If you’re going to create even a very cute custom icon set for an application that the vast majority use on Linux, then for the love of whatever you consider holy, don’t make the goddamned thing on Windows and just chuck it up on a server without an explanation because Windows doesn’t specify folder and file access permissions, so Linux restricts them to the owner (in this case, root) by default, and it might take a frustrated and annoyed Linux user a good half hour to finally read in one of your inane, “Gosh, I dunno why it doesn’t work…have you tried reinstalling? Wish I could help more with this technical stuff!” comments that you hadn’t, in fact, created it in the OS under which it would most likely be used. Dumbass. If root owns it and nobody else is given even read access, then of course the goddamned things aren’t going to show up for a regular user, and no one is idiotic enough to run a fucking IM client as the computer administrator except for…a Windows user.

Anyway, my icons are cute now. 😀

After updating to Karmic, I hadn’t got around to doing things like making my storage partitions mount on boot, or setting up GIMP so I can use the Wacom stylus with pressure sensitivity, but don’t have to use the crappy mouse (reserving the option to use said crappy mouse if I so choose). Nothing serious, just stuff I hadn’t got around to doing. After buying a new monitor last night–YAAAAYYY for dual displays again–and not going anywhere today because P. was busy with paperwork, I decided that since I had to fuck around a little with xorg.conf (couldn’t get changes to save after enabling TwinView and telling it to use the new HP as the default display), I might as well sort out the rest of the little things I’d been meaning to do, and also install Dropbox, since M.’s Verizon mail seems permanently broken, and I guess he never did set up a Gmail account. Anyway, I basically rule. I won the battle with xorg.conf, so now I have all of my stuff appearing on the appropriate screen when I log in, I edited fstab so that my old FAT32 partition (I really need to copy the files elsewhere and format that to NTFS) will mount on boot with write access, and also will display the special characters in file names. I had a few songs with Cyrillic characters and the names were so badly mangled (mounting it from Nautilus, which apparently used UTF-8) that I didn’t even know what they were supposed to be. Karmic had support for my tablet, and I could use both the stylus and mouse, but I didn’t have pressure sensitivity. I couldn’t remember whether I needed wacom-tools for that or not, but installed it anyway, just in case, and then fired up GIMP. It’s now actually working better than it does in Windows because I can use any of the stylus, the Wacom mouse or my Logitech mouse for any of the tools, whereas in Photoshop, I can’t use the mouse for tools like the brush and the eraser; I have to switch to the stylus for that. I just need for GIMP to come out with a few more tools and I’ll dispense with Photoshop entirely. I use GIMP now for everything except complicated composites; I’m still not good enough with it for that, but it’ll be easier now that I’ve got my stylus working with pressure sensitivity. Even better, I can stick the Tools and Layers windows of GIMP over on the second screen and have the working window maximised on the main screen. Big yay…I love the hell out of GIMP’s SDI when I have dual screens because it’s soooo much more convenient, but I don’t like it much with only one screen because I’m constantly flipping through the goddamned windows, trying to find the one I want.

If I forget one more time…

When I upgrade one computer and not the other, or the phone, and get a denied connection with SSH, it’s because I forgot (again) to delete the known_hosts in ~/.ssh.

So I can find this: hosts SSH sftp connection denied connect upgrade known_hosts

I never got the hang of Categories, and it pissed me off because setting it up was an unstable, crash-y process, but in spite of its stupid name (Pogo Plank? Seriously?), I really like this replacement for Springboard (hence…Pogo Plank). It needs more themes, but it’s a first release, so I think they’ll come in time. I saw some complaints in the reviews, but Spotlight just annoys me anyway, and double-tap has always been the camera, so meh. I haven’t found it unstable yet, and I like that I have the option to turn it off if I want, and everything is exactly as it was, until I turn it back on again. Anyway, it’s pretty cool for a first release, and I don’t regret the two bucks (plus an extra quarter because I paid with PayPal).

Einstein, Newton and Pascal decide to play hide and seek. Einstein is it, closes his eyes, counts to ten, then opens them. Pascal is nowhere to be seen. Newton is sitting right in front of Einstein, with a piece of chalk in his hand. He’s sitting in a box drawn on the ground, a metre to a side. Einstein says “Newton, you’re terrible at this–I’ve found you!” Newton says “No no, Einy. You’ve found one Newton per square metre. You’ve found Pascal!”

I no longer have to guess how many characters are in my SMS messages! I found SMS Helper (think that’s what it’s called) in Cydia yesterday, and it counts the characters as I type, so I can tell whether something I’m sending is going to count as one message, or more. Not such a big deal with domestic messages, though I’m going to call and find out how enabling MMS dropped my limit from 1500 to 1250 but the charge is still the same, but my international limit is still only 100 (and the rep seemed baffled when I asked whether I could add another 100), and I have in the past gone over. I’m already getting arse-raped for SMS because I live in North America (Canadian providers are as bad as US), and I don’t want to give those fuckers any more than I must. I can’t use a counter because I clear old conversations (messaging app loads slower if I don’t), and it loses track once messages get deleted. The best I can do is use the AT&T MyWireless app, which doesn’t keep a real-time count, so I’m always guessing. Now, I can guess more accurately because I know whether I’m sending one message, or two, or more. I’ve sent some epic SMS to M. and to B. that I’m sure had to count as four or five. According to M., “You just have a lot to say.” Heh. Anyway, now I have a character-counter that should have been built into the messaging app in the first place, and unlike TextPlus (which I still like), it will let me go over the limit; it just turns the numbers red. So yay for more accurate guessing! 🙂

Why is there no way to be selective in the email updates received from Facebook? When I’ve commented on someone’s status or photo or whatever, I may want to see others’ comments that follow mine, or I may not. If it’s someone with cool friends who say interesting or funny stuff, then yes, email me. If it’s someone who posts often and has lame friends who trot out stupid platitudes (especially religious platitudes and “prayers”) and obviously fake sympathy to complaints, then just STFU and spare me. I don’t even want to see that shit, let alone get email notifications. Chances are good that I commented only in an attempt to be nice or to cheer that person up a bit, not because I’m particularly interested. In typical “designed by a troop of drunken spider monkeys as a joke” FB fashion, of course my options are “updates on” or “updates off” globally, with no way to set per-user, or even set “updates off” as default and manually override for a select few. Don’t get me started on the official iPhone app, which doesn’t even allow commenting in proper thread style, or *liking* FFS, which I think FB actually invented. Argh.

Someone I like doesn’t have to know me for a very long time before he or she is likely to get called by some little term of endearment. It’s a habit of mine and I don’t think too much about it, really. Gender doesn’t matter, age doesn’t matter much, though I’m unlikely to call a woman my own age or an 85-year-old man “luv”. Anyone else, though, is probably fair game, assuming it’s someone I actually like. Hell, even species doesn’t matter; I’m as likely to say, “Hold still now, darlin’, and give me a big flutter-by smile!” to a butterfly as I am to say it to a human (sans flutter-by bit, of course). One of the words I use quite often is a short form of “honey”; it works when I haven’t heard what Josh said or can’t understand what Elizabeth said (“What, hon?”), and when refusing an offer (“Oh, no thanks, hon”), and when I’m answering a question in the affirmative (“Sure, I’m here, hon–come on over!”) Everyone who knows me is used to it and not bothered by it; it’s just a speech mannerism I use for people I like.

Notice in my examples that I’ve spelt the word, “hon”. That’s because it’s the shortened form of “honey”. H…o…n…e…y. Like the stuff bees make, but we use the word as a term of endearment for people because they’re “just as sweet as honey!” (well, figuratively). Not difficult to spell at all, and yet some people can’t manage to get even the “h, o, n” bit correct.

This is a Hun. Specifically, it’s Attila; arguably the most famous Hun of all. Note that the word “Hun” is always capitalised, and that is because it’s a proper name for a group of nomadic people who migrated into Europe in the 4th century. Led by our good friend Attila down there (followed by some seriously badass mounted warriors), they established an empire.

Look…our man Attila with lots of other Huns. I’m told their speciality was archery; specifically mounted archery. Do not fuck with the Huns!

Unless she is a time traveller from the 4th century, and unless she is carrying a bow and arrow, probably on horseback, and ready to fight for Attila’s cause, YOUR FAVOURITE SISTER IS UNDER ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING CIRCUMSTANCES A HUN. Even if you don’t use a capital, she is nonetheless not a “hun” because THE ONLY WAY THAT WORD EVEN EXISTS IS AS A PROPER NAME FOR THE PEOPLE. You may think of your sister as “honey”, and you may shorten it to “hon”, but for the love of Attila, or whatever you revere, STOP calling her “hun” and giving me those horrifying mental images of how a female Hun might have looked. Hm…were there any female Huns? I guess there probably were…where else would they get little Huns to grow into warrior Huns?

Jesus Christ, people annoy me sometimes.

Windows file systems note: “Barcelona – Please don’t Go” is not the same thing as “Barcelona – Please Don’t Go”. When I make a typo in a file name, then copy it to a storage partition that has to be Windows-accessible (i.e. accessible by an OS too useless to recognise anything but its own company’s filesystems), and realise I forgot to capitalise a letter, or accidentally have double caps at the beginning of the word, I want to rename it without having to move it back to an OS smart enough to recognise case-sensitivity so I can rename it, and then copy it back to the stupid OS’s partition. That’s a minute versus the three seconds it would take to just change the goddamned letter.

Since the 3.0 update, SMS themes (all but one, I think) don’t work anymore. I had always alternated between two of them; Hello Kitty when I was in a pink mood, and Bird SMS when I was in a more red-and-blue kind of mood. If anyone’s going to update themes to work with 3.0, they’ve not done so yet, and I’d been suffering with the default (seriously, Apple…light grey and chartreuse? Ew-ew-ew). I don’t like full themes that change my icons because I don’t like icon labels on anything–neither Springboard nor Dock–so when the icon is changed, I don’t know what the fuck it is anymore, and besides, no theme has custom icons for all of the apps I use, so I end up with a mix of co-ordinated ones, plus some extras, which looks horrible. There’s also the fact that most themes have some bit that I think is ugly, and I can’t be arsed to poke around to change it. Anyway, I’ve got user wallpaper and user lock background, so I don’t need or want a full theme. I do, however, use a system theme called Metal Pink (or maybe Pink Metal?) that I really like; it’s…brushed metal and bright pink, just like it sounds. I also wanted my SMS to at least have bubbles that were a better colour combination than “blech”. I finally got sick enough of the default colours to go find out how to make at least the bubbles work, if not the background (which won’t work because it can’t resize when you flip SMS to landscape). It’s simple enough to do, but when I forget the path and what I’m supposed to call it…

/private/var/stash/Themes.2J3vEu/(name of theme)/Bundles, then rename “com.apple.MobileSMS” to “com.apple.chatkit”. That’s it. You won’t get the background of the SMS theme in question, but you will get the bubbles, which, in my case, are pretty pink (today…I did Bird, too, in case I change my mind). Not the same shade of pink as my system theme, but it’ll do for now, and if I decide at some point that I need to change the shade of pink, then all I have to do is edit the PNGs. I’m not holding my breath, though, since they’re not ugly anymore, and I am incredibly lazy. 😀

Portrait pink:

Landscape pink!

Oh yeah, and when I forget the path to change the lock screen slider and power down text (and the others, though I didn’t), it’s:

/private/var/stash/Themes.2J3vEu/Slide Me Bitch.theme/Folders/SpringBoard.app/en.lproj

I’d love to know how I managed to change it to that lame “Unlock ME!!!” yesterday, and the power down to something that began with, “You don’t want to…” and got cut off, especially when all I did was plug the USB cable into my desktop (for once), but anyway, I found the file to edit so I could fix it, and for now, at least, it’s back to, “Slide me bitch”, and the power off just says, “NOOO!!!” I might change it to something else if the mood strikes me, but for now, Slide me bitch works just fine, even if it does mean I often get Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bitch” stuck in my head (not a bad thing–reminds me of something cool).