Probably best to read the link above, since I definitely don’t have time to write something anywhere near as good, but in short, it’s an introduction to Dana Hunter’s Carnival of Elitist Bastards which attempts to combat (or at least provide some resistance to) the apparent American tendency towards anti-intellectualism and a tendency to disregard what the experts say if it contradicts what people want to be true.

As I mentioned, the above introduction is much better than this little blurb and I highly recommend that you read it.

Not only do you get to use the VoIP client and high-quality $7 Skype-certified, noise-cancelling microphone of your choice, you can trap telemarketers in a voice-mail maze of your own fiendish design.

In essence, an FXO card is the “voice” portion of a voice modem isolated and made Linux compatible so Asterisk users will buy them. As such, they’re cheaper than an equivalent voice modem and, since voice is the core function rather than an afterthought, their noise/echo-cancellation is usually better.

Oh, and if you want to plug traditional telephones into VoIP… perhaps to use Asterisk as a full-fledged PBX, you’ll want an FXS card (internal) or an ATA (external, Analog Telephony Adaptor). (FXO cards act as phones, FXS cards act as phone lines)

• A faint background image in your terminal reduces eye-strain. (source)
• KDE users can use kioexec to pass URLs as command-line arguments to non-KDE apps. (source)
• set ttymouse=xterm2 will fix mouse support in Vim when you’re running it inside GNU Screen. (source)

Did you ever wonder what arcane incantations went into customizing that “ActionList: viewmode_toolbar” subsection in your Konqueror toolbar? Wonder no more.

First, anyone who has used both Kubuntu and another distro (eg. Gentoo) will notice that it’s possible to change the number of dropdown buttons. I’m happy with the three I have, so I didn’t really look into this very closely, but apparently this patch file will switch between the two configurations when properly applied:

http://launchpadlibrarian.net/4891395/un84.diff

Now that the difficult part is out of the way, here’s the part that is so typically “KDE voodoo”. Easy to do… but you have to know it’s there first. (Which is still better than GNOME in my opinion, but that’s just me)

If you want to change the order of the buttons, remove (or re-add) entries (but not change which ones go into which buttons), or re-order the entries within each button (Keep in mind that this also lets you control which one gets the ‘default for this button’ status), here’s what you do:

1. Go into the file association controls (Configure Konqueror –> File Associations is a nice quick way)
2. Choose inode/directory and click the Embedding tab
3. Re-order, add, and delete KParts.

It’s that simple. My suggestion is to install FileLight and then make it the top-most item in the right-most button with the traditional disk-usage viewer the bottom-most one.

Here are the relevant pages I ran across while googling. The rest was just experimentation on a hunch.

• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kdebase/+bug/43949
• http://strabes.wordpress.com/2007/04/05/make-konqueror-use-your-default-view-mode-in-new-tabs/

Just a blog post I ran across with some excellent tips for evaluating how difficult it will be to learn a given language. Not necessarily something I’d use (since I’d pick a language based on what it would get me and then soldier on, rather than learning languages based on how easy it’ll be) but something to keep in mind nonetheless.

I just pushed my attempts at RAR and GIF handling in Python to my useful hacks page.

The GIF one functions as a partial validator, but it’s main designed purpose was to tell static from animated GIFs without a ton of dependencies.

The RAR one is only really useful for identifying RAR files by header and listing their contents so far, but I eventually hope to add support for extracting files which were stored without compression. (Usually video files, as the docstring says)

Enjoy.

Given how automated it is, it’ll probably get updated frequently. (I just drag-and-drop files into the FTP client and it does the rest)

Enjoy.

Anyone who enjoys reading about interesting species should take a look at this. Same for anyone who likes laughing at amusingly-named creatures.

I’m a bit bogged down with work right now, but I can at least share something useful. Enjoy.

Just a bit of geek humor that I ran across and felt like sharing.