Got my keyboard!!

Hello internet!

My keyboard arrived in the mail, so I decided to make a post out of sheer excitement. It honestly types like a dream, I've never typed on a keyboard more awesome. The give is perfect, and it's completely unmarked, so I really look like a pro while I'm typing. Now on to some real news... or at least, what I consider real news.

I managed to get my club passed after being asked and turned down by 3 faculty sponsors. That was slightly more than I would have expected, but whatever, at least we have a sponsor now! The activity is going to be reviewed over Spring Break by the activities committee, and hopefully they'll approve it. I have a feeling though that, given the amount of faculty sponsors that turned me down, I shouldn't feel too optimistic about the outcome of their decision. One thing's for sure though: if it's passed, it'll be a lot of fun, and the logo looks absolutely kick-ass!!

Also, during cycling practice today (or what little we had), my coach's bike got hit by a car and subsequently ran into 3 members of a team. There was a bit of an accident but everybody was fine. At least it offered us a good chance to get to know the rest of the team; me and my co-captain sat with them on the side of the road and had a fun discussion.

That's kind of it in terms of updates, I'm just geeking out about my new keyboard. I need to come up with a name for it/him/her. I also need to decide s/he/it's gender.

Grounded -- hopefully.

Forgive me in advance for my pathetic grammar, it's early and I'm trying to pass the time by writing a blog post while my kernel compiles.

I have to stop naming my titles ambiguous names. No, I am not grounded. I'm grounded in terms of my distribution-changing madness. It's over. For now. I've settled with Debian, using the GNOME interface. I realize that that's pretty much exactly where I started, but I stuck with Debian instead of Ubuntu because I like to tell myself that I actually got somewhere with this whole thing. Also, I've decided to not go with as much eye candy because it's starting to detract from my need to actually do work.

So Debian it is. And it's very minimal, which I like a lot. The brightness control works (ditched KDE because it didn't support it), and I'm fairly sure that I could get the keyboard backlighting working with some effort. At this precise moment I'm hardening my kernel with grsecurity, a tool that basically fills in a few security holes in the system to prevent intrusions. Lightweight...ness and security are the two things that I'm going for and I intend to achieve them if I can't have anything else. Also, there are a few slight differences between Debian and Ubuntu, and I like a lot of them. My only complaint is that it's not very keen on giving me compositing support, which could be due to the NVIDIA driver that my MacBook Pro uses.

I installed my system as per this guide, and the disk encryption is fantastic. Only hitch is that I deleted the Mac OS X partition that I had installed (oops) for the purpose of installing rEFIt, which is an EFI bootloader designed to not suck as much as Apple's. Thinking that this software would, you know, be written to the bloody EFI partition was apparently too much of an assumption, because it disappeared as soon as I got rid of Leopard. Oh, well. I'm currently just booting off of their handy rEFIt CDROM, which then points the computer to the GRUB partition that I have installed. So that's nice.

Amidst all of this distro panic and exam worries (thankfully I only got one B+, the rest were above!), unfortunately, I wasn't able to work on my PHP project. I'm going to try to explain myself to my teacher tomorrow, hopefully he'll forgive me. I feel pretty guilty about wasting my parents' money for an hour of us sitting around not going over the code that I've written.

On a happier note, if any of you are interested in a screenshot of my new and (hopefully) here to stay system, feast your eyes!!

iPhone and moving.

No, not that kind of moving. Just moving distributions -- yes, that's right, I'm really having a distribution identity crisis at the moment, but the only reason that it's happening is because I'm frustrated with Ubuntu's slowness and lack of customization options. So instead of Xubuntu, which honestly has served me quite well, I'm moving on to Kubuntu instead, because while Xubuntu was nice and fast, I don't have it quite like I want it, the device support is shaky (couldn't get keyboard backlighting to work and apparently sound recording is a nono on any of their machines), and I absolutely love the KDE desktop widget functionality. So KDE it is! For now. If sound recording doesn't work on that I might go berserk.

Speaking of sound recording, my last post was a video whose audio was made possible by my new trusty iPhone, courtesy of a friend of a friend. And while we're (sort of) still on the subject of customization, he jailbroke it for me so that it would work on my carrier (AT&T) without a data plan, so that I wouldn't have to pay $30/month extra to get it to work (although now, funnily enough, I've purchased their 200MB data plan because a friend got me hooked on Foursquare). Wasting no time, I immediately customized everything customizable on the machine, although sadly enough Jobs isn't releasing the 4.0 update to the iPhone 2G, which is the generation that I have, so I can't download most of the things on the Cydia store like tethering or multitasking. Which I actually don't mind, because I only have a 200MB data plan and the iPhone 2G's CPU definitely isn't the fastest thing in the world. With some Locktool and Fontswap magic I was able to completely change my lock screen:

That's the Ubuntu title font combined with the HTC Clock, with the slide to unlock removed (the gesture still unlocks it, the button's just gone). I'm so proud of myself. Also, I installed a terminal app, so I can ssh into my Mac and make it say dirty things. Hehehehe.

First Video Post!1!

I seriously gave hours for publishing this single, 8-minute long clip of me rambling about random stuff that could have much more easily been rambled about in a blog post. So I seriously hope that you enjoy the video below. Lucky me, Xubuntu apparently can't record audio, so I was forced to record my audio with my new iPhone (talked about in video), convert the file to a .wav, convert the video to a .avi, join the two together, export it, and upload it to vimeo. By the way, thanks to the conversion process the video quality is horrible. Just thought I'd warn you ahead of time.

Gentoo

Insistent upon ignoring Randall Munroe's cautionary tale, I've decided to go ahead and move on from Ubuntu. Ubuntu was great until I had used it for too long, which meant that I would have installed some programs without removing them, or I would muck with the system a bit and end up breaking something or other. I'm moving on to Gentoo. Or should I say, I've moved on to Gentoo. I've successfully compiled the kernel and now have a basic CLI (command line interface) upon booting up. Not too shabby. Hopefully at the end of today I'll have enough time to compile GNOME and have a full X environment up and running. So far I really like the customization options. The USE flag is basically a dream come true for me: upon the installation of a program, you choose what programs you want it to have support for. On Ubuntu, it installed support for everything, hence the speed issues.

Another beneficial factor of having to compile everything by myself is the fact that I'll be lazy about installing programs and hopefully I shouldn't install one unless I find it absolutely necessary. Of course, I'm installing a GNOME environment because I have no idea what I'd do without one. I'm still not entirely Ubuntu free, mostly because I've been spoiled rotten by GNOME-Do and Docky. I realize that not choosing XFCE probably leads to a bit of a slowdown, but I'm giving it a try anyways and seeing what it's like. One thing that I'm somewhat concerned about is the boot time, I've looked at it and it hasn't been as stellar as I would have hoped. Ubuntu was really fast. Like, really fast. Clean installations booted in less than 15 seconds. Gentoo seems to be a bit slower, mostly because the dhcpcd client keeps looking for dhcp servers on the network, of which it finds none because eth0 isn't and probably never will be connected when I start up.

Which brings me to the other issue. Wireless. I'm going to emerge wicd when I get back home today, but for now the OS doesn't allow for WPA or WPA2 wireless authentication. That said, it could have been a lot worse seeing as iwconfig actually sees my wireless card. Only time will tell, I'm still in the early stages of building it and hopefully I should have a running GUI by the end of tonight. Another concern is the fact that I'm actually doing this during the week before finals. I always seem to have these huge projects that pop up during high-stress times. Probably for distraction purposes, and I have to say it's working a little too well. Ah, well.

I really, really want a website of my own. Having a wiki would be awesome, and not dealing with Blogger would be awesome...er. And yes, in case any of you are wondering, I haven't posted to my French blog in ages. How exactly am I supposed to explain compiling a kernel in French? My vocabulary doesn't really go that far.

Actually Posting Tech Stuff

So I know that you all are probably looking forward to reading a few facts on my visit to France. Well, I kind of intended this blog to be my daily blog as well as my posts for tech, so those who don't want to read this post can either close out of this window or read it clutching their head whilst making tortured noises. It's really up to you.

Recently I came across a few items thanks to my newest obsession: Google Reader. I have to admit, I had tried it out for a while and it never really made sense to me until I actually started following multiple blogs: up until then, the only blog that I checked frequently was Make: Magazine. After needing to consume more internet material thanks to an absence of actual internet, I decided to, in my twenty minutes of daily internet, save all of the content I possibly could from every tech blog I could find. After getting hooked to said tech blogs once we found a wifi network we could access from our house, I needed a way to constantly check them all in one place. So I tried out Google Reader, and from there I discovered a whole array of things that I've been missing out on.

First to come was Gnome-Do, a utility which I absolutely have no idea how I missed. Gnome-Do provides you with an interface to search for files, create calendar events, play music in your Rhythmbox library, manage tasks on your Remember the Milk account, post to Twitter, and (my personal favorite) install new applications with apt-get. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; Gnome-Do comes with a plethora of plugins that enable you to interface with a whole variety of other resources, and it even has a dock mode to let you imitate the famous OS X staple (except said staple does not include a do-it-all search feature). The downside: It's only for Linux, and the plugins, from what I can tell, are not third-party but rather developed by the Gnome-Do team, so development of new plugins is really up to them. Still, it really is quite an amazing feature, and I've never been so happy with my Linux system.

Also, after browsing Google Reader for some time, I began to get a bit tired of the interface. For one, I was tired of skimming everything with my down-arrow-key held down to find some content that I actually wanted to read. Also, there was no way for me to be able to share the links on Twitter or Facebook. So when I stumbled across Feedly, a Google Chrome extension / Firefox add-on, I was instantly hooked. Feedly takes your Google Reader, Twitter, and Flickr accounts and merges them all into a start page, allowing you to see all of your content at a glance. When you click on an item, it expands to show a preview, which you can either open into a new window or preview the actual webpage in the same window. Thanks to Feedly, I can now tell you what is latest in Fail.

Finally, the last thing I wanted to talk about was Springpad. Whilst browsing Lifehacker, I stumbled across a positive post concerning a certain piece of online organization software called Springpad, and I decided to try it out. Springpad is essentially a single place for you to put everything: contacts, calendars, to-do lists, products, books, bookmarks, wines, and all kinds of other stuff. You can use these different data types in different ways: for example, a to-do list for a bunch of wines, a shopping list for various products, etc. The really cool part is that it pulls various information from the web concerning the various items you post: Springpad might add an Amazon purchase link to a product you list, or a review concerning the wine you're currently interested in. It also lets you organize everything into apps: categories with specific layouts to help you get more organized, for instance, a school planner you can fill with various books, or a trip planner complete with events, packing lists, ideas, and even an itinerary created from the various addresses you've linked to the aforementioned items. My only gripe is that while it does integrate with Google Calendar, the synergy ends there: It appears as its own calendar, doesn't pull existing events, contacts, notes, tasks, bookmarks, or anything else from your Google account, and doesn't synchronize with other popular organization services like Remember the Milk. But it's still in beta, so it's likely that such features are down the road.

So that's pretty much it. To those of you that have read this without wanting to, I will now give you an update on France: Not much is going on, but we have managed to buy a car-turtleshell that will let us ride with more space and ever-increasing dorkiness. But we bought a van to begin with, so I guess we should have expected that. We're off to Rome on the 31st, and we're going to meet my grandmother and my aunt there to go family-tree-hunting with the Mazzeis. Also, as you all may have read, I now have internet in my apartment, so message me! Well, that is, if you can stand the 7-hour time difference.