Heroine:

Here–have another:

Heroine addicts:

Heroin:

(Note that there is no goddamned “e” at the end!)

Heroin addict.

For the love of…whatever it is that you love, learn the difference! You can say them the same if you like, but they are two different words and if you ever picked up a fucking book, you’d know that. Jesus Christ, if I see that stupid mistake one more time, I’m gonna shoot up or something to forget the pain. Idiots.

Well, there went my grand intentions of getting my work done early. I couldn’t get logged into MSN this morning (maybe MS changed the goddamned protocol again to lock out non-MS clients), but thought I’d do a quick check on FB. I happened to notice that L(K) was logged into chat, so I sent a drive-by. There’s some election there today, so he was in the mood to discuss politics, and for someone so stream-of-consciousness as he, that turns into a long discussion about absolutely everything. It wasn’t long after I started that J. logged in, and we hadn’t talked for…oh, several days, so I wanted to chat with her as well. I generally don’t talk to more than one person at a time because it’s…well, it just seems a bit rude to me because I’m not giving my full attention to either one, but J. said she didn’t mind, and L. types slowly anyway. So, after two rather long coversations; one with a sociologist/philospher and another with a psychologist, I’m too brain-drained to write what I wanted to write when I logged in here to post, and on top of that, I’m nearly 2h late getting started with my work. So…so much for blogging, but that’s okay; whatever I was going to write was probably something less than profound anyway, and if I don’t GTFO, the fish will have evolved to amphibians. I’ll be profound another day…perhaps after I’ve figured out the best method to install the SVN version of aMSN. 🙂

I have no idea who you are, and I don’t care; I love you because you wrote the Facebook Purity Greasemonkey script to remove those goddamned quiz results from the FB Wall without having to hide everything from a particular user. Granted, that does mean I won’t get to see quiz results from anyone else, not even those who don’t annoy me with ten of them every fucking day, but since it’s a GM script, I can turn it off if I want to make a quick check and see whether there’s anything interesting.

I un-hid (is that even a word?) the offender from my Wall, and *poof*…42 more posts, and 85-90% of them stupid quizzes. In one small sample, two of them. One was titled, “How well do you know (some person I don’t know at all)?” Jesus wept.

Now, post-Facebook Purity GM script. Ahhhh….that’s much better! Yay for sane Facebook (okay, sane-ish)!

So, I love you, Steeev, even if you can’t spell “Steve”, I love the user on Reddit who posted a link to this script, though I don’t remember even his user name, and when I lose the page on Userscripts in my ridiculous collection of bookmarks, it’s here.

Oh, cool…it puts a little message right on the page, under the search box, with an option to show the hidden app messages on the page, and a link to Steeev’s page (which will always have the newest version, even if Userscripts doesn’t).

Regardless means “without regard to; in spite of (something).”

Irrespective means “heedless; characterised by disregard.”

Practically interchangeable, but you get to choose only one of these two words…you can’t use bits from both. I don’t care what some web site says about “non-standard use”; that is simply a polite way to say “illiterate use”, and IRREGARDLESS IS NOT A GODDAMNED WORD! EVERY TIME YOU USE IT, GOD KILLS A KITTEN AND BABY JESUS CRIES. JUST STOP-STOP-STOP!

It’s not as pretty as Time Machine, but fuck pretty–I care that it does what I want it to do, and that it doesn’t cost me a fortune to do it. Back In Time does what I want, and doesn’t cost anything at all. It’s really just a GUI frontend for rsync, but since I suck at rsync in a CLI, and didn’t like “grsync” or whatever it was called, so I’m grateful for it. Ubuntu comes with Simple Backup, but it doesn’t seem to let me have as many options I want. Back In Time does. When I upgraded to Jaunty and switched my /home to a separate partition, I backed everything up to a different partition on my second internal HDD, and that’s where I told BIT to save my stuff. When I forget where it is (or what it’s even called) and how I installed it so it’ll update with the rest of my stuff…

Add to sources:

deb http://le-web.org/repository stable main

Import the key:

wget http://le-web.org/repository/le-web.key
sudo apt-key add le-web.key

Reload repos and install:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install backintime-common backintime-gnome

There’s one for KDE, too, but I still can’t get into KDE, so…meh.  FWIW, and if I should need it in future, the project page is here.

That was the “cool”. The “argh” is that now, I have Huey Lewis and the News, “Back In Time” stuck in my goddamned head. Oh, well…slightly better than Agadou, I guess. 😛

I’ll lose this if I don’t put it here, and since the first installation command returned a complaint (error) from bzr, this is the one that worked (okay, after I’d installed bzr, since I hadn’t had a need for it since I upgraded to Jaunty). The icon is über-ugly, but I can disable its showing in the notification area, so…meh. Now, I just need to add it to my startup script and I’ll be good to go! 🙂

EarCandy is a Smart PulseAudio Volume Manager

[Linux only] EarCandy is a PulseAudio volume manager, but a smart one It will automatically mute your music when a Movie or a YouTube video starts. And will mute the video when a Skype call comes in. You’ll love that !

This is not really a program where you have millions of options to play with. It’s more a zen one: you launch it and forget it. You’ll just remember about it when it automatically kicks in and do what you were about to do out of habit, before you.

I’m embedding here a short screencast of the old version, since I don’t have any newer one available. It will give you a better idea of what I’m talking about.

(snipped embedded video)

This release is packed with new features, and finally seems very stable. Let’s go over the new features one by one:

• USB Headsets support: if you plug an usb headset, the audio streams will be automatically transferred to the headsets.
• Updates special volume keys to point to the usb headset when it’s plugged in: no more need to mess with the volume applet, the special multimedia keys of your keyboard will work on your audio boxes or usb headset depending if the latter is plugged in or not.
• Volume slider: the tray icon now behaves much more like the standard Gnome volume applet, and displays a volume slider when clicked.
• Deactivable tray icon: …but if you don’t like to have yet another tray icon, you can hide it easily.
• Lock volumes: earcandy automatically determines which audio stream you want to listen. But if you happen to be willing to freeze the current situation, you can do so with the pause button that appears above the slider when you click the tray icon.
• Refactored interface: nicer and more sober.
• Adjustable volume fade speed: I like it fast btw. With fries.

Two more new features:

Smart volume detection

This is pretty cool. The last releases had some problem with YouTube. When Youtube video is paused or finishes, the audio stream is not released by Firefox. That means that viewing a youtube video meant stopping the music forever.

Earcandy now features a nice volume detection. That means that, if you stop a video, the music resumes playing automatically. This is nifty, you really have to try how seamless it makes it to understand what I mean.

Automatic configuration

One issue with EarCandy was the fact you had to configure your application to tell EarCandy which application was a Video player, which one was an Audio player, and so on. EarCandy now sniffs the .desktop files of the open applications, and understands on its own who does what (and you can even override the rules you don’t like)

Sold ?

Since it seems pretty stable right now, I encourage everybody to try it. Open a terminal and type the following:

bzr branch lp:~killerkiwi2005/eyecandy/0.4 earcandy
cd earcandy
./ear_candy

ps: if you already played with some earlier version of earcandy, remove altogether its settings folder (~/.config/Ear Candy) before running it.

(Original blog post here, but if it “disappears”, as things sometimes do on teh intar-tubes, I still have what I need to know!)

This was in my “Highlights” (or whatever the thingie on the right is called). I fucking hate-hate-hate this. There simply aren’t words for the utter contempt I feel every time someone makes a stupid grade-school level mistake like this. This woman is an excellent artist, has a TV show (though I’ve never actually watched it), and has her own line of makeup…and is obviously illiterate. FFS.

Oh my gawd–here comes an “s”. Quick! Get me an apostrophe!

I went to get a hanger from the place on the closet where empty shirt hangers *belong*, which is to the left of the most recently worn ironed shirts, (which are on the left, since P is right-handed and will gravitate right when be chooses clothes, so this keeps him from grabbing the same two or three shirts every week). I wondered why one hanger was sticking out, so I pulled. A pair of jeans, crumpled sideways (I’d *never* fold jeans with a crease) on a shirt hanger (hangers for pants are different), stuffed in behind his shirts. Why? I understand the crumpled–he’d think that was fine folding and hanging–but why on the wrong kind of hanger when he’d have taken them off the right kind, and why way behind his shirts on the left instead of with the rest of his pants on the right? Having a husband (well, mine) is a lot like having little kids…lots of WTF moments. Hmm…I wonder whether he wasn’t trying to sort of hide these jeans because they “shrunk”? I’ll put them in the right place with the rest, on a proper hanger, and see what he does next time. Heh.

I like Facebook. Not, “I can’t live without checking my Facebook every day,” but I don’t dislike it as much as I thought I would…except for one thing. Whatever genius designed it offers three options for those friends who have nothing to fucking do all day but take stupid quizzes which then automatically post on my Wall with enormous graphics and too-long explanations of the results (and yes, I have one such FB friend). I can do one of: leave it as-is and have three-fucking-quarters of my Wall littered with the results of whatever lame “Which (insert fantasy character) are you?” or “What (insert personality trait) are you?” quizzes she took that day; or, I can disallow apps from showing quiz results on my Wall…app-by-app; or, I can hide her from my wall entirely, which includes anything she actually writes herself. Option one is annoying; one or two quizzes, sure, but Jesus Christ, it’s like she has absolutely nothing better to do than sit there and take fucking FB quizzes all day. Option two is a pain in the arse, and not useful to me because it’s not one quiz and lots of people, it’s one person and lots of different quizzes. Option three will be the one I choose if I decide I’m sufficiently annoyed. She was away last week, and I gotta say, it was bliss; all I got from her on my Wall were single-sentence status updates, which was fine. FB needs to add an option for us to block all quiz results, or to block quiz results only from certain friends. I do want to see which quizzes some people have taken because some of them are quite fun, and most people don’t go overboard with them, but she’s been back for not even two full days, and already I have eight of her quiz results displayed on my goddamned wall. I’m fast approaching, “I like you, but whatever you have to say is less important to me than blocking your annoying fucking quiz results, so you’re going to be hidden entirely” territory. Seems kind of mean, but so is inconsiderately spamming one’s friends with the Facebook equivalent of, “I’m bored, so here’s a bunch of junk you don’t care about to force you to scroll all the way down the page to actually read anything of any interest to you.” I guess that for now, I could just hide her entirely and hope she doesn’t post, “I’m moving to Bora Bora,” or “I’m dying,” or anything actually important. Argh. Who designed the UI of that site, anyway? What a fucking nightmare, just trying to find the option to link my Flickr and Facebook (after I’d been told where it was); an option I would not even have known existed if M. hadn’t found it first and uploaded photos to her Flickr so I could see it on my Wall.

“What is your purpose in life?” Hm. Apparently, to annoy me with this shit until I feel like blocking someone I’ve known since I was fourteen years old, and someone who used to be a reasonably close friend. Can’t be a very accurate quiz if she is not possessed of sufficient perception to figure out how many people get pissed off at those who spam their friends’ Walls with this feel-good-about-myself glurge.

Hmmm….found this on some blog, but don’t want to lose it. If it’s un-doable, then…. 😀

The latest on how to un-hide friends on Facebook

At some point in time last year, I wanted to join a Flickr group which aims to catalogue as many of the world’s species as possible. I may not have great photos, but I do have photos of critters that don’t interest just anyone, and if I could add something useful to the Encyclopædia of Life…well, good. The problem is that the group requires submissions to have taxonomic machine tags (which makes perfect sense–more effective searching), and there was just nooooo way I was going through all 1400-and-whatever photos one-by-one to add machine tags to suitable images. I found a link to an automatic tag generator in the forums, emailed the link to the page on iNaturalist myself (so it didn’t get lost in my bookmarks), and…promptly forgot about it all winter. This morning, I was looking for something else and ran across the email, so I decided to give it a shot. I tried a few dragonflies, damselflies and true bugs by common name, and came up with one result–Acrosternum hilare. I tried by common name and binomial, but got nothing for any of the dragons or damsels except Widow Skimmer. Woo-hoo. The rest had no results at all, and therefore couldn’t generate any tags. WTF kind of “naturalist” site can’t manage to have a record for some of the most common insects in the eastern region of the third-largest (and remarkably diverse) land mass in the world? It came up with my box turtle, and mayapple (two non-insects that I picked at random), so it’s not that it’s focused upon European species or something; apparently, it just doesn’t have much for insects…one of the largest (if not the largest) groups of living creatures on the planet. Go figure. Anyway, I guess I’m not going to be contributing to the EOL unless I can find another machine tag generator because there’s just no goddamned way I’m sitting there and typing it all out. By the time I finished, the odonate powers-that-be would probably have reclassified half of my dragons and damsels.