http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak Paul Swanson's Technobabble Mon, 25 May 2009 14:27:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en ... or, how I spent the last 6 months trying to get a brand new laptop to suspend / resume correctly ... and am still trying. In a previous post I talked about my initial experiences in choosing an operating system for my laptop; the saga is far from over. I'm ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/05/my-laptop-lament/ I've been running these blogs since 2007 without any real idea of the kind of traffic they're generating on account of WordPress's fetish for rewriting URL's; that and a personal sense of apathy. But, a quick google tonight revealed a helpful tip from a fellow Dreamhost user on how to ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/03/stats-rewrite-and-anonymity/ It's time for a rad revival and leading the charge is Rhythmbox, which today earns the venerable title of Rad. In a recent post I mentioned some of the troubles I've had with media playback in Ubuntu but after a recent comment by Peter Lamb I decided it was time ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/01/rhythmbox-is-rad/ And so does Paul. So I set about sexifying my desktop yesterday and I'm quite pleased with the results. I used a really nice Ubuntu GNOME theme called Dust, a GDM Login Window the called Woobuntu 2.0, changed the default font to FreeSans and turned on Subpixel Smoothing. And it ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/01/everybody-loves-eyecandy/ Some time ago I purchased an M-Audio Transit USB sound card, and it's actually pretty cool but it has caused me some angst. At first I was using it solely under Mac OS X 10.4, and without incident, but then I was forced to buy a regular laptop and the ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/01/i-love-my-m-audio-transit-but/ Have you ever wanted to watch your computer battle itself in a energetic game of Snap? I can't say that I have, but as part of my Master of Computing studies I'm doing Advanced Programming in Java and this has resulted in me undertaking such an experience. Before you ask ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/01/robosnap/ More or less everyone who uses the web regularly uses chat in some way, but it recently struck me how it was becoming a problem for me. I've got Gmail chat, or GTalk, which is conveniently next to my Gmail e-mail, it even offers some VOIP. Then there's Skype, which ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2009/01/the-chat-problem/ I can't believe I didn't see this video on Slashdot first! Mythbusters, Parallel Processing, The Mona Lisa and Paintballs: need I say any more! http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2008/12/mythbusters-on-parallel-processing/ It's no secret that media playback is more convoluted on Linux than it should be. The Ubuntu distribution has made a number of efforts to the reduce the pain felt in this area, most of which I applaud, although it's no where near as good as it should be. It ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2008/12/ubuntu-and-media-player-problems/ Over this last year I have been experimenting with different ways of integrating video within our blogs. At the outset I had to main options: use something like YouTube or Google Video or host it myself. I picked the later option for two reasons. Firstly, I was not happy with ... http://www.swansonblog.com/geekspeak/2008/12/wordpress-and-quicktime/