Como Park Highlights

Como Park is quickly becoming my favorite disc golf course in the area. Today's highlights include:

Mark's almost hole in one

Eagles by Mike (2) and Sean (1)

PRs by Mike (-14) and Sean (+1)

Take Down List

I remember years ago AJ was telling me how Reggie was learning to play guitar. One of things AJ said Reggie did was to make a list of famous guitarist and take them down one by one playing their songs. I thought this was a outstanding motivational idea and decided I would apply it to my running.

Originally, I hand wrote my running routes out on a piece of paper and just left it on my desk. I thought it would be a better idea to put them somewhere a little more permanent. If you look on the sidebar, you will now see my Take Down List for running.

You might notice that none of them have been from this year. Well I basically was lazy and didn't want to go out in the snow to run over the winter so I stopped running. I plan on taking down the rest of the runs this year!

Humble Frozenbyte Bundle

It is that time of the year again. The Humble Bundle is back with some great games (Trine, Shadowgrounds, Shadowgrounds: Survivor). All games are available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Same deal as before, pay what you want with the option to divide money up between developers and/or charity.

You can get it here.

Humble Indie Bundle 2

If you don't know what the humble indie bundle is let me enlighten you. Basically, it is a pay what you want pack of games from several different independent developers. You can choose divide you payment up between money for the developers, or donate to charity. The games are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can get it here.

I bought the original humble indie bundle last year mainly for World of Goo, but was surprised at how much fun the other games in the pack were. I've looked at the games in the new one and they look promising. Take a look at the video below.

Please take a look and if you like what you see, purchase them.

Hugin

Don't worry, I'm not going to hug you. Hugin is a freely avaiable for non-commercial use program used to stitch photos together to make a panoramic view of said photos. Feeling inspired by AJ's picture, I tried to take a picture of a huge rainbow last night. I couldn't get the entire rainbow in frame, so I took several pictures of it.

Using Hugin, I was able to create a panoramic view of the pictures I created with in a few minutes.

Hugin is available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

PalmSDK on Gentoo Linux

I dislike my phone and my carrier. Once my current contract is up I would love to switch carriers and get a new phone. One option is a WebOS device, the Palm Pre or Pixi. Since I don't want to buy anything without trying, I thought it would be fun to try out the emulator that is provided in the PalmSDK (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). Here is how I installed the sdk on Gentoo:

First add the sunrise overlay:

layman -a sunrise

Unmask the sdk and novacom and emerge:

echo "=dev-embedded/PalmSDK-1.4.1.427 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

echo "=dev-embedded/palm-novacom-1.0.55 ~amd64" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

emerge PalmSDK palm-novacom

Add your virtualbox modules to load at startup and load them now:

echo "# Load VirtualBox Modules" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

echo modules="vboxdrv vboxnetflt vboxnetadp" >> /etc/conf.d/modules

modprobe vboxdrv

modprobe vboxnetflt

modprobe vboxnetadp

Add the novacom to run as a service and start it:

rc-update add novacom default

/etc/init.d/novacom start

Add your user to vboxusers group:

usermod -G vboxusers -a username

Now you can run the emulator (not as root):

plam-emulator

If all went well you should get prompted to select which device you want to use.

If you got a "missing version string error" instead, it most likely means your virtualbox modules are not loaded (see modprobe code above to load them).

To access the console you can use:

novaterm

Enjoy using WebOS!

Pipe Menus KDE4

For many years, I used Fluxbox as my window manager. I made the switch to KDE around the time 4.2 was released. One of the things I missed most was the pipe menu in fluxbox. When KDE 4.4 was released, I found out that you can have the pipe menu functionality in KDE. To enable it, you need to go to your Desktop Settings (right click the desktop) and select Mouse Actions. Next, set your right button to Application Launcher. You also may want to do as I have and add another action to set shift + right mouse button to use the Standard Menu.

When KDE 4.5 was released, the Application Menu was synchronized with the KDE start menu. Finally I could get rid of the start menu, but I still need to add a menu entry for shutdown/logoff and one for run. Using kmenuedit, I created a Leave button using the following command:

qdbus org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.logout 1 -1 -1

For Run, I used the following command:

qdbus org.kde.krunner /App display

For both items, you will want make sure "Enable launch feedback" is unchecked.