I may play with layout some more later. But for now this is what it is. Shows information I personally need to know about my machine. And of course what the time is. I think I should put the clock back on the panel because most of the work I do covers up the desktop and I always have to minimize to see what time it is.

I imported pictures off a SD Card for our digital camera using F-Spot. It worked flawlessly. It was really easy and this shows that the card reader also works on the laptop under Linux. Wheeee! Now I have the pictures that Sarah this past month on my machine. That’s about 400 pictures. Seriously. We have taken over 8GB of pictures of Emma in the past year and a half almost. Think we’re obsessed with our child? Got a problem? Fuck you.

I took pictures of the labels I added onto the machine. As you see they look awsome! I trimmed the picture of Tux to remove the shadow that was in the original because it would look nasty with the white and gray shade that was in it. And yes I put a VooDooRadio logo sticker on my laptop. What’s it too ya! People will ask me about it if they see it and that promotes my show… Kinda… Sorta… Leave me alone!

During the last update, Ubuntu had released a version of Firefox called Shiretoko. It’s Firefox v.3.5 but looking up info on it. It’s a Beta of the browser. All I have to say is that Shiretoko is a little slo-mo. It locked up while uploading the pictures you see here. But also the original files are 3MB average each. But still. It runs a little ragged.

So we are nearing the end of the 30 Days point. Where do we go from here? I think I may continue to blog about running under Linux but we’ll see. Still missing some of the games I played under Windows and watching Netflix. But maybe I will load the games on the desktop and hope it will work ok.

I got this setup from the Ubuntu Blog website which it was very helpful, but seeing how I am wireless more I needed more variables to add to my setup. And this information was easily obtainable from Conky’s Sourceforge site more specifically the variable section.

The one thing I have been finding out about conky is that is is very tedious to really set it up. There is no “user friendly” GUI to configure it like the Screenlets so you have to do a lot of text editing to get it to work right. And you have to really ignore word wrap.

Another little thing about conky is when you make changes you can kill the process (I use top in the terminal to kill it) and restart it, reboot the machine, or log out of your Gnome session. I have used all three and logging out seems to be a little quicker than the other two. Go fig.

Also I learned that gPodder has an option to skip podcasts when syncing them to your iPod. So the Ubuntu Podcast has been set to that because of the file format issue with the iPod.  You can also set up an autodelte ever 30 days or whatever you want. I prefer to manually do it, but that’s just me. Also you can save the files somewhere else if you please. This is  a nice option because some shows I like to archive or edit to get bits for my show (ala “This is Why we’re Fat” from Nobody Likes Onions being inserted into my show).

I have been shutting down the machine lately so I don’t log in from work too much. But I still think I got some things done in the short time I did them.

Still bummed about the mixer. Thinking of picking up a headset soon as I can. Just can’t right now. Maybe I will pull out the original USB mic I used on the show MANY moons ago.

Again I am happy that I am able to organize a lot better than under Windows. I feel like it’s Laundry day!

Yes that is Linux Detergent you are seeing in the picture to the right. Micro&Soft is the maker? I have seen this picture floating around the interwebs for quite some time now. I still think it’s funny.

Ok let’s get into the final day of sorting and also there are some links to some more resources I wanted to share with you all. So please, read on…

The funny thing about this is I am finding a ton of duplicates and tag errors from when I was under iTunes. WTF?

With Linux there is a huge difference between a lowercase and uppercase letter so if you have tunes from a band where the tag is different by 1 letter it will be sorted into multiple directories.

For Example, on the last batch of music, I had songs by the group VAST however they were tagged Vast or VAST so I had 2 directories for VAST because of this. Under Winduhs, they omit the case if the primary directory is one name. So even though VAST was the folder name under that old OS, I had Vast in there as well. So, re-tagging the files will fix that all up. And behold the duplicate entries!

I also found some helpful resources as well. I added them to the links on the side, but here they are:

• ClubUbuntu – Here you can read articles about Ubuntu.
• Linux Linx - The Linux Portal
• Linux Starter Pack – A free e-book to help you get started with Linux
• Bash Guide For Beginners – Helps learn the terminal a little more
• Grokking the GIMP – Learn to use The Gimp image editor
• Linux Documentation Project – Tons of free ebooks and web based guides for Linux.

Speaking of Gimp, I am thinking of playing around with that some more soon.  So I looked up some more things for it, check out these pages:

• GimpShop – GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP), intended to replicate the feel of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP.
• Gimp Stuff – A community site for Gimp Users. Tons of extras for The Gimp

I am sure there is more out there, but this is what I found recently.

Ok now that I have sorted tunage,  I am going to create my first podcast under Linux! w00t!

I am still sorting out music. I said I had a large collection, didn’t I? Well now we are up to the T’s now. Hopefully I will be able to finish this up real soon. :O

Aside from sorting out the music files I decided to try out a little monitor program called Conky. The screenshot may be tough to view as a thumbnail so boost it up. Awww, Emma’s still playing with Daddy’s iPod… Oh wait this is about Conky, not Emma. Sorry was distracted.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. You can find more about it on their website.

Configuring this thing is a little tedious, but there is a lot of things you can do with it. I am considering a different layout than what I put here. This is basically a single line bar that shows info about my system, the Wifi connection (yeah the laptop is in my bedroom so the signal strength is kind of low there), My internal IP, and the Mail thing is a python script that checks one of my Gmail accounts.

I have a weather script that works but I can’t use it here on the single line. So I am going to need to figure out how to use multiple configs, or use a different layout. Here’s my current .conkyrc file:

#avoid flicker
double_buffer yes

TEXT
${voffset -1} CPU: ${color e0e0e0}${font}$cpu% ${cpubar 8,8}${color} | Mem: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${mem} ${color} | Battery: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${battery}:${battery_time}${color} | ${color} Up: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${uptime_short}${color} | ${color} Wifi: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${wireless_essid wlan0}: ${wireless_link_qual wlan0}%${color} IP: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${addr wlan0}${color} | ${color}Free: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${fs_free /} ${color} | Email: ${color e0e0e0}${execi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail.py}${color}


As you see it’s still a work in progress, but this originally was supposed to use a different weather script, but I couldn’t get that to work right at all.

Oh well, back to playing with it some more and sorting the music. Tomorrow. Possibly working with Audacity to get a podcast out this month.