment, you can pretty much install any desktop environment available out there, the Manjaro community offers their own versions with the likes of Cinnamon, Lxde and more.

What are the advantages of Manjaro? Contrary to Arch Linux, once the user boots the live environment, it can be used right away, and installing is a breeze through the graphical installer, another user-friendly feature is the pre installation of popular software and good hardware recognizance which gives the user a great out of the box experience.

Zorin OS, test drive and experience.

After testing Elementary OS I though I would take a break from distro testing and concentrate on my next project, unfortunately my geek heart just can't stand still so I started to look for another test candidate, this time is Zorin OS to show what it can.

Tagged as 'One of the best Linux distros available' and 'Best replacement for both Windows and Mac' it sounded very promising so I downloaded the latest release, made a bootable USB stick and I was ready to test.

First impresion is a very clean, Gnome powered, friendly and for those coming straight from a windows enviroment, very familiar desktop which reminds a lot to Win xp or Win 7, alternative you have the normal Gnome desktop in the Core version and the Ultimate version offers a Mac and a Unity like desktop enviroments plus a few more goodies which are not included in the Core version.

The default Zorin OS desktop.

Under the hood is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which means stability, long time support and  5 year updates.

The out of the box applications include libre office, chromium, gimp and a preinstalled wine (which unfortunately didn't work for me, more on this soon)
A big plus from Zorin was setting up my printer. I have a HP multi-function device connected to our home network via wlan, Zorin found it within seconds and in less than 2 minutes i was all set, it was even easier than setting it up on windows!
Unfortunately there are also minus points, libre office kept crashing while I did some light office work and if i had more than 5-6 programs open at the same time i noticed some lag in the overall performance, probably updating will solve the problem(s)
In a nutshell, ZorinOS is a good looking, stable and fast Linux operating system which is worth a try. 

Trump won, my thoughts.

Some love him, some curse him, some call him a visionaire, some call him a monster and an arrogant a**hole, stock markets worldwide were shaken and went back up overnight, people freaked out, cried, panic broke loose and doomsayers started calling "Black tuesday" and even predicting the 3rd world war.

Politicians are predators, and politicians on campaign and the dirtiest and most dangerous predators one could think of, they will dig into the enemy's dirty laundry, find out their best kept secrets and weaknesses and use it against him/her, this is modern political campaign warfare. 

All of a sudden Trump was accused of sexual harassment, -he touched my breast back in 1984- or -he put his hand under my skirt- he did? maybe he did, maybe he didn't, one thing is  for sure, the more powerful your position is and the richer you are, the easier it is for you to put your hand where you should not. Just think of all these people that would do "anything" to land a good job, climb to a higher position in a business or to get an exclusive interview with a famous superstar. 

In today's society it happens, and it happens more often than we think, but nobody talks about it... until someone can use this accusations to damage someone's image.

How many people accused Barack Obama of drug abuse in the past as he was running for president? He admitted having smoked pot and done cocaine, nevertheless he became the first afro-american president in the history of the USA, won the peace Nobel prize and was reelected again.

Remember Ronald Reagan? a Hollywood actor will never be president, some said, but in spite of that he was elected governor of California, was reelected in 1970 and after unsuccessfully running twice for president in 1968 and 1976 he was finally elected president in 1980 and was reelected for the following period.

At this point it's worth adding how similar Reagan and Trump are, they were both outsiders who weren't taken seriously as presidential candidates, but they were both driven by this passion for what they believe in, and that's probably one key factor for Trump's victory.

Don't get me wrong, i wasn't pro-Trump myself (although the other candidate wasn't really a better option to be honest) my point is, he won, we're now stuck with him, note that i say 'we' because even though i don't live in the USA and i didn't vote for either one of them, the world's become so small and countries are so connected to each other that his victory will have mayor influence worldwide.

So people, quit complaining, accept your loss, try to see the positive side and give the man a chance, after all, you have no choice, do you?  

Elementary OS Loki, my experience.

Elementary OS, codename Loki, is a light weight distro with a simple but beautiful OS X like interface, it's based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and it's packed with lightweight applications for most tasks, aditional software can be installed with a few mouseclicks from the easy to use Software Center.

So what's new?

Check the official developer's blog to read what's new on the new release.

Elementary would be the first choice for users looking for a minimalistic but good looking distribution. The system is based on Ubuntu LTS but uses it's own desktop interface called Pantheon.

I installed an early release on my notebook a while ago, just because i didn't (couldn't?) wait for the official release scheduled for Sep 2016, my first test drive wasn't very positive, many bugs, things missing and a frozen screen didn't make me a good impresion.

But hey, don't forget this was an early test release and not the official one, so bugs belong to the daily agenda, so I went back to pure Ubuntu and (un)patiently waited for the official release.

Was it worth the wait? Hell yeah!!

Same as Freya, Loki follows the minimalistic one-app-per-task approach. It's not a surprice anymore that the developers inspiration comes from Mac OS, basically they take what they consider to be the positive qualities of Cupertino's OS and build it on Elementary, the result is a gorgeous looking, clean and easy to use operating system.

A clean, good looking desktop comes out of the box.

Thanks to this keep-it-simple-stupid (no ofense!) philosophy, it takes very little to no time for the average user to get used to the enviroment, there are no multiple menus or complicated settings.

Being Ubuntu based, installing is a breeze with Ubiquity which was taken over without a lot of modifications, updates and third party software can be installed during the installation, the partitioner offers the option to encrypt the hard drive or use LVM and the whole process is fully automated.

In a nutshell, Elementary Loki is easy to use, good looking and being Ubuntu based you can install additional software to suit your needs, the new Epiphany browser is lightweight and should be enough for the average user but power users should go ahead and install their favorite browser.

Retaking the logbook

And here i am again, it's hard to believe that my last post was months ago again... shame on me!!!

What has happened? You may wonder, a lot i'd say, but this is a different story i may write about sometime.

Since my last post on Ubuntu 16.04 i've tested a whole bunch of different Linux distros, damaged my laptop's harddrive and had to swap drives with my external storage in order to keep testing.

I did also test a few Android roms on my Samsung Note II before it fell two stories down the stairs and was so damaged that repairing was not an option anymore (at this point i may remind you the importance of having a backup of your data, specially of mobile devices)

My actual hardware setup is a Medion Akoya E6313 (also known as MD 97842) Windows 7 and the latest release of Elementary Linux code name Loki based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

After testing Open Suse Leap 42, Fedora and Ubuntu 16.10 among others, I decided to stick to Elementary due to it's beautiful look, ease of use and because it's Ubuntu based.

This is it for now, more to come, stick around!

Ubuntu 16.04 is out.

The new release of Ubuntu code-name 'Xenial Xerus' has reached beta stage and is out now, this is Ubuntu's 6th LTS release, which means 5 years of updates, bug fixes and support.
On board is a new software center, and many new improvements have been made under the hood.
This release is shipped with Unity 7 but word is said Unity 8 is also available as an alternative session (experimental, use at your own risk!)
Probably the most expected new feature (thanks mostly to the work of Marco Trevisan and the Ubuntu Kylin developers team) is the possibility to move the Unity launcher to the bottom, this has been the source of many discussions and debates all over the Internet, finally the developers have been merciful with us end users, kudos and thank you Canonical for a key change, i'm sure this move will make Unity more attractive to users of other desktop environments.

A gorgeous looking Unity at the bottom of the screen

Another improvement in Unity is the so-called 'Spyware' feature which make huge waves and made many users start looking for alternatives has been disabled, back then when the user searched his/her own files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop the system used to send that string back to Canonical's servers. Read here an article by Richard Stallman on this. Even though you could turn this feature off, users weren't happy to have such feature on their desktops (I was one of them)

In case you found this feature useful, don't panic! You can easily turn it back on, take a look below.

Go to Ubuntu Systems Settings > Privacy > Search and turn the slider back to 'on'

While it would be unfair to call Unity's search feature spyware and even worse, like some people did, compared it to windows 10 nagging, which in my own experience is much worse, this wasn't a good move from the developers, but they have positively reacted to the communities, again kudos and thanks Canonical.

With all this features together, being able to change Unity's position and many improvements under the hood, Ubuntu 16.04 makes an excellent release from my point of view, particularly from the LTS stability standpoint, give it a go and try it yourself, and feel free to leave a comment if you found this article helpful, happy testing!

True, true...

Couldn't help but smile at this, 20 years ago you would walk around with a ghetto blaster and/or a Walkman with a backpack full of CDs/cassettes, camera (and a bunch of film+batteries!!) Books, notepad and a myriad more things, today the whole electronic world fits in your pocket.

Back online!

Well, after a turbulent year and a lot of personal changes i'm back! What a year, maybe i'll write a book about it sometime :-)
This time off brought a few goodies and testing platforms to play with! For the first time in my life i bought a brand spanking new notebook (specs will follow) I also got a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and a Samsung S II mobile phone, of course all this gadgets are running on code that didn't come from the factory, details will follow as well, i'll soon start posting the result of my experiments :-)
Nice to be back!

Cinnamon a GNOME 2.x style desktop

This afternoon while searching for more information about this ACTA mess i came to a site featuring Linux Mint's new desktop interface codename 'Cinnamon', a Gnome 2 looking desktop built on top of Gnome 3.

Is this a step backwards? Cinnamon interface looks and works a lot like the popular Gnome 2.x interface, but it’s built on top of the Gnome 3.x interface. 

How is that going to work? Time to ask mighty Google for enlightenment, the first images weren't that impressing but being a geek i couldn't say no to try a new window manager so i installed it on my Ubuntu 11.10 using this instructions.

After a couple of commands on the terminal and a few minutes i was ready to go, the first thing you notice is the clean desktop featuring only the bar on the bottom as you see in the picture.

Standard Cinnamon desktop.

Not impressed? well, neither was i to be honest, but as i started to poke around i quickly realized that it's actually pretty nice, fast, and well organised, the menu window is big and is neatly arranged, on the far left you have your favorite applications, in the middle the different software categories and by hovering the mouse over any of those categories you have on the far right the applications corresponding to that category.

Menu window

AND here's this particular thing that i love on G3: when you move the cursor to the top left corner you have an overview of all the open windows :-)

Overview of all open windows

This combination of old school G2 interface on top of the actual G3 is well made, practical, productive and very nice to work with. Clement Lefebvre, lead developer of Linux Mint and his team created Cinnamon because many people, including Linux’s father Linus Torvalds don't like the new Gnome 3.x interface.

Among the new features that the now official stable Cinnamon 1.2 includes are desktop effects, desktop layouts, a new configuration tool, and applets as well as a variety of bug fixes and other improvements.

Overall, many of the changes aim to reintroduce a level of customisability that numerous desktops have lost in recent years, Lefebvre said.

Cinnamon is available as a download for the mayor Linux distributions on their website.

ACTA

You think SOPA and PIPA were bad? Get ready for ACTA, this is SOPA and PIPA on steroids, imagine a global filter that allows you to see only what it wants you to see, imagine your ISP being allowed to monitor you and keep track of every website visited, every file downloaded and every bit of information you share, send and/or receive, IMAGINE your ISP could REPORT you to the authorities because you downloaded something that MAY be illegal and the authorities WILL have the right to raid your house, check your computer and put you in prison should you have an illegally downloaded song or any bit of 'dangerous' information whatsoever, this is ACTA, please watch the video and don't just think 'it won't affect me' because it will affect us all.

 

Megaupload is down, what's next?

The FBI shut down the Megaupload platform and put it's owner Kim Schmitz and his associates in prison and they're facing prison sentences. 'Finally' some say, 'bad move' others call it.

What is exactly Megaupload? 

Megaupload Limited, better known for its closed websites including the top-15 megaupload.com, is an online Hong Kong based company established in 2005 that ran a number of online services related to file storage and viewing (source: Wikipedia, the whole article is here).

Are such services illegal? Theoretically not, such services are used by millions of users everyday to storage legal and/or personal data, backup physical hard drives and to be able to access important data whenever needed from any computer.

Practically, these services are often misused for illegal distribution of copyrighted data such as movies, music, games, etc. Once a user uploads a file to a filehoster, this file becomes an 'address' which can be called from any PC and the data can be downloaded again.

Most filehosters can not always control all the data being up/downloaded, alone Megaupload was clicked an average of 50 million times a day, about 4% of the world's Internet traffic, with such a data volume, trying to keep control of every file is like a drop of water falling over a hot stove.

How do filehosters earn their money? The basic hosting service is free, for a monthly fee users get for example faster up/download speed. Megaupload had around 150 million registered users, that alone brought the company around 175 million dollars. Alone Kim Schmitz, head of the company is said to have earnt around 42 million dollars last year!

Will Megaupload's customers be prosecuted? 

This is because of the huge amount of data probably impossible, there will be for sure enough illegal data to do so, but i don't think they could probably prosecute 150 million users, Washington said about this that they will concentrate on the people responsible for Megaupload.

The servers used to storage data in the US were shut down but Megaupload being a Hong-Kong based company, has many other servers spread around the world, which means the impact on the Net will be minimal, besides, many users who traffic with illegal data upload the same file(s) on different filehosters so if one goes down, the file is only a search away.

 

Gnome Tweak Tool

GNOME 3 or as i like to call it 'G3' is the newest release of the Gnome desktop. Many Linux users and distributions are starting to adopt G3 as their default desktop environment because of its look and feel, user-friendliness and performance. But when it comes to customizing, there aren't many options available by default in G3.  If you want to do more serious customization on your G3 desktop then you need the Gnome tweak tool.

The Gnome tweak tool is an open source tool developed to customize your G3 beyond normal settings. With this great tool you can make advanced adjustments to various G3 settings including fonts used in the user interface, user interface themes, changes in window management behavior and much more.

Interested? then let's proceed to install Gnome tweak tool in Ubuntu using G3. 

Gnome tweak tool is on the Ubuntu repositories, meaning that installing is as simple as opening software center and typing 'gnome tweak tool' on the search box, clicking install and watch the progress bar :-)

Once you're through with the install, you can start tweaking the settings of G3. Gnome tweak tool has a very simple and intuitive interface, on the left panel you have six different categories (Desktop, Fonts, Shell, Shell Extensions, Theme and Windows) that can be 'tweaked' using the corresponding options on the right panel.

Let's click on the 'Desktop' category on the left panel, on the right panel you can choose from the different tweaking options for the desktop, an image says more than a thousand words so take a look at the following screenshots.

Now click Fonts, here you can configure the Text scaling factor, Default font, Document font, Monospace font, Window title font, Hinting and Antialising.

Under Shell category, you can configure date, time, calendar and arrangements of buttons on the titlebar.

The theme category takes care of the setting for menus and buttons as well as themes for cursor, key binding, icons, Gtk+, shell and window.

The Windows category, here you can configure the settings for  various click actions on the title bar of windows and the window focus mode as well.

Happy customizing!!!!

How to install Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04

Gnome 3 is the next step in the evolution of the Gnome desktop environment and is a light desktop environment used in many popular Linux distributions. 

Here I'll show you how to install it on Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal.

Attention! If you're doing this inside Unity, you'll break your session. I don't know of a way to revert this process, I did, and I recommend you do this inside Gnome 2 as well, I'm not in any way responsible for your mistakes. You've been warned!


Ok, you've been warned, now lets get down to business, first thing is to do is open a terminal and add the Gnome repository:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

Enter your password when asked and then ENTER. Once the repo is added we update:

sudo apt-get update

Enter your password again if necessary and then ENTER, this may take some 30 seconds depending on your conecction speed, when update is done type:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Again type your password if needed and hit ENTER. You will be asked if you want to upgrade your packages, type Y (yes) and hit ENTER.

We're almost there, once the dist-upgrade is done then we come to the point of this tutorial which is install Gnome, type in terminal (or copy/paste if too lazy)

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

Type your password and hit ENTER. You'll be asked if you want to install gnome-shell, type Y and hit ENTER.

You're done! Not as colorful as 'The most incredible and really unbelievable dream has become true: You compiled e17 successfully!' (Enlightement fan here ) but GNOME 3 is now installed in your Ubuntu machine. All you have to do now is to reboot your system and choose 'Gnome shell' at the the login screen.

And this is how it looks, enjoy it!

 

Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric Ocelot' on HP nc4200

It's been a couple of years already since i posted my notebook's hardware specifications and my experience installing Ubuntu 7.10 'Gutsy', since then i have loyally upgraded to every new Ubuntu release, Ubuntu has been my distro of choice because HP's original concept was to actually market the nc4200 with Ubuntu so they made sure that all the hardware was 100% Linux compatible  (and believe me, it still is!!)

A few months ago i upgraded the ram to 2 Gb and got a 100 Gb hard drive before upgrading to 10.10 'Maverick' and just a couple of weeks ago i upgraded the same notebook to Ubuntu 11.10 'Oneiric Ocelot' which is running perfect.

One thing i don't like from the latest Ubuntu releases is the Unity interface, it feels like a huge smart phone and i just couldn't work comfortably with it, so i kept using Gnome 2 and waited (un)patiently for Gnome 3 to be released.

When i upgraded to 11.04 i read with great pleasure that Gnome 3 was released so i happily made the necessary arrangements to upgrade to this long awaited release.
Gnome 3 is great, it's interface is a bit like Unity but you find your way around much faster... at least i do.  Coming to think of it, if Gnome 3 looks and works as good or even better than Unity, why didn't Canonical stick with Gnome and saved themselves the whole work of developing Unity? 

Well, there are a lot of happy Unity users too so kudos Canonical for developing another way to customize our desktop :-)

While running on 11.04 Gnome 3 was lacking a bit of performance but after upgrading to 11.10 it's performance improved a lot and G3's interface is very pleasant and user friendly, if you still want to customize Gnome 3 beyond what configuration editor allows you'll need the Gnome Tweak Tool to do so.
To sum it all up, the Oneiric Ocelot / Gnome 3 combo is great, and my notebook is a perfect example that you don't need the latest, most expensive and fastest hardware to run the latest Linux releases efficiently, so you can keep your hard-earned cash for more important things :-)

How to re-enable wireless in Ubuntu 11.10

Yesterday while checking settings on my laptop i accidentally switched the wireless lan off -Stupid me- i thought, but as i tried to switch it back on it didn't work!

Wtf??? was my first thought, i clicked on the enable button but nothing happened, i also notice that the 'Airplane mode' button was enabled, so i switch that one off and tried the wlan again button without success.

So i put on my Google and dived into the net, within minutes i got an answer and a few minutes later i had everything working again, there were a few option how to deal with this, but i managed to fix my problem using only two commands, see graphic below:

To check if wireless is blocked, we use the 'rfkill list' command, in my case, '0: hp-wifi' is the interesting part of the output. When wireless was blocked it showed 'Soft blocked: yes' (sorry, screenshot was made after everything was fixed) in order to unblock it enter the next command 'rfkill unblock wifi'.

In my case that's all i had to do, no reboot, no nothing else, nada, there were other, more complicated methods to get around this issue but probably because of my laptop's hardware i didn't have to do anything else (lucky me!!)

How smartphone users see each other.

Why are we (still) here?

The manufacturers of the Blackberry will today be asked to explain why the Planet Earth still exists.

Still here for some reason
After the crash of its email and messaging service, experts say the smartphone may not be as vital as all the people who own one had led us to believe.

Technologist Stephen Malley said: "According to my calculations none of us should be here.

"In the event of such a prolonged absence of Blackberry messaging facilities, the Earth should have exploded by now in a hellish furnace of molten rock and body parts.

"There should be charred Blackberries spinning silently through space that will one day be picked up by aliens who will then be able to work out where it all went wrong for Earth."

He added: "I did the calculations on my Blackberry."

But Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "It's an easy mistake to make. Blackberries are owned by people who think they're incredibly important, whereas iPhones are owned by people who think iPhones are incredibly important and Android phones are owned by poor people who don't matter.

"Anyway, we worked out that the world was able to continue to exist for two key reasons. Are you ready?

"One - if you're in the office you can get emails and stuff on your computer, and two - if you're out of the office and something happens that actually matters then people can phone you. On your Blackberry."

He added: "We then did another experiment which shows that if people keep using Blackberries then the word will eventually disappear up its own rectum."