Painting of the Future
Sometimes when I’m working, I just get ideas that are, at that moment, quite interesting. After looking at how my Apple Screensave (I was having lunch) was displaying pictures and zooming in and out of them a bit, I started thinking about The Home of the Future. Of course, each home of the future has several touch-screens on the walls, to easily access all the high-tech gizmo’s we have sprewn around the house.
But what do those display when they’re not in use? Why, pictures of course! Artistic usage of screensavers. I can imagine photographers selling subscriptions to their site, so your screensavers get a login to download new pictures from the site every day. And of course your unread RSS headlines are displayed now and again on the screen. Maybe your stock quotes, if you’re interested in those kinds of things.
The Information Age has just started. Mark my words.
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Printing to Remote Cups server from Mac OS X.4.1
Since I only use the Canon S600 that’s connected to my father’s pc, I needed my PowerBook to connect with that machine. I’ve been looking for the solution for a few hours (since it seems not doable from the Print Setup from Mac OS X), and I finally found a very simple, yet effective solution here. You need to create a file in your home-directory called .cupsrc and put the following to lines in it:
ServerName anouk
Encryption IfRequested
I added “anouk” to my /etc/hosts file. Not sure what the second line does, though. But now it works like a charm, and that’s what’s most important.
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Switched to Ubuntu
With the tv showing heart rending eyewitnesses reports in the background, I feel the need to report on my progress of the Ubuntu installation on my dad’s desktop. The first results are very, very promising. Ubuntu feels a lot faster and has a lot less trouble with many things. For example, Hanneke (my dad’s girlfriend) had trouble with certain email in Evolution. They would lock the program and crash it. Under Mandriva, that is. With Ubuntu, she uses almost the same Evolution and has no trouble at all.
I did have to install some programs for my father to use, like KMail, which aren’t usually installed under Ubuntu, but I wasn’t able to import his KMail-tree into Evolution, so I saw no other solution for it. Well, switching to IMAP one of these days would be a really good thing. Also, I had to tweak the KMail config file (~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc) a bit to point to the directory Mandriva uses for email under KMail, which is ~/.Mail instead of Ubuntu’s default ~/.kde/share/something/more/here. That was easy to find out, but I can imagine people having difficulty with that switch.
All in all, I think they’re very happy with the result so far. I’m considering switchin to the development branche of ubuntu on thei machine, though. Some things could be a bit better imnsho.
Terrorist attack
When I got behind my computer at about noon, Bart told me there had been some explosions in the London Underground. At the moment, Blair and other persons, have already told the world the six explosions are almost certainly a coördinated terrorist attack. I feel sorry for all those people that were hit by such an attack.
I’m afraid these kinds of attacks do nothing but harm. It doesn’t help with anything at all. I don’t see why people get so sick with hatred that they decide to attack innocent civilians. I mean, yes, the USA is still keeping their prisoners under torture in Guatanamo Bay. Yes, they do terrible things to those prisoners. But how can honest civilians, just taking the public transit to work, be blamed and punished for such things? Terrorist attacks only help to increase hatred between all parties.
I’m afraid these terrible incidents will be used to push normally undesirable measures through parliament. I hope people will keep their heads on.
