rob86

Hey, pretty good graphics! I especially liked the first one. Your test tube looks great there. Very unique. It's refreshing to see you put some effort and originality into your creations.. I can just imagine how cool it would be if it were animated for a software splash screen!You should consider doing some graphics design tutorials here.. I'm sure it would generate some interest.

The notorious LHC, the world's largest atom smasher and one of science's greatest modern tools, has again been temporarily damaged. A piece of bread, presumed to have been dropped by a bird flying overhead, fell into some related machinery outdoors causing overheating. The LHC is well known, and it's safety has been questioned by many people who fear it could cause disasters of End-Of-The-Word proportions, such as a black hole. As far as I know, the incident wasn't too serious, and the world wasn't about to be sucked into nothing-ness, it was merely a bit of a funny inconvenience. One of man's greatest scientific achievements put out of order by a piece of bread! ..or was it an inconvenience? Could a higher being be preventing these scientists from achieving these major scientific breakthroughs? God? Aliens? People from another dimension? These are some of the theories that have been discussed..however strange they may be!

You must not be talking about death metal fans. Cannibal Corpse sure doesn't write songs about peace and harmony. My cousin is a big fan and insists we listen to them and other similar bands when we have summer barbecues. It's the only music he likes. Their lyrics are about very peaceful things like violent rape and mutilation and a range of other strange things. You need the lyrics just to understand the vocals. It's strange music for sure, not really sure if it's my kind of thing, but as Simp said..

I stumbled upon these strange beasts while browsing through Python's manuals and they don't make any sense to me. I tried reading a few different introductions to them and it seemed so strange? What are they good for, how do you use them? What are wrappers? This is mind boggling stuff! I've never see "@" in any example code. Could someone show me a simple example of how it could be useful?

We have pretty much the same animals over here in Eastern Canada as jlhaslip has on the other side, coyotes,wolves, foxes,moose,bears. Coyotes or wolves are frequently around, almost every night but I don't consider them really deadly. They recently killed young woman somewhere in Canada but that's pretty rare I think. I sometimes like to watch them howling and barking in the moonlit field behind my house, and they always run away when they see or hear me. It's hard to even get close enough to see them, their hearing is exceptional on a quiet night. I suppose they could attack me if they were starved, but I guess that's the chance you take to enjoy nature!I don't see moose very often, but they are about the scariest things I see because of their size and big antlers. They are like the incredible hulks of Canada, they've got bulging muscles! I've always been told they are likely to charge you when they're separated from their young, but I've never seen it. I'm definitely cautious around them though. Due to their size, being the biggest thing around, they're rarely scared of anything which makes them more of a threat in my opinion than any coyotes or wolves. Moose will stand their completely unconcerned with your presence. Hearing them charge through the trees is an interesting thing to experience. They don't have to be agile, and actually crush small trees and tear limbs off bigger ones when they're running. I never see bears, though they are around. They don't seem to be as abundant in my area. I see their tracks, and I see where they clean out patches of berries, but I've only actually seen one or two in my entire life. That doesn't keep me from being a little cautious of them though, as there's always the chance they might be around.One thing that jlhaslip didn't mention that I consider one of the most terrifying animals are eagles and hawks. They might not be a threat to humans, but they are deadly killers of small pets. I've seen so many wild animals being picked up by and flown away with such ease that I can't help but worry about pets when I see one circling the skies. Once one of these birds sets its sights on something, it swoops down with such incredible precision it seems almost unreal. How can they be so high in the sky, see a mouse running in a field, and swoop down and kill it before the mouse even knows what happened? I have no idea, but it's impressive! They are completely silent, quick, and deadly. Let us just be thankful there aren't any large ones that feast on humans. As for cougars and any type of wild cat, well there's some debate over whether they even exist in my province. There are people who swear they are roaming around and some who claim to see them when driving at night. When people do send pictures to the newspapers , they're always considered fakes. The official word is there aren't any. I haven't seen any (large) cat tracks in my life.Elks.. there aren't any around here. Too bad!In general I feel my part of Canada is a very safe place. There are no poisonous creatures, there are few predators that will attack humans. Most will run away around humans. They get a bit aggressive when you get between their young and them, but that doesn't happen much.. and they mostly avoid confrontation. I'm not going to say animal attacks never happen, but it's so infrequent it doesn't bother me at all to walk in the woods. There are probably more murders and assaults in city parks than Moose attacks. I'm not sure what the official statistics are for animal attacks, but it seems a lot less common than people think. My father went to Texas,USA and every walk he took with his brother they had to constantly watch out for poisonous snakes, and this was on public walking trails, not the outback. My uncle stepped on a snake on one of those few walks and they had to call for help just to be sure he wasn't going to die. That doesn't seem very safe!I find it kind of interesting that you would stay away from Canadian animals, inverse_bloom. I've always got the impression Australia was for real outback men who fight off crocodiles and poisonous snakes with their barehands. I guess I watched too much Steve Irwin, m8. Those pictures you posted are going to give me nightmares! All of those creatures are much more scary to me than anything in Canada. At least a moose or bear you can actually see from a distance. I'd always be paranoid of stepping on a poisonous snake or spider hidden in the grass. I'm a relatively confident person in the wilderness, and I would be very weary of taking a hike in Australia! I do some geocaching, which is just a casual outdoor hobby, and I read Australian geocacher's posts about chopping through jungles of vegetation with machetes and fighting off poisonous beasts and avoiding snakes like the ones you mentioned. Pretty extreme outdoors there, but hey.. Sounds kind of fun actually..

I'm not much of an author, but I think it'd be fun to do one of those things where people write different parts of a story. Whether you have confidence in your writing skills or not, feel free to continue the story in any way you feel would be interesting or fun. Make it serious, insightful, or completely ridiculous. It's up to you!Chapter 1.It was a dark and stormy night. The rain was picking up, the patter of drops on the thin aluminum roof of my small worn down shack sounded like a thousand tiny soldiers marching out of rhythm. The haunting calls of wild coyotes pierced the thick noise of the rain. They were hungry, nourishment was scarce these days. I knew this all too well. Visible only in my imagination, these beasts were off in the distance, they were no threat to me. A much greater threat was even farther in the distance, though I felt the grip of fear from a hundred miles away. I was surrounded by tall spruce trees on three sides, an uncrossable river to the right. The Trappe River , as it was known, was rushing with immense power I can't recall observing in the past. The waves were crashing against the shore, the splashes hitting the thin walls of my shack. I found this area while searching for a safe location to hide. It was solitary, secluded, and I hopped it to be very safe.Ignoring the fact I'm living in a shack in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by wild beasts, you might come to conclusion that I'm living in a normal world. You would be correct, had you failed to read the headlines of the local Trappe Gazette. The events that transpired during the last week had changed humanity forever. I have had much difficulty accepting that reality was no longer what I had thought it to be in the past. In one quick moment, I realized how weak and infantile our concept of reality was. I realize now that there is no limit to what is possible, and things our greatest scientists and spiritual teachers could not have imagined can become take over our lives overnight. I picked up the Trappe Gazette, it was no longer crisp and fresh, it's pages were worn. I had read the article, the last one ever printed by our local press after the incident, more than seventeen times now. I searched the pages repeatedly for a shred of logic, in hope that what I was reading was not as I thought, that I might be going insane, however the truth of the past seven days in the history of Man was obvious to only the chronically skeptical.I have been so overcome by this story, that I have more vivid memories of the past few days than I have of my childhood. It all started when.......

I too preferred Thunar over Nautilus because of speed mostly. Nautilus looks almost exactly the same as Thunar for me, the only differences being folding directories and a few more things in the Places sidebar. Even the toolbars are pretty much the same, I can hardly tell them apart, but it might be my desktop environment.EmelFM2 is designed to look and work like Norton Commander, which I haven't used myself. Another file manager which I haven't tried is called Gnome Commander. It has some interesting features like remote connection and looks like EmelFM2 with icons (and a default blue background). It is noticeably slower and less responsive than EmelFM2 on my computer though. emelFM has an optional thumbnail viewing plugin , which is a somewhat handy thing missing from the default install and has to be downloaded separately. I seem to be having trouble colourizing file types as of the latest version. I had no problems in 4.? but in 6.2 it doesn't seem to work. I asked about it on their mailing list, and am awaiting a reply. This is my only gripe so far with it.I'm finding emelFM2 hard to beat for my needs, it has a great balance of speed, clean interface, functionality it seems to be customizable. The toolbar icons can be made tiny and compact too. I like it when icons take up little space.

Computer mice are looking less and less like real life mice than they did when they were first invented. They originally got their name from rodent-like their appearance. Modern computer mice have lost their tails (cords), they glow red (or other colors) at the bottom, and they aren't always white or beige coloured anymore like a mouse. Do you think this important piece of computer hardware needs a revitalized name to reflect the changing times? What would you call it?

I'm really, really liking EmelFM2. The only problem is, I have a very old version of it and can't compile the newest version without an error!. The one in the Ubuntu repo is almost 2 years old!? It's like 4.0 and the newest is 6. Some of the things I mentioned about EmelFM2 above I found more about. You can customize the colours of the file types, which is good, but I wish it was pre-set like in the shell. I'm trying to find out what changed in the last two years to update my opinion. It's kind of stupid 'review'ing such an old version. The main reason I'm so picky about file managers is because I came from Dopus on windows. I never cared much about file managers until I tried Directory Opus. Then I realized, wow, what a difference it makes to have a good file manager. I could do things faster, and more efficiently. After switching to Ubuntu, I suffered from "file manager shock". Nautilus reminded me too much of Windows' default and is very limiting after what I was used to. I kept wanting to do things that Nautilus couldn't do. I don't want to go back to that. Nautilus is probably a good choice for Ubuntu's default file manager since it fits the simple "it just works" philosophy, but it's not for me.

I have never seen his movies but like you, saw the WOW article and looked him up. None of his movies really interest me enough to watch. I was going to watch Alone in the Dark as I did play that game before, but the movie's reviews scared me off. I think all of his movies got bad reviews. Video game movies usually don't turn out too good do they? I can't think of many right now. I thought the DOOM movie was pretty bad, and was nothing like the game at all! It did have an interesting bit near the end where it was in "FPS" mode.. that was neat to see! Wing Commander was pretty bad if I remember right.. Hitman wasn't that great either. It is kind of fun to see movies about video games though, even if they are really bad and forgettable. Warcraft would make a pretty good movie, it has an interesting back story. Just don't let Uwe do it!! I think Peter Jackson (LOTR) would make a good Warcraft movie. He did an excellent job bringing the world of LOTR to life on screen. Did you know they're coming out with a 'The Sims' movie? That seems kind of boring to me, how could it be interesting? Plot climax.. Mr Smith buys a futuristic nuclear microwave and sees the grim reaper. I guess we'll found out. I wasn't aware The Sims had much of a story, but I haven't paid much attention to that franchise. I don't think Uwe is directing it anyway.

I've tried a few File Managers on Linux in search of one to use as my primary one. I'll give a little information and my opinion on them. I haven't really used any of the for very long (aside from Thunar) so I might have overlooked something so don't start flaming me about how I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't claim to! It's just a casual post, not an authoritative review. I haven't had time to test out all the "advanced" features and config options of each either.Thunar:Xfce's/Xubuntu's default. It's fast for a modern looking File manager. Looks about like Nautilus, but less featured. Personally, it's big icon (even in detail mode), spread out look doesn't appeal to me (even after any some effort to customize it). I can't seem to see any way of accessing a 'history' of directories? Which seems like a huge missing feature to me, unless I'm missing it.Nautilus:Seems to be a more feature rich Thunar. It looks about the same, but has folding directories and is a bit easier to navigate with bookmarks. It's much slower starting than Thunar, unless it loads faster on GNOME (I forget). As it looks the same as Thunar, I don't like the looks of it.Midnight Commander:A command line file manager, looks relatively powerful and feature rich, takes a little more effort to learn and love since it's more different than anything else.. Looks kind of ugly, especially with the default colour scheme and colour settings of my Gnome Terminal. It's old school, command line look definitely wouldn't appeal to everyone. On the plus side, it's very fast, probably the fastest I've tried, and it supports command line commands (!!) (ls, cd .., cp, etc) which is excellent to me. Two window panes. No Drag /Drop. Not bad if you're in a terminal and don't want to leave it. Plus, you don't need to run X to use it. emelFM2:This is definitely one of my favourites. It's got quite a few useful buttons, but the interface doesn't look cluttered. The information is tightly packed in which means more on the screen at once. The GUI icons look great and modern, and it seems to be customizable (different icon sizes, etc..). It's got a mini terminal at the bottom for command line file managing. It's sleek look comes at a price, no thumbnails and no file icons (I don't think anyway). To me, this is a good thing, as I don't like icons. It colours the filenames a bit to separate file types, I'm not sure how much. I haven't checked out the config settings yet to see how customizable it is. At default, it doesn't colourize things like archives. Two window panes. Quite fast. Drag and drop!Worker: This was modeled after the immensely powerful Directory Opus available on Windows. While it doesn't really compare to dOpus (I don't think anything on linux can) it still looks like a strong contender for the most powerful file manager. To be honest, I haven't tried this much. It has a whole bunch of buttons (not all shown at once, you have to cycle the view) ranging from quick renaming (tolower, to upper), conversion , extension changing, image manipulation, archive tools. All of these buttons are CUSTOMIZABLE, you can program them do anything you want and add more if you need it. Very useful. It has two window panes like any good File Manager. It's fast. It doesn't have a very clean interface (buttons EVERYWHERE, the date and time, free ram..). It reminds me of a jet cockpit, with tons of information packed in everywhere. It's got three file listing modes, normal listing, image listing, and information listing. Image shows a preview of the file, information shows a bunch of information like access time on the side, pretty useful. It seems to have a relatively customizable layout, but will always retain it's not so pretty "old" style look, with no graphical icons. No drag and drop here either. Doesn't seem to have a command line, unless I'm missing it.Rox-Filer:Surprisingly good for such a speedy little file manager. It looks pretty good, though doesn't have all the buttons of the more powerful Emelfm or Worker. I literally just installed it, so I haven't checked out the options much. It has icons and thumbnails. I definitely do prefer it to Nautilus or Thunar though, no doubt about that. Conclusion:It's really hard to decide on a primary file manager. EmelFM2 seems to have a great balance between powerful features and a sleek, not too cluttered look. Midnight Commander and worker are powerful, but have the "airplane cockpit" look with as many buttons and information that will fit on the screen at a time. Some might like this look, some might hate it. I don't mind it. Rox-Filer would make an excellent default manager for a distro and in fact I think it does. It's fast, does mostly everything a basic user would need, and looks pretty decent. Nautilus is definitely the slowest of all of them from my testing, and nothing about it seems to make up for the slowness. If you need thumbnails and file type icons, Rox-Filer does it but faster and better looking (that's my opinion of course). Thunar is a relatively fast Nautilus-type, but it seems to be the most feature-less of the all. I can't recommend it for anyone unless they want the absolute simplest thing out there. I have strong negative opinions about the look of Nautilus, others might not agree with me and that's okay. I prefer a tightly packed, command line style listing of files and use small fonts for everything. On Nautilus, every line of file is separated by padding and I don't like it. I like file managers for power users**. I haven't tried things like connecting to FTP and remote locations yet with any of these, I'm not sure which supports this. The ability to use command line shell commands on a file manager is a feature I never had on Windows, and I'm finding it really useful and am starting to miss it on file managers that lack it.What do you think about file managers? Do you like Nautilus, the default Ubuntu file manager? Someone must, since it IS the default pre-loaded one.( ** Yes, I know, "power users" use the command line and shell commands. I've heard that said half a dozen times while asking for recommendations. I use bash all the time, but I also prefer a GUI once in a while, too!)

Opera can't be beat for speed, at least compared to any browsers I've tried. In my opinion, they've always been an innovative company, and in their earlier days really outdid Firefox for features. Their most recent version has a "turbo boost" for slow connections. I was a loyal Opera user for a long time because they had features that Firefox didn't (mouse gestures, good tabbed browsing, sidebars, speed dial, previews, voice commands, so many things..) and it's speed was exponentially faster than the slow FF 2.0 and under. It was much easier to customize Opera's toolbars (though Firefox is more customizable if you're a programmer or download extensions). These days, Firefox has REALLY caught up thanks to the open source community. Almost every feature Opera has that Firefox didn't in the past is now available as an extension. Opera is a still great browser for someone who wants powerful features, but isn't interested in browsing mozilla addons for them.As a supporter of Opera for a long, long time, I sadly (for them) have to admit I'm drifting away from it. It's having a hard time comparing to Firefox with the dozens of extensions I have installed. They're still putting out features like Turbo-boost browsing but even so. Firefox is fast enough now that it's hard to argue that the speed difference is significant. Firefox just feels better to me now and with extensions..it rocks! I still use Opera when time is of the essence, though.

Here's what I've got, it probably has a lot of flaws (heck, it might be complete garbage) but I tried. It does work for some simple tests. Regex is really useful,but it gives me a headache trying to understand it. I'm not very good with regex but I need the practice so I'm going to attempt this. \bhttp://(www\.)?([a-zA-Z_]\w+)?example\.com/?(.*)\b Match http:// (literal string) Optionally, match www. (the ? around something means optional) Then, optionally match anything that starts with a-z, A-Z or _, and then has letters or numbers (\w), Then, match example.com and optionally include anything else after .com/ and make sure it's one "word/string" with no whitespace with \b As I explained this, I realize it has errors. For one, it doesn't support funny characters like - or _ really. Two, at the end, it DOES support anything, so "%@#%@#%!$!@%$&*%$^@#%)()@!$*@$" or something equally non-english would be valid. Three, I'm not too sure about the \b, I tried a few different things and that seemed to work the best, but I'm not too confident \b is the best method depending on your uses. I'm not sure how it works in JS, you might have to take both them out. I know this isn't exactly what you want, but it's a start... You really should check out http://www.regular-expressions.info/, it's a great little lesson on reg-ex (which is surprisingly complicated) and download some kind of reg ex testing software. On Windows, there's one called RegExBuddy which is just excellent, but it costs money so I only tried it for a few minutes. It explains everything to you in plain english, like I did above, but much more clear. I'm using the program called "Kiki" on ubuntu to check my reg ex. Not as good as Regexbuddy, but it's free. There are probably other ones, or maybe even some online ones. Something to test your regular expressions is very useful.

Woohooo! The absence of that clunky program could have saved me some trouble when I first installed Ubuntu, though it does seem like it could be cool, if it worked right for me. Really? That sounds like quite a con to me. I hope that's not truly gone for good. Try CTRL+ALT+D, if that doesn't work, download "wmctrl" and "xbindkeys" .. one lets you control windows (show desktop) other lets you bind keys. Should work, though haven't tested it for this specific thing. The super key never worked for me? I hope it's not too bad, I convinced my friend to try out Ubuntu and they're going to receive 9.10. They aren't the type of person that would settle for a buggy OS. My other friend also left Ubuntu 9.04 because of software incompatibility. I love Ubuntu, but seems it still has work to do to please the average person. Can't wait to see them! Interesting, but I hate the slowness of the GUI package manager front ends on my aging computer and prefer using apt-get in the terminal OR... wajig, which combines most of the important commands like "search" "info" into one easy to remember command. Neat feature, I guess. I really wish they'd send me a new CD.. I tried different things to trick shipit into letting me deprive some unfortunate person of an ubuntu cd for my own selfish needs..using proxies..clearing cookies. I couldn't trick it into thinking I was a different user for some reason. Unfortunately, Begging didn't seem to be option on their list of ways to acquire more cds either.

This link might be helpful..check it out. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ There are a few suggestions there.. one is to try the password "Dell". Hopefully something there can help... if not.. there seems to be some information on google about dell laptop bios password resetting I didn't read it all. edit: ...never mind didn't know the case was closed I recommend this website for learning the basics of Ubuntu, I found it very helpful when I switched. http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/index

I'm going to introduce you to three small, seemingly useless yet fun programs available to linux users. In reality, they aren't completely useless, but unless someone can tell me what they can be used for.. I'm going to say they are pretty darn close! First, download and install a couple small programs while you read. sudo apt-get install figlet toilet BANNER: This probably comes pre-installed on Linux and was used to divide papers for large print jobs. You can use it to make simple banners, and have a bit of fun. banner Xisto ^1 FIGLET: If banner gave you an insatiable desire for more banner making tools, (and I hope you're not THAT interested, because it would be weird), there is even more fun to be had. Assuming banner kept you amused for more than a minute, your figlet installation should be complete. Let's try it out. figlet Xistofiglet -f slantfiglet -kf slant There are a few fonts to try, use the figlist command to view the, and use them with the -f flag (replace slant). -k Spreads the letters out a bit. TOILET: Our third and most modern looking banner maker is called Toilet. Don't ask me where the name came from. It's kind of like FIGLET but improved. It can do colour! Using it is simple: toilet Xistotoilet -f bigmono9 --metal Xistotoilet -f future --gay Xisto There are a few options, filters and fonts to play with. The two main filters are "Metal" and "Gay". Metal gives your large banner a blue,greyish gradient colour, while the Gay filter gives you a rainbow coloured banner. Here are a few examples, unfortunately I can't show a toilet colour example because I can't paste colour. Enjoy! ###### ###### ### ## # # # # # ################################## ################################## ################################## # # # # # ## ## ###### ###### # # #################### #################### #################### # ### ## ## ### ####### ####### ####### ### ######## ########## ##### #### #### ###### ## ## ## ## ## # ## ## ## ################## ################### ################## ## # # # ############################### ############################### ############################### ############################### ## ## ## ## ## ## ### ## #### #### ################## ############## ######## # # ## ############################# ############################### ################################# # # ### ##### ##### ##### ###### ##### ############ ##### ################# ##### ###################### ##### ########### ##### ###### ##### ######## ##### # ______ ___ _____ /_ __/_____ ____ _ ____ < //__ / / / / ___// __ `// __ \ / / / / / / / / / /_/ // /_/ // / / / /_/ /_/ \__,_// .___//_/ /_/ /_/ ███████ ███ ██████ █ █ ▓▓ █ █▒██▒ ░███░ █▓██ █ █ █ ██ █ █▒ ▒█ █▓ ▓█ █ ▒▓ █ █ █ █ █ █ █░ █ █ ▒████ █ █ █ ▒█ █ █ █▒ █ █ █ █ █░ █ █ █░ ▓█ █▓ ▓█ █ ▒█ █ █ ▒██▒█ █▓██ █████ █▒ █ █ █

A lot of people use use Cron to play an audible alarm. It's not something I thought up. I thought it was useful, and it's not just about making an alarm, it's about being introduced to two useful and important parts of Linux. For example, to run something (wvdial to connect to internet for example) on startup, you simply add @reboot /thefile to the crontab. I also use it to weather images regularly. It's frequently used to keep things running in case something crashes, like eggdrop bots being run on a unix shell. Knowing how to use cron and at is in my opinion important knowledge for a linux user and quite within the understanding of anyone, there's not too much difficult or unsafe about it as long as you're reasonably confident using a command line interface. You don't even need to be a SuperUser to use cron. Just because they are built in doesn't mean they are only for unix experts, it means they have proven useful enough to keep installed by default! I wasn't going to say you understand nothing about Linux. I've only been using Linux a little while myself, I certainly don't consider myself a unixGuru. Just sharing what I learned that I found interesting. I've found that Linux isn't about being easy, it's about being powerful and useful. A lot of the appeal of Linux is power of it's CLI programs, in fact half it's GUI applications seem to be just front ends for popular CL programs. Still, I thought using cron to schedule a task was pretty easy.

You know, I could never find many videos of C.C. I found a few on the internet and they were bad quality and weren't so enjoyable because everything was so fast it blurred the video. I would have liked him probably.I guess I like a few comedians, though it's hard to pick a favourite. Are we talking about comedian-actors? Jackie Gleason (and Art carney) were funny and good actors. Don Adams was very funny. Three Stooges were entertaining slapstick. Shemp Howard (one of the stooges) had some great solo comedy though it's hard to find. While he's not a comedian, I actually find Jackie Chan (and Sammo Hung) quite funny..his earlier films are reminiscent of earlier slapstick comedy. Rowan Atkinson is kind of funny at times, but sometimes I think he's boring. Jerry Seinfeld's dry style comedy made Seinfeld a funny and witty show.. Monty Python are pretty funny.I never got too impressed with the Marx Bros.. I know they're good, and whats-his-face (why cant I remember his name?) Marx is a genius with words, but for some reason, they just don't interest me. I'm used to fast paced comedy I guess. Red Skelton..well I saw him in one movie, and it was alright.Oh, and I don't know the names of these guys -- but the ones who did the british comedy films /album "Bad News Band" etc.. holy cow, I had tears in my eyes watching that. It reminded me of being in a band with my cousin and arguing all the time. It had a lot of swearing, something I don't normally like, but it was realistic.. so I guess that made it funny.I hate comedy about fart jokes.. and other modern "dirty" comedy. I dunno, there are a lot of "comedians" or funny actors that I like. I like dry humour, or slapstick, silly simple stuff.. Charlie Chaplin would probably fit in there.If you're talking about PURE stand up comedy, well I don't really watch/listen to much of that though most of the classic comedy actors were comedians or vaudevillians at one time..

Most Helpful Member- truefusion - while many people on Xisto are helpful, truefusion seems to know a lot about everything and helped me a few times!Most Valuable Poster- The_Simpleton - interesting guy who starts or contributes to some of the most interesting spam-free threads. 1337 Programmer- truefusion - seems to be for the same reason as the other award, but his skill with different languages was helpful.Most Creative Member - patavinatech - No idea who this person is, but they wrote probably the worst poem and hence most memorable poem I ever read on Xisto.Most Reported Posts - Nameless - Somehow managed to whiz by me and almost double me on the post count despite registering after me?! I think that's an impressive amount of posts.Dog Whisperer Award - sheepdog, for the interesting animal related posts I enjoyed reading when I was new here.

I think Swiftfox is only for Linux users. You're not missing out on too much if you can't use it, it's not a huge difference. Firefox and swiftfox are actually relatively fast on Ubuntu. On XP it was really slow. Also, don't go overboard with extensions. I had almost 100 installed and it took forever to start up FF. Removing them sped things up a lot. Swiftfox starts up in a couple seconds, plain Firefox maybe a couple seconds longer.

Did you know you could quickly and easily turn your computer into an alarm clock with linux? All you need is a few different things, which are probably already installed! Preliminary step: Make sure you have SOX - Sound Exchange installed. Type the play command in a terminal, if the command is found, it's installed, if not, install SoX. sudo apt-get install soxor get it installed somehow. Next determine the audio file you wish to play. I'm not sure what formats are supported, but use whatever works for you. I use wav's. If you're not sure what to use, why not browse your drive? find / -iname '*.wav' You may be surprised and find a .wav from an application or game that would work well for an alarm. When you find a good alarm clip, make a note of it's path, copy it into a note or clipboard manager. Now, onto the Alarm. Method #1 - The recurring alarm. Let me introduce you to cron. This is the scheduling daemon on linux and can be used to run anything at any time. I won't go into the details of all the many ways to use cron, there are lots of sources on google. I will however show you how to use it to create an alarm. To edit your crontab, and add something to your computers schedulers, type crontab -e This will open up a text editor (Vi, but there are other options like emacs.. google for more information if you prefer this). If you don't know how to use Vi to edit a file, just remember that there are two modes. Edit mode and insertion mode. Push the i key to go into insertion mode which will allow you edit the crontab. Push escape a couple times, then type :wq! to exit and save your crontab. So what do you put there? If you're lucky, the first line of your crontab is a guide. You simply put the time you want the alarm to occur on the second line. Check out the letters, they make complete sense when you look at it. m = minute, h = hour, dom = date of month, month = month, dow = day of week. Time is in 24 hour military format. Sunday is 0, Monday is 1..etc Let's say you want alarm to chime every morning at 7:45am on weekdays, not weekends.. You would add something like this to your crontab. #m h dom mon dow command45 7 * * 1-5 COMMANDGOESHERE Now what do you put in the command section? Well, cron can be picky, so you need to find the direct path to SoX. Type in: which play Which will give you the path, most likely /usr/bin/play So back to your crontab, you type in #m h dom mon dow command45 7 * * 1-5 /usr/bin/play /home/username/myalarm.wav Replace /home/username/myalarm.wav with the path to your audio clip you saved earlier! And there you go, your alarm should be ready to annoy the heck out of you when you least want it to. # Method two: Believe it or not, there's another method. This method is most useful for one-shot reminders that will only occur once. It's called the AT command. It's incredibly simple to use. Simply type something like this. Don't type the <ENTER> and <CTRL-D> ... just do it. at 6:00pm tomorrow <ENTER>/usr/bin/play /home/username/dinnertime.wav <ENTER><CTRL-D> Cool! Your alarm will ring at 6:00pm the next day. Of course, you don't have to put tomorrow in. It's a very flexible command. ------- Well that's it. These two scheduling commands are of course much more powerful. You don't have to use these commands solely for playing audio, they can do anything! Read the manual for AT and CRON or google for some lessons. You won't regret it! If you have any questions..feel free to ask. I'll try to help. I probably missed something important. NOTE: Trying to open up windows or display data can get tricky with these schedulers.. it's not easy and obvious but it's possible. If you're interested, let me know.

You used VLC for music? I don't think it's really meant for that At least, I wouldn't consider it an audio player. Does it even have a database? Rhythmbox is okay, but I prefer something a bit more light weight. I've only tried a few but Sonata seems to work nice. Light weight, good database searching features. Another excellent audio player that doesn't need music player daemon running is cmus. Yes, it's a command line app. It has good features, it has multiple modes, and best of all - it's ultra fast! I don't think either of these have Jamendo or Magnatune..whatever they are, but oh well. I use one of those two, depending on how I feel. Sometimes a CLI audio player is too much for me and opt for the GUI.I've heard good things about kde's music software..Amarok is it called? I can't remember, but it sounds more powerful than R.B. I'm not too interested in organizing my songs anymore, there was a time when I was obsessed with tagging and addnig album art to every album I had, but now I just play the songs

Pidgin? Eww. It'll be a while before I use that. It would be alright -- if it actually worked. It almost scared me away from Ubuntu so I have a bad impression of it. Well, technically, it's Ubuntu's fault for ignoring dial-up users. I could never get it connected because Ubuntu's network manager or whatever it's called always said I was offline and Pidgin would complain that I was offline, even though I wasn't! You have to disable and enable it in the options to sign in.I've never used Empathy. I tried Emesene Messenger, which didn't even connect without freezing up, and was quickly removed. For a while I thought I'd be out of a decent messenger on Linux, until I found aMSN - the best option for MSN at least. Just get rid of the skin that comes with it - I recommend the Cold skin, simple, plain and easy to read. Also, one of the developers/admins at aMSN helped me tweak the GUI to my liking. I was impressed by the helpful support. Oh, and sometimes I use centerim. It's especially great when playing a game you can't alt-tab out of, you can switch to another tty to chat. Command line rules!In general, anything on Linux beats the heck out of MSN Messenger, every version of that disconnected me if I even opened a webpage. Win Messenger used to work great for a while (if you don't care for the fancy stuff) until they changed their protocol or something? It always disconnected too. I don't know what they had their time out set at, 5 seconds? Geez!How about getting really desperate? In high school, I used to connect to messengers and irc via telnet. I had to type a dozen words just to say hello to someone.

I actually wrote a reply to this a long time ago but Trap was having one of it's down times and I saved the post on my gnome Desktop and lost it during my switch to Xfce.. now I forget what I said!I'm familiar with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan..and some others. I like what I've heard from Vishwa Mohan Bhatt though I think he's a slide guitarist. I haven't heard much of his music. There's a musician Derek Trucks (American?) who studied Indian music and has done some interesting songs. I think he's a rock, jazz musician but his slide guitar playing is excellent and definitely infused with some nice ICM influences.. One nice song I can think of off the top of my head while not purely classical is Maki Madni with .. oh man, this is a long name -- Rahat Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan -- it's nice!Indian instruments are very hard to find here, they seem only be available from the big cities in Canada and cost a lot! I took an old guitar of mine and tried to modify it to sound like something remotely Indian. I had to raise the height of the strings ..lower the tuning..use skinny strings.. tune my guitar to use drone notes.. use chorus and reverb and delay effects and filters to eq out excess bass.. in the end, unfortunately its sound not surprisingly left much to be desired, though I did learn my first (and only) raga on it.. which I enjoyed playing over some bad tabla and dholak track I created.. There's an interesting software called um.. Swar Shala, which looks good, but unfortunately it seems to cost a lot. They say the price is so high because ICM isn't very popular and not many people buy their software.. too bad! It looks to be good for someone learning about ICM in general and also musicians who play the Indian instruments.You seem to know a bit about ICM, are you a musician? Do you have any recommendations for songs to listen to? I wish I could get some Indian instruments though.. they are really cool. I'm truly jealous! I know what you mean about NRI, my Indian friend wants to move from Canada to USA.. I was kind of offended! I think it'd be neat to visit India.. it seems like an interesting country. I guess you forgot the video, that's okay, I forget posts too..

The worst thing about using Beta versions of Firefox is that sometimes addon extension developers don't update their extensions for Beta releases. I didn't see anything too interesting about the new Beta that makes me want to rush out an download it, but I saw it can now show videos full screen. It doesn't bother me any, but my friend was telling me a few weeks ago how Firefox sucked because of this reason. I'll have to let them know it's been fixed. For the lazy amongst us, here is a c/p of the good stuff. By the way, I use Swiftfox. It's an (apparently) tweaked version of the latest FF that is a bit faster.