Encephalosponge » Soaking Up Life

I was inspired by the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell to show off my new desktop look.
In traditional Lifehacker style, I’ll mention the pictured applications. The operating system is obviously Ubuntu. Avant Window Navigator is my dock. The IM application is Pidgin, which includes the Facebook Chat and MusicTracker (displays currently playing [...]

Vendors Rally While Windows Sleeps by Mike Elgan (PCWorld) I must say I have to agree with this article. Windows appears to be complacent and vendors are seeing an opportunity to create custom solutions for people by bypassing Windows when it’s not needed.

Surprise, Surprise. Vista gets seriously pwned at Blackhat 2008 [via Gizmodo]. The exploit is actually based in a bunch of Java and .NET exploit that takes advantage of Internet Explorer’s ActiveX controls. Giz claims that this has potential to infect many other systems (theoretically because they’re not based on platform specific technologies). [...]

Some people on an airplane videotaped a solar eclipse (via Gizmodo). Sweet!

I remembered reading an article on ifacethoughts a few months ago about keyboard shortcuts in web browsers. One or two of them stuck, and I keep wishing that more had. I really like using scroll click (press down on the scroll button of your mouse to click) to open links in a new [...]

Until recently, I didn’t toy much with the default “look” of Ubuntu. I changed my wallpaper and that was about it. But one of the great things about Linux is how customizable it is. I hadn’t toyed around much with Screenlets or Avant Window Navigator, despite having both of them installed. [...]

I know I’m a bit late on this bandwagon. I don’t normally have too many Firefox extensions installed, but I’ve been playing around with a few lately. I’ve discovered AdBlock Plus. If you’re a Firefox user and you don’t use this extension, you should. If you’re not a Firefox user, you [...]

I’ve been reading the Free Software Magazine on-and-off for a few weeks now, whenever something looks particularly interesting. Some stuff is not incredibly impressive, but this article “Creating web pages, the right way” by Mitch Meyran offered a lot of incredibly insightful information as to some of the true considerations for designing a page. [...]

I found this old post on Dive Into Mark about why he chose WordPress to run his blog. I started reading his blog regularly a few weeks ago, and I really like it. That post gives a concrete example of why the GPL rocks: because it gives you, the user, all the rights.

So check this out. There’s a new(ish) plug-in for The GIMP that allows you to do some pretty awesome stuff when resizing photos. You can ignore the guy talking if you want and just watch. The GIMP is kind of like Adobe Photoshop, if you’re not familiar with GNU-linux.