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frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Fri, 01 Feb 2013

Dedoimedo is hilarious

Read Dedoimedo's Linux-distro reviews, like these on Bodhi, Fedora, Netrunner and Crunchbang, this roundup of desktop environments and his top distros of 2012. And he loves CentOS.

No feelings are spared. If he likes it, you know he likes it. Also the other thing.

How I feel about GNOME 3.6 in the Fedora 18 final release

I'm testing Fedora 18 again. Yes, the live image. I didn't do an install, though I'm certainly thinking about it.

In this release's GNOME 3.6 desktop, at least a few applications -- all from GNOME proper -- like Nautilus are putting more functionality into the "global" menu that pops down from the app's icon in the upper panel.

While not catastrophic, it is problematic.

From where I sit, as long as most of an application's menu choices remain in its own window, putting anything in that app's panel-icon dropdown menu other than a superfluous "quit" does nothing to enhance the user experience.

More directly, having to go from the menu in the application's window to the additional menu in the upper panel to look for the functions you want just seems wrong.

For one thing, it kills discoverability, something that both GNOME 3 and Ubuntu's Unity seem overly fond of doing.

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