Meebo Me

I love this web messenger, but hate that I have to keep the browser open to use it. It has a really nice GUI that would look wonderful on my desktop outside of the browser window! Since I have this green theme thing going on, I set the theme for Meebo to be green, and it looks really great. Reason why I’m using this is because I was testing to see if I still get disconnected on MSN and it turns out (as said in a previous post) that I do still get disconnected. I’ve concluded that it’s the wireless.

Click the preview below to view the full image.

Nintendo DS Lite

For Christmas, David gave me a Nintendo DS Lite, along with a couple games besides the two it came with. A while back I had seen Brain Age on TV and thought it was really neat to be able to “improve” your brain and wished they made Brain Age for the computer. So, he bought me Brain Age and the New Super Mario Bros. game. The two games it came with was a Sonic Rush and Monster Trucks. I’m not too fond of the Monster Trucks game because it’s really not that exciting. Sonic is a little hard on such two tiny screens when he goes really fast and moves from one to the other. And, I recently bought myself the Animal Crossing game because it looked cute and I wanted to test out the wireless. Only problem is that our wireless network isn’t accepted by the DS, so I have to wait.

Anyway, the reason for me writing about this is that today I went to my prenatal appointment and in the waiting room there was a boy playing on the DS. There was a girl a seat or two away from him playing something else, not really sure what. But after the boy had left the waiting room, the girl pulled out a DS and started playing.

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openSUSE 10.2

OpenSUSE 10.2 is the newer version of the Linux distribution by Novell. I had tried 10.1 at first, because that is all I had on a DVD, but this laptop (the system I installed it on) didn’t appear to like it. It ran very slow. According to others’ experiences, it was an issue with 10.1, not my laptop.

When I tried installing 10.2, I noticed a big difference in the speed of things loading on the screen compared to 10.1. I unfortunately had to go through a very long Internet install, because the DVD drive wasn’t recognized by openSUSE I guess. I’d say about 2+ hours.

Everything seemed to work right after openSUSE was installed, except for the wireless card, which I guess is normal. Following some guides on the Internet, nothing seemed to get it working, although openSUSE did recognize it on its own. It turns out that I needed to use the drivers that came with the card, rather than downloading them and then change one module setting in the hardware settings to display “ndiswrapper”.

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Terminal on Demand

Anytime I install Linux I have to customize it how I like it. This includes adding little “widgets”, as most people would call them, on the desktop. I usually would start off with opening a terminal (gnome-terminal) and customizing it so it is transparent and without a border or frame. Then I would have a terminal right on the desktop to use whenever I needed.

This is where Yakuake comes in. I’m not sure how I found it. Currently, the developer doesn’t keep the website up-to-date, but you can go here to a page that has information about it and a link to download.

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History of the Graphical User Interface (GUI)

I found a website that showcases Graphical User Interfaces. You might find it interesting to see how far back it goes, via the timelines. It starts from 1981 and ends at 2007 (I’m sure we all can guess which one is supposed to be released in 2007 (Hint: Microsoft)).

Also included on the website are articles and books related to the different Operating Systems. Another fun thing is seeing the different advertisements that have been placed in magazines, videos, on the Internet, and more.

I won’t spoil too much. Just visit this link to go to the website. And have fun!