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 song in my away message) plugins. I’m using 3 Screenlets: Now Playing (displays currently playing track and album art), Sysmonitor (displays current system information) and Trash. Finally, it shows one of my new favorite productivity applications: Gnome Do. “Do” is a launcher that can be extended by a number of plugins. For example, you type Super(Win)+Space to launch Do and then start typing what you want to do. Start typing an artist’s name, like “beat”, and then pressing “enter” will open all my Beatles songs in Rhythmbox. Typing the first few letters of a friend’s screen name and then “enter” will open a chat with them in Pidgin. Those types of things are useful. Oh, and I got my wallpaper from iunewind.com.

My August 08 Desktop featuring Avant, Pidgin, Now Playing Screenlet, Sysmonitor Screenlet, and Gnome-Do

The full list of diseases represented: adenosine deaminase deficiency-related severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID), Shwachman-Bodian-Diamond syndrome (SBDS), Gaucher disease (GD) type III, Duchenne (DMD) and Becker muscular dystrophy (BMD), Parkinson disease (PD), Huntington disease (HD), juvenile-onset, type 1 diabetes mellitus (JDM), Down syndrome (DS)/trisomy 21, and the carrier state of Lesch-Nyhan syndrome.

Sound like a list of diseases we studied in class, anyone?

“No one cares about freedoms for the same reason that no one cares about oxygen. As long as they’re there, why bother? Freedom zero is so abstract to most people that no one even thinks about it, let alone care. It’s like the string theory. It’s only when things are taken away that there’s reason to get upset.” -Jesper

For those who are unfamiliar, Freedom 0 is one of four freedoms listed in the Free Software Definition:

“The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.”

NBC Olympics only allows 4 browsers

Sorry to say NBC, but there are a lot of web browsers out there that are capable of displaying your videos. No one’s asking you to go out of your way to “support” them all, just don’t preemptively block them. Plus, is anyone else concerned that they’ll start doing this to Hulu and other network’s sites? Well I am, and I’m not one bit happy about it!

If you’re wondering what all that stuff is, you can check out one of Harvard’s versions, which contain a play-by-play. I must admit that (having no real idea of what I was looking at) I got a little bit lost in the video, so Harvard’s version definitely helped clear up a few things. But Sadie and I agree that it’s pretty cool that we can watch a video like that and actually mostly understand it. After spending years studying something like bio, you forget how much you know about it that the average Joe has never even considered.

Can you be a more productive at browsing the web by learning a quick trick or two on the keyboard? I really feel like I have. And I’m about to get even more efficient. In fact, I’ve found myself paying attention more to keyboard shortcuts in other programs I use. The GIMP (an awesome, free Photoshop-like image editor) offers a lot useful keyboard shortcuts that I quickly picked up on. Hopefully as time goes on, I pick up on more and more ways to be more efficient on my computer.