Where have I been? o-O
Its been nearly a year since the last post on this site, so, I might as well do one now, right? I mean considering the fact I paid to have the domains renewed for another year, and its already been half a year since I've renewed one of them, its almost as if I've wasted half a year. 
So a lot, and I mean, A LOT has happened in the past year. I've gotten a job, lost a good bit of weight thanks to the job, got hooked onto a game called Minecraft, finally got around to getting my drivers permit at the age of 19, gotten hooked onto mechanical keyboards, and a bunch of computer upgrades! Of course the computer upgrades are always fun. 
So I guess to start off, I got a job at UPS over peak season, starting out on the Ramp as thats where they needed people during peak. That was fine up until they hired me on after peak, at which point they would have required me to have my license, which, at the time, I did not have, so they instead move me into the hub in Small Sort. BUt, having that job during peak had allowed me to do a a few upgrades to my PC. I had upgraded to a Phenom II x4 925, an ATI Radeon HD5750, and also got a new 520W Seasonic Power Supply.
I might as well go into some of the other upgrades I've gotten throughout the past year as well. I've finally gone to 8GB of Kingston RAM. Was going to go for 8GB of Patriot, but, I couldn't find a single matching kit to what I had, so I said hell with it and sold the 4GB kit I had, and bought an 8GB kit of Kingston. I also got myself a 1TB Hitachi hard drive to go along with the 500GB WD Caviar Black that is in my system, because I felt like I needed to get more storage. I replaced the optical drive due to that was giving me issues, had to replace both my 120mm case fans, and I am now buying a new case in the upcoming week so I could throw a larger CPU cooler into my system.
Now onto the subject of Mechanical keyboards. After having played with a mechanical keyboard somewhere, I really enjoyed the feeling of typing on one so I decided to start looking for an IBM Model M. First off I ordered a Model M off of eBay, with the seller neglecting to tell in the description that it was the rubber dome version of it, but that was still a strong keyboard.Then in March I went to a Hamfest in Southern Kentucky with one of my friends, and out of the corner of my eye at one of the booths I had seen two IBM Model Ms. They were the Silver Square logo Model M's, with no indicator LEDs, both manufactured in early 1986. I have been using them since I have gotten them and they are amazing to type on. Since then I have also acquired a Dell AT101W, which uses Black Alp Sliders, which aren't as tactile, but nice as a backup keyboard.
I guess thats enough rambling on for now, isn't it? I'll probably be posting more, especially now that I got around to updating WordPress. OH! I also do plan on getting a new computer case at some point soon, so expect to see pictures of a new case up soon, PLUS a review of it. Probably sometime not this week, but next week as I can't order one till Friday. Thanks for reading, if anybody even bothers to check anymore.
- Tyler J. Brown (Condoulo)
The Flaming Experience With KDE 4.5
I have time and time again heard that KDE 4.5 sucks badly and KDE only got worse. Well.. i have no freaking clue why people are saying that. In my own experience, i have not had any problems with KDE yet. I may not.. KDE 4.5 runs like a dream for me. It uses less RAM than KDE 4.4, it has faster system performance, it is extremely stable, and everything is still just as easy to use! I dont know why many people are having problems with KDE 4.5, but it may just be my own experience. I have replaced my xfce desktop with KDE on Arch Linux. If you agree with me that KDE 4.5 works quite well, or disagree with that, feel free to comment back! Preferably if you have used KDE long term though...
Thanks- FlamingLinux
What i think Canonical needs to fix in Ubuntu
Canonical has for a long time since October 2004, been working on their Debian based linux operating system, Ubuntu. Well, Ubuntu is the most popular of the linux distributions, but i think it has one big problem. I believe it is the way Canonical is managing the Ubuntu release cycle. When 10.04 Lucid Lynx was released, it nearly had a major GRUB bug in the default install. To me, that is unacceptable for a LTS release. The way i see it, a lot of adjustments should be made. For the October releases (x.10), they should add new features that they want to add to Ubuntu, and in the April releases (x.04), they should make those the bug fix releases since it is in line with the LTS releases every two years. Also, i believe they should work on the LTS releases at least a year ahead of the release. This type of schedule would give Canonical more time to develop the LTS releases and to build on the features they want to implement in the LTS releases.
Also, as an addition, I think they should put in the multimedia codecs and flash and have the LTS releases as paid editions for Ubuntu to help support development, pay for the legal rights to distribute the codecs, and earn a little profit from it. Then, once Ubuntu becomes really stable, I might have faith in it going mainstream again.
Now using XFCE
With all the speculation and consideration that I might be switching to KDE 4.5 next month - and I just end up switching to XFCE instead? Yes, that is true.
But wait a minute... that looks a little like how I had GNOME configured. Thats one of the things I love about XFCE, its lighter weight, however, it packs a huge punch. It uses the GTK Themes that you may have installed in your GNOME configurations, and although you may not see it in the screenshot, I'm using the metacity Window borders by using Compiz Fusion. another thing I would like to mention about XFCE that I like, is they actually pay attention to those who use dual monitors, and have options in simple things like Panels or the wallpaper configuration to either have something on monitor 1, or 2. In XFCE I can set a different wallpaper per monitor, without having to create an image in GIMP. I absolutely love it.
However, I am running into a few small issues here and there. Adobe Air apps rely on KDE or GNOME's Keyring applications, which don't automatically run in XFCE, so I had to set that up to be able to run Tweetdeck in XFCE. Another thing I'm getting used to is the different applets in XFCE panel, especially when I have gotten used to the ones I have used in GNOME-Panel. For example, the default clock applet in XFCE, when you click on it you don't get a calendar where in GNOME/KDE you do. However, there is a way you can put GNOME applets on the XFCE panel, so I might do that for a FEW applets.
So overall, I'm going to try using XFCE for a week or so and see how it goes, and see if I go back to using GNOME or not. Today's question for you all to answer in the comments is: Which desktop environment do you use, and why?
Anyway, thanks for reading Today's post, sorry for not having one Monday or Wednesday, share this post with anyone that might be interested, subscribe to this blog with your favorite RSS client, check back Monday for a new post and have a great Weekend! 
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Fun w/ Synaptic and KDE 4.5
Today's post is going to be me more or less venting a little bit about Synaptic and the Kubuntu PPA. So earlier this week I read about the KDE 4.5 Release Candidate and I decided to give it a little spin. I added the Kubuntu Beta PPA repositories and installed the KDEBase packages, etc. etc.
I guess I should first talk about my experience with KDE 4.5. From the probably 4-5 hours of me using it I can definitely see that this is going to be a release focused heavily on fixing bugs and stability. I noticed a few changes here and there to features, but I haven't really seen any new SIGNIFICANT features in KDE 4.5 RC. I would also like to say that the problems I had previously w/ Audio in KDE 4.x, where if you use a GTK app in KDE it would try to take control of the audio and not let any KDE apps use the Audio, is actually fixed, and I can now actually have the really annoying result of listening to a Youtube video in Chrome and Amarok at the same time, or just simply be able to hear an IM notice from Pidgin or Emesene while listening to music in Amarok. I did noticed a few bugs here and there, since it is a release Candidate, however, the issues I have previously with it have been fixed, and once its finally released next month I will heavily consider going from GNOME over to KDE!
Soo... if you managed to get anything from that mess of a paragraph, you can probably guess that I am still using GNOME for now. So, earlier Today I decided to try and install KVIRC, and this is where the troubles began. The .deb package was looking for older versions of the KDE packages and not the version that indicated it was the Release Candidate, so I just decided "hell with it" and started to remove the KDE packages anyway since I don't plan on using it until the final release of 4.5 anyway. Well, first I removed the repository, and I had to keep going from Dependency to Dependency until I found the one package that was still using the version from the repository. Needless to say, I finally managed to get it removed, but to remove that package it did ask me of one bizarre thing, that I had to remove fglrx. In the end I was able to reinstall my ATI drivers, but that was a bit weird (I haven't rebooted yet, so I hope nothing screws up). In the end I was actually able to install KVIRC, but that did take up about half an hour of my time trying to fix it and find out which packages I needed to remove/downgrade.
In the past 4 years of me having used Ubuntu (off and on of course), this is the first time where removing a repository and downgrading/removing packages from it has really given me any issues like this. But I guess it happens to most people at one point or another.
Oh, and while typing this I just thought of another thing I might do is ask a question at the end of each post in relation to what the topic was, so for example Today's question is:
So, have you had an issue w/ any repositories like that? And have you been able to fix them, find the root of the problem, or did you just say hell with it and reinstall Ubuntu?
Please leave a comment answering the question, or just what you think of the post in general. Also, if you like what I write, please subscribe to me using your favorite RSS reader. Have a great Weekend and Check back for a New Post Monday!
- Tyler J. Brown (Condoulo)
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