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Last night I had a bit of an epiphany and uninstalled Twitter from my tablet. I haven’t deleted my accounts or anything, I’ve just removed it as a possible “go to”. However, this wasn’t because, like many people, I’m starting to resent the distraction it causes but rather I’m starting to think I just don’t like the offer.

My grumbles centre on “algorithmic curation” i.e. the service decides what I’m interested in and promotes items in my news feed. The problem is that these algorithms don’t work on me. I don’t follow more than about 50 accounts on ANY service I use. There just isn’t enough data for these algorithms to make meaningful decisions on and so, to me, it’s totally arbitrary. That ruins the experience for me.

I mainly use social media to keep in touch with people that share my interests but that I don’t know personally. In the past I would have used forums for that sort of thing. Forums have become extremely tedious in recent years. There is so much risk of offence or upset in the face of poor wording or tone. Social media doesn’t seem to be blighted by that problem. It’s accepted that you’re stating an opinion and that opinion is your own. Having an opinion on a forum is a recipe for disaster.

Timeline curation was one of two things that ultimately pushed me away from Facebook. I just didn’t have confidence I could actually see everything my friends were saying, or that anyone was even seeing what I was posting. What an awful system. This morning I’m reading that Instagram is planning a similar approach. Apparently “the average user misses 70 percent of posts” so they think curation is important. I must be way below average then because I can not login to Instagram for a few days and catch up on every post in a few minutes. In that sense I don’t think curation on Instagram will be that much of an issue for me. There really is nothing to curate.

I’ve actually just logged in to Twitter to get an idea of just who I am following and, lo, the new timeline was just switched on for me. “Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline,” goes the claim. I think not.

 

 

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I work for a small not-for-profit and we use Drupal to power our website. There are only 6 people on staff and we all have access to do pretty much anything on the site.

Yesterday, our Chief Exec came across something strange. A link had been sent out in our newsletter that pointed to oursite.com/404-page-not-found. How could this have happened? Not being very familiar with Drupal, I suggested it was some weird redirect as a result of a 404 to the most recent post. But it was the right post. Coincidence? The universe is rarely so lazy.

So I looked into it. Turns out, and I’m not entirely sure how this happened, someone had actually edited the page that was set as our custom 404 page. So the link in the newsletter was technically correct. The problem was all 404 were being directed to that article.

Because we didn’t want to break the link in the newsletter I set up a new 404 custom page. In the process of testing it, putting in a few aliases and redirects I discovered a few broken links. Amusingly, these broken links had never come to light because they were supposed to direct to the article that was ON the 404 page!

With the new 404 in place they really were broken. I soon had that fixed but it led me to check a few more pages and it turns out that who ever made the original error made a bit of dog’s dinner of it. There were a few duplicate nodes and aliases pointing all over the place.

Didn’t take more than about half an hour to the whole thing out but it did provide a nicely little puzzle!

 

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This took me ages to find. I started off messing with Xmodmap until I realise GNOME would ignore it.  I finally found the solution here.

navigate to org >> gnome >> desktop >> input-sources

Put your options under xkb-options as a list. Ex: [‘altwin:ctrl_alt_win’,’caps:backspace’]

I hope that I can help others find it faster!

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Then

I’ve been using Arch Linux for years. It’s been my main Linux distribution since I decided I needed to switch from an i586 optimised system to an i686 optimised system. Yes, it was that long ago. To be honest, I’m astonished my original distribution is still going but I’m really pleased for them!

When I first got interested in Linux it was because of a distribution called Mandrake. Back then KDE and the Keramik theme were all the rage. It was all so refreshing compared to Windows.

Anyway, I could never really get on with those big desktop managers. With KDE I always wanted some GTK apps (firefox) that ruined the look and Gnome, well, back in the day the word was “cruft”, it was full of dependencies and apps you just didn’t want. Plus it was butt ugly.

The first window manager I really got into was Fluxbox. I even made some popular themes for it. I’d always liked Xfce but, like Gnome and KDE, it still wasn’t very cohesive. At some point Xfce must have grown-up because that became my standard desktop environment from at least 2007. That was probably down to Xfce 4.4.0!

With hindsight, I was lucky to find Arch Linux early on in my Linux experience as I never even considered trying Ubuntu when it was created. Back in 2003 Gentoo was the cause of most flamewars on the Arch forums.

So, my first experience with Ubuntu was around the last noughties when a laptop with an OEM of Windows XP went kaput and we needed an OS. I was pretty pleased with it. It always ran well on the laptop and I didn’t need to mess about with it too much. It almost never went wrong. I went off it a lot when Unity came on the scene but the laptop died permanently shortly after, so I was never really forced to look for an alternative. I always kept half an eye on Ubuntu, though.

Now

A few weeks ago I was at a conference in London for CiviCRM (which is an open-source CRM used by a lot of charities and not-for-profits.) Almost all of the presenters were using either Macbooks or Ubuntu laptops. A few guys from CiviCOOP were also running what I surmised was Gnome so I asked them about their set-up. They simply said it was Ubuntu Gnome and I decided I’d check it out.

As you might know both Gnome and Ubuntu have recently made major releases. I guess Gnome didn’t freeze early enough to make it into Ubuntu’s release window so Ubuntu Gnome still ships with the previous version.

So, yesterday, I decided to try and install. I started out by making sure that the installation wasn’t going to mess with my Arch install. That meant revisiting my bootloader configuration and moving /boot back into the Arch root. Then I had a huge balls-up where I deleted everything in my ESP with some sloppy typing. Yay, me! So out came the Windows disks to restore the Windows EFI bootmgr and, bleurgh. Mission.

Once that was finally sorted (and, as is so often the case with Linux, improved) I got around to installing Ubuntu Gnome in some free space on my Windows drive. I was pretty disappointed. I quickly realised that it was going to a struggle to get the system set-up how I liked; I have so many long forgotten customisations in Arch that I take for granted. Also, the Ubuntu software centre was just weird. There were two versions of Vim and I couldn’t tell what the difference was. Gnome itself was also really unstable; it hanged on me a few times and some widgets vanished, making the UI tough to interpret. However, what really put the tin hat on it was trying to change the Gnome icon theme. I couldn’t find any to install in the software centre and the advice I found while Google was to extract packages straight into /usr! Urgh! That’s like recommending incest!

I decided that Ubuntu wasn’t for me after all and decided to give Gnome a go on my Arch install, especially when Arch is noted by the Gnome Project as already shipping the latest version. It didn’t make long to get it sorted. I’d already decided, while out a on run last night, that I was going to convert wholesale to the “Gnome way” and swap to gdm and NetworkManager.

I can honestly say it’s the most complete Linux desktop experience I have ever had and I think I’ve only scratched the surface. It’s all worked out pretty well in the end!

Took a twitter survey about surface pro 3 the other day. I couldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Emailed @hellosmsapp 4 days ago to let them know that @kaspersky identifies malware in their app. No response yet.

Also interested in the new Google Messenger app, rumoured to be coming with L. SMS in Hangouts occasionally vanished for me ?