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Downtown

Went to a seminar downtown Toronto today. It was a nice change from the usual routine. I love seeing the city wake up and come alive. There’s just something slightly awe-inspiring about it.

I also saw huge crowds on the street around 10AM. Turns out the Scotiabank centre was having an evacuation drill. Not something you see every day.

And I don’t know why the first picture appears rotated.

Enable Desktop Effects in Kubuntu 10.10 using radeon driver

Just installed Kubuntu 10.10 on my old ThinkPad T43p. It has an ATI FireGL V3200, which is similar to the Radeon X600. The latest fglrx driver doesn’t support this card anymore, however the open-source ‘radeon’ driver does. The driver is enabled by default in a fresh install of Kubuntu maverick, however KDE desktop effects are not enabled. After some research, I found that “KWin has detected that your OpenGL library is unsafe to use, falling back to XRender.”

The solution then is to force Kwin to enable desktop effects and stop complaining.

Edit ~/.kde/share/config/kwinrc

add

DisableChecks=true
OpenGLIsUnsafe=false

to the

[Compositing]

section

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=3113529.msg240826#msg240826

Thanks to Rog131 of kubuntu forums.

Screenshots from the past

So I was going through my old hard drives today, and came across a few old desktop screenshots. It’s interesting to see what I was up to back in the day… Using MandrakeLinux, testing Windows Vista….

Kindle

Just received my new Kindle 3 today. Was pleasantly surprised. It’s light, thin,and very easy on the eyes. The built in webkit browser is quite good,if you don’t mind browsing in greyscale. I’m actually typing this post usimg the full WP admin page on my Kindle. The free 3g is also a fantastic plus. Wikipedia,Facebook, e-mail and news,from almost anywhere in the world, for a one-time fee of $189!

oh, and it reads books too. Quite well. I’m hoping this will help me get back into reading… We’ll see.

My one major gripe is the poor keyboard. Typing any symbol other than a period requires awkwardly navigating through an on screen Symbols panel usimg the directional pad. i think they could take a lesson from the BlackBerry symmbol input panel, which also displays am on screen table of symbols, but has each one mapped to a hardwarebutton to avoid havimg to scroll around.