I write a lot about encryption. I'm not trying so much to keep the government out of my business but to give myself peace of mind in the event my machine is lost or stolen.

I want to know that it would be way too much trouble for anybody to try to get any data out of the machine so I can confidently carry around a laptop and know that nobody else can get to that data if it leaves my possession.

But there's one problem with the kind of encryption provided by the installers for Debian and Fedora: The global (or individual) passphrase(s).

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An interesting post from Evgeni Golov: Why I hope Twitter will die with the new API.

Twitter built its following on a great deal more openness and flexibility than it wants to provide now. And thus Twitter is closing things up in such a way as to make sure more users access the service through Twitter-controlled sources and see more Twitter-controlled marketing.

Evgeni hopes it'll backfire. I'm with him.

We're in the middle of the git-isation of all things digital. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm somewhat on board. I have a Gitorius account. That's about as far as I've gotten.

Here's an interesting article: Manage your website through git by Debian Developer and GNOME contributor Andrea Veri.

It's been in the works for a while, promised but not yet delivered, now promised again for Oct. 30, 2012: The Lightworks video-editing software is coming to Linux, specifically to Ubuntu 12.04 (and perhaps others after that).

Having really never heard of Lightworks, which the OMG!Ubuntu post above says was used to edit such professional films as "The King's Speech" and "Hugo." The project was open-sourced in 2010, and there is already a Windows build available. I'm somewhat excited by that prospect in itself, as I haven't yet come up with a Windows video-editing workflow/application that I can both use myself and recommend to others.

You can bet I'll be trying this out asap and waiting for the Linux version. If it only runs on Ubuntu, a video-editing app that can really get the job done is enough for me to choose my OS accordingly. That's a big "if." I'll have to get some actual time in front of Lightworks before I can make any judgments.

Remember my recent problem with doubled icons in the Applications view in GNOME 3 on my Debian Wheezy system?

Running the command update-menus every time you boot takes care of the problem, but that's no solution.

It turns out that getting rid of the menus package fixes the problem permanently:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge menu

This will most likely accomplish the same thing (though I didn't try it):

$ sudo aptitude purge menu

I know that on my system the menu package came along with the fluxbox window manager. Since I was losing the menu package, I opted to get rid of fluxbox at the same time.

Note on Xfce: Removal of the menu package did not affect Xfce, which I also have installed on this Debian Wheezy system.

Note on menu and Debian: I suppose this should be classfied as a bug, because menu and GNOME Shell should be able to co-exist, but I don't see a bug that addresses this issue filed against menu. Maybe the bug should be filed against GNOME Shell. This is one of those (many) situations where I'm at a loss.

Note on menu: If you reinstall menu, will the problem with GNOME 3 return? Yes, it will.

While there's always a pack of geeks telling me how they've been running the same Debian system since Potato, I've found that most desktop systems under any kind of heavy use by those of us who do a lot of experimenting and install a lot of software don't last forever.

Or they won't last a long time without a great deal of maintenance and fixing mistakes made along the way.

My current, main Debian desktop system -- running on the Lenovo G555 laptop I bought in early 2010 -- has been in place since late 2010, after Fedora 13/14 died a quick yet painful death and I had a brief flirtation with Ubuntu 10.04. I started with Debian Squeeze while it was still the Testing distribution but well after the freeze that would lead it to becoming Stable the following February.

I upgraded to Wheezy -- the current Testing release that is now frozen -- with very little pain at all and am pretty happy with GNOME 3/Shell. I've installed Xfce for comparison's sake. I'm not using it much, preferring GNOME Shell even though it seems like I'm in some kind of silent minority and in threat of using my geek credibility because I not only don't hate the Shell but actually like it and find that it boosts my productivity on the desktop.

So here's the old and crusty part: You (really I) never know how much disk space you'll need when you set up a system. And since I chose to use Logical Volume Management with a couple of encrypted volumes, I really can't mess with them. Go ahead and send me links about how you shrink and expand LVM partitions. With encryption. It's just too hard. There's not enough real information out there. And for the non-super-geeks out there, attempts to modify encrypted LVM partitions are likely to go pear-shaped damn quickly.

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Update: I only have this problem with the Chrome/Chromium menu while running the GNOME 3 desktop environment. In Xfce, everything is fine.

The original entry starts here:

I guess I should file a bug report against Chromium in Debian Wheezy about the following:

When I go into the menu in either Chromium or Google Chrome (yes, I have both) and try to edit the bookmarks, the browser crashes. So I can't re-arrange my bookmarks in these two browsers.

FYI, re-arranging bookmarks in Firefox/Iceweasel not only works but is extremely intuitive: You can drag/move bookmarks right in the bookmarks menu -- no need to go to a special bookmarks-editing screen to change the order of a bunch of bookmarks. Thanks, Mozilla!

All is not peaches, cream, furry kittens and puppies in GNOME 3. Why are the bookmarks I've created to FTP sites in Nautilus disappearing?

To write today's flurry of blog posts, I opted to use a bookmark in Xfce's Gigolo (yes, the app's name is extremely unfortunate) to access the server where these files live via sftp. At least Gigolo remembers where I've been. I'll try again with Nautilus.

Once you start mousing into the "hot corner" in Xfce, GNOME Classic, or plain old GNOME 2 -- all systems where there is no "hot corner," you pretty much know you've committed to GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell.

I'm not trying to be a GNOME Shell fanboy. It doesn't gain me any credibility not to hate on GNOME 3.

But I gave GNOME Shell a try (GNOME 3.4.2 in Debian Wheezy, to be exact), and despite having GNOME Classic, Xfce 4.8, even Fvwm and Fluxbox, on this machine, I'm using the Shell 98 percent of the time.

Once my muscle memory drags me over to the hot corner, it's nice for it to actually be there.

It's easy to get native Linux apps in the menu bar on the left side of the screen in GNOME 3 / GNOME Shell. They appear there when you run them from the Applications tab, and you can right-click on them in the bar and cause them to persist.

Not so with Wine apps. The only Wine app I'm really using right now is the photo editor/viewer IrfanView (p.s. I didn't need to add mfc42.dll to make it work!!), and when I run it from the Applications tab, I don't get an IrfanView icon in the GNOME menu bar. Instead I get a "windows loader" icon. And besides not persisting, that icon won't run IrfanView.

But this will work:

Go to the Applications tab (hot-corner or Super key), then click Applications, or just type the first few letters of your Wine application into the box.

At this point, don't start the app. Instead, drag the icon into the menu bar on the left side of the screen.

Now that icon will persist in the menu bar (is that what they call that thing on the left side of the screen, or is it the "application bar"? If you really know what's it's called, please let me know).

And the icon will launch the Wine app to which it's tied.

Problem solved -- for me, anyway (and hopefully for you).