What good is The Tweeted Times? I'd like a nice output of what I'm posting to Twitter. I don't care much for such a web page from the people I follow. No offense, (you) people. My Tweeted Times would be useful. It appears they don't do that.

GNOME 3.4 is making its way to Debian Wheezy. But getting it there is not so easy.

I stopped using PDF-Shuffler for awhile. I reinstalled it in Debian a few days ago and have been using it a lot. LibreOffice Draw can't do everything.

It's funny. I was thinking about the last time one of my domains expired and whether or not I changed the contact e-mail address to something I actually check so such a thing (an expired domain, that is) wouldn't happen again.

But I didn't (change the contact e-mail address). And it did (the domain expired).

I renewed the domain, and a couple of others, one of which was set to expire a few days from now.

The domain on which this site lives is pretty much all the way back. Chances are DNS will work and you'll get the site, but it could be a day or so until some DNS servers catch up.

The moral of the story: Keep an eye on your domains.

• Make sure your contact e-mail addresses are up-to-date (and maybe filter that mail so you'll stand a better chance of finding it)

• Make a list of your domains, their expiration dates and where and how to renew them. Keep this in a list with the other important information about your web site.

• Make a habit of doing some web-site maintenance. Go through your site(s) and:

  1. Make sure all services you're offering are actually working

  2. Get rid of files and directories you no longer need

  3. Do regular backups and keep a backup archive (yearly, monthly, weekly ...)

  4. Check on any applications (like WordPress) that require a software update/upgrade.

  5. Watch for things like expiring domains.

Do you have any other webmasterly maintenance chores that belong on a list like this?

The next day: Google's DNS finally caught up, and I can see the site from my laptop that uses those DNS servers.

X died on me today. For the uninitiated, I mean the graphical environment -- the GUI, if you will.

The cursor moved, but the mouse and keyboard otherwise had no effect. I'm running Debian Squeeze with the default GNOME desktop environment.

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The OwnCloud team has released version 4 of the run-it-yourself file-sharing software.

Development on OwnCloud has been happening rather quickly. I distinctly remember updating my own installation with the last two point releases in Version 3.

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I don't know what it means (and it could very well mean nothing), but Blosxom is now in GitHub.

Crawl through these files to find out more.

This file in particular says:

Welcome
Welcome to Blosxom 3.0, the future of the Blosxom self-publishing system, coming soon to a computer near you.

I like dlvr.it. It's a refreshingly easy service to work with. For me, it's understandable in a way that ping.fm never was.

So why am I turning it off?

In a word: hashtags.

Postings to Identi.ca and Twitter work better when the proper words are hashtagged (in Twitter) and #hashtagged or !bangtagged (is that the word?) in Identi.ca. And services like dlvr.it don't do that. Nor should they.

So I'm back to manually flogging my blog posts via social networks, hash/bang-tagging where needed.

I'm not jumping headlong into GNOME 3's GNOME Shell, though I see the day coming very soon when I'll leave GNOME 2 and Debian Squeeze behind.

I don't know who said, "The current desktop environment and its actual menus aren't working. Let's blow that stuff up and try something totally new with fewer features and little configurability." I'm neither totally against it, nor excited about making the transition.

With that in mind, I've tried lots of other desktop environments, including Xfce, LXDE, Openbox with Xfce's Thunar, Enlightenment (with PCManFM), etc.

No, I haven't given KDE a shot recently. I may.

But right now there are features and polish in GNOME's Nautilus file manager, Gedit text editor, and many other helper applications, that I would miss were I to leave GNOME entirely.

I could mix/match, bringing Nautilus, Gedit, Rhythmbox, NetworkManager and more into a different DE. Or I could close my eyes and leap ... into GNOME Shell.

After months and months on Linux kernel 2.6.39 from Debian Backports on my Squeeze laptop, I decided to give a newer kernel a try.

I'm only using newer kernels than the 2.6.32 that ships with Squeeze because the version of the ALSA sound system built into that kernel doesn't mute the audio on my Lenovo G555 laptop when I plug in a headphone jack. Kernels after 2.6.35 or so, which include a newer ALSA, fix this bug, and that's pretty much the only reason I'm not running the stock Squeeze kernel, which is updated regularly for security patches.

The Debian Backports kernels don't seem to update on their own. You need to periodically go in there, see what new kernels are available and install one.

I've had few kernel panics here and there in 2.6.39, so I figured that dipping into the 3.x era of Linux kernels was warranted.

There are two 3.2.0 kernels right now in the Debian Backports repository -- 3.2.0-4 and 3.2.0-15. I used 3.2.0-15, and so far all is running well. Sound works as expected. So does suspend/resume. And in a couple of days, I've experienced no kernel panics.

Absent my sound issues, I would have never used a "newer" kernel, and by the time I move this laptop to Debian Wheezy (or any other distribution with a post-2.6.35 kernel), I should be able to run that system's default kernel for the duration.