Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker!

According to today's Google Doodle, today is Bram Stoker's 165th birthday. Well, it would be if he hadn't died on April 20th, 1912 (aged 64), or if he had been bitten by his most famous creation and become an immortal vampire.

In other Google news, the only reason I saw this doodle was because Google have decided to remove the custom background images from the homepage of their famous search engine. As you can see below, I had a really nice one of a cat with its tongue out which a nagging pop-up message asked me to remove a couple of days ago.

Apparently, it's all part of Google's redesign to make it easier for people with smartphones rather than real computers to be online. Great! (Note the sarcasm.) Now pandering to all the braindead texters has made my logon a completely depersonalised experience and caused the Google image search to be as worthless as trying to find anything on YouTube.

I thought the new Blogger dashboard was bad, but they just have to keep on pushing until we all jump ship to Wordpress and DuckDuckGo instead of leaving well enough alone. When will this madness end?

Ubuntu 12.04 on an Acer Aspire AM1100-B1410A

I did something else this weekend which I swore I'd never do. No, I didn't watch "Puss in Boots" because I've already done that and thoroughly enjoyed it. I downloaded and installed the latest version of Ubuntu.

Called "Precise Pangolin" for those who care about the stupid animal codenames (I have no idea what a pangolin is, by the way), Ubuntu 12.04 is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version of Canonical's Linux operating system. This means that it will continue to get upgrades and security patches for the next three years (which is more than the life expectancy of my already four year old desktop computer).

Of course, all did not go completely smoothly for me. The installation itself only took half an hour and was fine, but it was all the tweaking that I had to do afterwards which was annoying.

As you can see from the picture above, I'm using Unity 2D because, although I can use the normal version of Unity, the "3D" version was too bloated, used too many resources and, most importantly for me, caused DVD playback to skip frames. I used my "American Psycho" DVD to test the playback using VLC player. It was too jerky to watch on Unity but perfect again on Unity 2D so I've stuck with that for now.

I also had to use Unity 2D to install my email account on Thunderbird. For some reason, it just would not automatically configure the settings for Gmail under the normal Unity but it worked fine in 2D. I think Unity is still pretty buggy so I've also installed the various Gnome desktops and Xubuntu/Xfce although I probably won't use them unless I start having major problems and can't log in.

Gnome 3 is horrible to use but there's a "fallback" version which looks and works a lot like Gnome 2. I'm glad that the developers had the sense to include it as this was one of the things which drove me to Linux Mint 11. The recycle bin on the bottom panel was bizarrely missing but I've used a program called MyUnity to put it back on the Unity desktop.

I couldn't switch the positions of the icons on the "Dash" dock thing on the left either without doing it under normal Unity and then returning to Unity 2D (but it won't leave them resized). Canonical really need to fix this with Unity 2D.

Other bugs I found were that the Thunar file manager took ages to start on Xubuntu (which was something to do with gfvs not mounting properly, and there was a cosmetic "Could not write bytes: Broken pipe" message when logging out which is some bug in the Plymouth system). I solved the former by Googling for a solution and the latter by running a disk check on startup (which opened the GRUB bootloader at one point before restarting). Both problems have now disappeared.

Rhythmbox has replaced Banshee as the music player. It crashed on me when I first imported my music library but appears to be working properly now. Again, I think it was a Unity problem and I probably should have used Unity 2D when I first set it up. I prefer to use Audacious to play back music anyway.

One thing which is still annoying me after trying out the Guest Session is that occasionally I will get asked to re-enter my keychain password if I log out or shut down as soon as I've logged in. This must be something to do with the speed at which the keychain information is loaded. It didn't do it before I tried out the Guest Session (which froze the computer the first time and caused me to have to shut down incorrectly by holding in the power button) but I'll just have to live with it until someone else posts a solution. The Guest Session works now but it's unnecessary on my or any other home user's computer anyway.

Anyway, I suppose this is sort of a review of Ubuntu 12.04 so I'll just wrap it up by saying that Unity isn't as bad as a lot of people would have you believe. With 12.04, Canonical have really polished the turd and actually made it usable.

Aesthetically, Unity really only replaces the "Quick Launch" icons and the "Open Windows" applet from the bottom panel of Gnome 2. There's a lot more behind the scenes, of course, including an Apple-like way of finding files and applications which is still slower to me than the previous three-part menu but it's all very smooth, it's free, and it works.

For most people, Ubuntu 12.04 will be the best version of Linux until Mint 13 gets an official release.

I bought that for a dollar - part 8

What is it? It's a USB pumpkin lantern for Hallowe'en, of course.

Although the picture isn't actually of the one which I bought from Big Lots for $1 last year (due to not having any batteries in my camera at this present time), it's exactly the same. You can now buy these all over the place although I suggest eBay especially as you can now get bigger ones which change colour.

It's a kind of pointless decoration as the light isn't very strong in it and it takes up a USB socket which could be better used for something else, but if you work in an office where you aren't allowed to really decorate then it's something you can probably get away with.

My Top Ten Freeware Applications

Having just downloaded the beta version of Firefox 5 onto the Windows XP part of my laptop, I was disappointed to discover that Linux Mint doesn't have a version available for it yet. Since I've decided to try and make a bit more use of Windows XP while I'm waiting for somebody to fix the ACPI problems that I'm having with the new Linux kernel, even though this Microsoft operating system is nearly 10 years old now, I found that I could still keep it fairly up to date with free software.

Apart from my Lady Gaga wallpaper, here's what I've downloaded recently to try and keep the environment as close as I can to my preferred Linux.

1. VLC Media Player 1.1.9
Apart from Firefox, this is one of the first things which I download whenever I install a new operating system. For someone who watches a lot of movies like me, you can't beat VLC Media Player on any platform.

2. AbiWord 2.8.6
Whereas some people need all the bells and whistles of OpenOffice or LibreOffice, I don't actually use a word processor all that often but, when I do, I like to have it pop-up as quickly as possible. AbiWord does more than I need it to do and it's very useful for creating the occasional blog.

3. Gnumeric 1.10.14
When I need to open a spreadsheet, I add Gnumeric as well although I really have no great use for it otherwise. I once tried to make a database of my Mill Creek DVD collection but so far have never completed it. I was amazed to find that there was a Windows version of Gnumeric as I've always believed that it was a Linux only application.

4. Firefox 5
If I'm ever forced to use a barebones version of Windows, I use Internet Explorer for just long enough to download Firefox. From then on Firefox is my default web browser. Most versions of Linux have Firefox installed already or this would be number one on my list. I've also tried Google Chrome/Chromium but it's just not as good yet.

5. WinRar 4.01
I never have any use for this on Linux but as a user of WinZip for many years, I discovered that this was a much better alternative on Windows XP and I tend to need it almost instantly.

6. Adobe Reader 10.0.1
Again this is not something which I'd fall over myself to use on Linux or a Mac because it's become so bloated but I still have to have it on Windows XP to view a lot of pdf attachments and ebooks. I can't believe it's got to version 10 as there's really no reason to download anything other than version 5.

7. Skype 5.3.0.116
I've never really got into using Skype for the telephone side of things but it's a useful instant messenger at times. I could easily live without it but I find myself installing it on everything just in case I ever need it.

8. Pidgin 2.7.11
Since I use all the instant messengers, it's nice to be able to access them all in one program. Although ICQ doesn't seem to work through Pidgin anymore, this is a much better alternative to bloated offerings such as Trillian (which I used to love more than anything up until a couple of years ago).

9. The Gimp 2.6.11
I've never been able to work out how to use Adobe Photoshop as I was an avid user of Paint Shop Pro until it became completely useless to me on the newer versions of Windows. Because I got used to the GIMP's inclusion on Ubuntu, it's something that I still have to download. It does everything I need a graphic program to do and, of course, it's completely free. Seashore (a lighter version of GIMP) is the only decent alternative when I'm using a Mac.

10. CCleaner 3.07.1457
I use this a couple of times after installing everything on Windows XP and then never run it again. It's a great program for tidying up the start menu entries and cleaning the registry but of little value to me otherwise.

I also tend to download a few programs which I don't think I've ever used but I install them anyway including FileZilla, Audacity, ThunderBird and ImgBurn. I don't use FTP for anything, no longer need to edit a podcast, only use web-based email, and have nothing to burn to CD or DVD. Of course, there's always the possibility that I might need these programs one day.

For anti-virus software, I use Avira or Avast depending on whichever version is getting the best reviews at the time though I used to be very happy with AVG and ZoneAlarm before they slowed my computers down to an unusable crawl.

What are your favourite free programs?

What's on your desktop?

Here's a screen capture from my Acer laptop because I can't think of anything more worthwhile to post right now. And, yes, I do like Paris Hilton. She's the perfect accompaniment to a winter day.