I am trying out Blogilo to post this article right now. It’s a little like Microsoft Live Writer from what the description boasts. When I loaded it I noticed that it’s a KDE based application and you have to set up KDE Wallet. No big deal, but a little annoying I guess.

I would have used BloGTK orginally however in recent times it seems some of the packages that are required to run it are no longer available under Lucid. the gtkhtml2 package I believe is what is was screaming about. Something that gPodder also uses for show notes but it seems to work fine without it.

One thing that is nifty about this application is that it can pull your style sheet from the server so when you preview it within the application it gives you an idea of what it will look like on the site. Really nifty.

I think I may use this to post things. Testing it out more. I even have added an image to see if it will upload it and post properly.

Note: This post went up fine. Just the time zone difference caused it to be late so I editted the time. And it seems the image was not formatted right. Probably something I missed. I may be using the application more in the future!

So I installed Cairo Dock. Cairo-Dock is an animated application launch bar for the desktop, comparable to the dock in Mac OS X or Rocket Dock (for Windows). I trimmed out the task tray (still want to use my panel at the moment. But I added a few of the things I use frequently and of course Second Life was added as well. I just wanted to get things off my desktop as far as the icons. Want to add this to your machine? Read on!

I know people will say go through the Software Sources section or edit /etc/apt/sources.list which is done by:

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

or

sudo kate /etc/apt/sources.list

Either way you add the following repository:

deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu jaunty cairo-dock

This repository needs an authentication key so run:

wget -q http://repository.cairo-dock.org/cairo-dock.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Then, to install Cairo-Dock, issue these two commands in the terminal:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

The Cairo Dock will be under System on the KDE Applications menu. Not sure what it is under Gnome. I ran the Non OpenGL one and it’s really smooth under KDE.

After I did the install updates came in for the linux kernel.  So I ran the updates and then had to reboot. This is the only thing I really need to reboot for as far as updates. Suck it Windows! I can’t count how many times I have woken up to my desktop with windows I had left open overnight that were closed because of the autoupdate rebooting my machine.

I installed Inkscape and Gimp. I really need to sit and play with those more. I didn’t install Pixel so I could concentrate on these programs somewhat.

So now I am looking over things I need to get re-installed since the complete KDE install. I need the following things which have slipped my mind:

• SSH
• VLC
• Skype
• Audacity
• LiVES
• Some more Games (like Majhong (sp?) and some of the KDE games)
• Import pictures and other things from External HD

So my little list is still a bit large but I think it will be quick and easy to do for tomorrow’s posting. I think I will start documenting some How-To’s but I will probably open up VooDooStevie.NET to do that. We’ll see. I have a Joomla install going on there with really nothing on it. Maybe I will make it a one stop thing with a bunch of different things on one site. Wheee!

Basically aside from some more installations, I have begun organizing things. Read on for the recap of the past couple of days!

Day 16

I installed WinFF (which is a Video convertor). WinFF is a cross platform batch GUI for FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once.

I removed Warzone 2100, mandvd, and kraft.

Warzone, albeit a great looking game it would not play right on my machine for some reason. I was getting black screen for the main look (the troops and terrain) so it’s not worth the hassle in trying to figure it out right now.

I installed ManDVD because there is an updated replacement for it that seems a little more intuitive called… 2ManDVD. I launched it to look at it and it’s much better visually than the previous program. I will play with this more later.

I also installed  LiVES (Linux Video Editting System). To quote it’s website:

LiVES mixes realtime video performance and non-linear editing in one professional quality application. It will let you start editing and making video right away, without having to worry about formats, frame sizes, or framerates. It is a very flexible tool which is used by both professional VJ’s and video editors – mix and switch clips from the keyboard, use dozens of realtime effects, trim and edit your clips in the clip editor, and bring them together using the multitrack timeline. You can even record your performance in real time, and then edit it further or render it straight away.

For the more technically minded, the application is frame and sample accurate, and it can be controlled remotely or scripted for use as a video server. And it supports all of the latest free standards.

I removed kraft because it’s geared more for KDE and I am using Gnome as my default GUI. Maybe someday I will through in KDE, but Gnome to me seems more stable. I dunno maybe because I am used to Gnome on many levels. But who knows maybe after this experiment I will load Kubuntu which is the KDE fork of Ubuntu

I also removed mixero from the system. It’s a great new AIR application for twitter, but it is REALLY a resource hog. Tweetdeck isn’t that heavy so I went back to using it as my primary again.

Over the years I have amassed many MP3′s so I thought it was time to sort them out a bit. I moved all the Audio Books I have into a separate area. I am trying to focus on the music I possess. So I copied those beginning with a symbol (i.e. !!!) to those beginning with the letter K to my Music folder on the laptop and opened up SongBird to edit the tags. Hmmm. I got a message regarding the files were unable to modify so I hopped into the terminal screen and changed the permissions on the files to Read and Write to all (777) and tried importing the files then editted them again. Perfect. They were sorted perfectly. So I moved them back onto the External hard drive.

After I moved the files that have already been sorted I moved the next batch of files over. This time The letter K to the letter Q

Day 17

Still working on sorting.  There was a little bit of mistaken ID Tags and worst of all I have some that were tossed into the Unknown area for the artists. I got most done before I had to hit the sack. But the unknown one’s I will work on tomorrow.

The nice thing is I am finding duplicates of music for some reason. I don’t know if it’s from the renaming structure or what, but there seems to be a few doubles here and there. But all in all They’re easy to remove from the directory. I think so far I have had at least 250 doubles from !!! to artists with Q in the name. Not too shabby seeing there was 15,000 tracks so far sorted.

So far this experience has been really good. I feel my music collection is really sorted better than under iTunes allowed me. I still have some things I need to sort that are not really music related per se. But there is also some WAV files I need to convert to MP3 for sorting.

I have a huge collection of Sound Effects and Movie Quotes I have to sort. Some I had in the music collection originally but I think through this I can sort and move them away from that.

So basically Linux is making me feel more organized. Let’s see if I can get more things set right from the years of digital clutter.

When Transmission opened I chose where to save the download and voila torrent downloading.  Simple.

While waiting for the torrent to do it’s thing I moved some files from my external hard drive to my home folder to sort out things that I have floating around. Some music I put into the Music folder and when I launched Songbird it sorted it for me. YAY!

I really need to reorganize the HUGE collection of music I have on the large External and  catalog them all as well. I think I will look for a program that can help me with that soon.

Poking around the Add/Remove Programs application I poked around for some more programs I wanted to check out. I tried Ardour which is a audio editor that has been

Installed Kraft which is a small business program for creating invoices and tracking inventory.

I also install Internet DJ Console which for some reason isn’t running. Hmmm.. Looking into that later.

I also installed a game called Open City which seems to sound like another SimCity clone. I will check this out because LinCity-NG seems totally different than expected.

I want to get my Razr set up to get pictures and sounds off it so I installed gMobileMedia to see if that is something that will help with that. I know moto4lin is supposed to handle that as well but I need to dig deeper into configuring it to work.

I am thinking of trying to get some vector graphics made for designing stuff so Inkscape was the next thing I installed. It’s a replacement for Adobe Illustrator.

I like putting pictures on my iPod from time to time and GpixPod is suppsed to handle that

I installed an app called Camera which is listed as an app to aid in getting pictures off of digital cameras. If I can’t get the card reader going (yeah I haven’t tested that yet) I am going to see how this works out.

I am thinking of making my own Fonts sometime so I installed FontForge

For some web development I figured I’d install MySql Manager to help with databases. I think I am doing something wrong because it won’t connect to any database I use (local or remote).

Yet another test of an audio application that can sync podcasts and handle my music library, I checked out Exaie Music Player, which I installed some of the extras but didn’t play with it that much.

I am trying to see if I can connect to this site from my desktop rather than loading up Firefox and logging into my site so I installed BloGTK which supposedly connects to WordPress blogss.

I have a TON of pictures of my daughter and I saw a lot of picture mosaics out there  and think I would like to make one of her. I found a program called Pixelize that is supposed to do exatly that. Take a bunch of pictures and make a mosaic of them to produce 1 picture.

I Removed Gwibber because I am using TweetDeck and it seemed redundant to have 2 programs to tweet with.

I had another DVD I wanted to rip (for backup purposes, yeah that’s it) so I decided to try dvd::rip this time. It was getting late so I started the rip of the main movie and hit the sack. More on this tomorrow!

I began installing the LAMP server stuff. LAMP is Linux Apache Mysql and PHP as one package. Once I got it all installed I tested out the web server. Worked. Installed PHPMyAdmin. Works. I will play more with that later. I need to read up on configuring Apache some more.

So while updating my podcasts from listening to a bunch of them at work, I installed some Applets for Avant Window Navigator as well as some themes for it and for Gnome. I  also added some more Screenlets and downloaded some desktops from Gnome-Look to make everything stand out. You can see the screenshot by clicking the thumbnail at the top of the page.

So I am still itching to get the mixer hooked up and work on getting the podcast recorded so I can really play with Audacity to re-learn it. It has been too long since I used it.

I ran across another Air application called AirTalkr. It is supposedly an IM client and Social media client combined (like Digsby) but it was REALLY buggy so I uninstalled it.

Uninstalling Air applications is kind of easy. You have to actually download the .air file onto your machine and double click it as if you were installing the application and the installer brings up the Uninstall option. See cake!

Ok That is all for today. I will have more on the 7th day.