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I don’t like the new Gnome either. I had been enjoying Gnome but after 3 was released I swapped back to Xfce.

However, one app which is inexplicably hardcoded to work with Nautilus is Dropbox.

I followed a quick guide here to get it working with Thunar but it kept giving me an error:

Thunar: Unknown option --no-desktop

Taking a look at the suggested wrapper script we see:

exec thunar $@

It’s passing thunar multiple options. So, a quick bit of trial and error gives us:

exec thunar $2

Done.

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Turns out I’ve got an old PS3. Seems weird to say that but it is a very early version. It only had a 40Gb HDD, for example. So in order to take advantage of the PSN Welcome Back I had to upgrade my HDD.

Having read the instructions I knew that backing up, installing the new disk and restoring the system should be relatively simple. Still, I didn’t expect it to go quite as smoothly as it did.

So, Sunday, I went into town and bought a 320GB disk from yoyotech. They may not be the cheapest but they are competitive and working full-time is not very compatible with internet shopping, anyway.

Then, on Monday, my lovely wife borrowed an external HDD from work for me to do the back-up. Bless her.

I was pleasantly surprised that the PS3 backup routine uses a file structure that allows multiple, time-stamped back-ups on the same disk. That’s cool, eh? I did a couple of back-ups just to be sure and then dived in.

Actually changing the drive was easy. I’ve done loads of laptop HDD changes in the past and it was really no different. Although, I’ll wager the screws on the disk caddy weren’t tightened by a human. If they were, that human was having a bad day.

The restore was just as easy as the back-up. A couple of restarts later and everything was exactly as it had been before except now I have 8x the HDD space.

Kind of dull but I am delighted it was that easy. I really didn’t need any hassle!

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I picked up a Dell Optiplex SX280 from eBay last week with the intention of setting it up as a dedicated Linux box. Previously I have always worked with dual boots but I decided it was time to have the best of both worlds full-time.

The install went pretty well although it’s been a while since I did anything in Linux. I came a bit of a cropper trying to partition the hard disk. The auto partition scheme was great and worked fine but didn’t make a separate /var and /tmp, which I wanted. So, I resorted to doing it manually but was baffled by cfdisk and working with extended/logical partitions and the fact I couldn’t choose the FS I wanted. Naturally, I shortly discovered that cfdisk doesn’t make filesystems and that comes later in the install.

After that it all went pretty flawlessly. I have used Arch Linux a lot before so the set-up was pretty simple once the OS was actually installed.

Now to set up the services.

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My wife bought me home an unused monitor from work so I have a nice dual screen set-up at the moment.

This is just a quick snap.

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I have a friend who works for LG and a few months ago he slipped me an LG Optimus One to have a play with.

I had an HTC Hero before and I loved it. When I initially switched to the LG I hated it. My only experience of Android had been with HTC and I thought Sense and Android were one and the same. Imagine my disappointment when all the great widgets weren’t there.

I stuck with the phone though because it was noticeably faster than my Hero, which was starting to struggle under the weight of the apps.

This week I have finally got my home screens setup just so. I thought I might share some of my favorite apps and widgets in the next few days.

I wish I could post screenshots of my phone but it’s not rooted.

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Looks like the baddies have got at LastPass now.

They say there is no cause for concern if you use a strong non-dictionary master password…

Who wouldn’t protect every password they own with the strongest password they could manage?

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So, I recently installed some software on my linux box.

I saw on the homepage for the software that they were looking to make a new home page. So, I made a new one for them. I just took their content, threw in some divs and made a simple CSS. Took me about 2 hours (I’m no expert).

The project lead quite liked it. I sent him the files and he put it to the dev list.

What happened? The very first response was: I like it but I think it would be better if we had a wiki front page.

This is absolutely typical open source:

  • There’s a problem or an issue.
  • Someone takes the initiative and solves the issue or problem.
  • They put the solution to the inevitable committee and immediately everyone’s hither to unmentioned preference comes to light.

What’s most annoying about this is that often you can tell that the responses are from people that have never put any thought into a resolution for the problem or issue before but now it’s been bought to their attention their brain has wandered off and decided how they’d do it (better). This wandering nearly always fails to take into account that they don’t have time to do it themselves.

What’s even more galling is you know that if you approached “the committee” for preferences before you start, you’ll just get bogged down in discussion and indecision anyway, again taking into account the opinions of people that don’t intend to actually contribute to the solution in a practical way.

So, the work that’s already been done is pretty much discarded and a new solution is proposed, taking into account the newly revealed preferences. As with everything designed by committee, this new solution will then limp along, unfinished for months or even years, because no-one has the time. In the meantime, the perfectly decent solution initially proposed could be filling the gap nicely but instead it sits unused and the time already spent is wasted.

The solution? Well, there’s two possible outcomes but no real solution:

  1. get to a point in the “hierarchy” where you just implement your ideas, without even checking with anyone (really ballsy and often risky)
  2. you get really fucking lucky and create a solution that everyone likes and meets everyone’s expectations with an almost psychic degree of accuracy

Good luck!

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