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the "pre-blog polls", now reside bellow the blog. please jump to the end of the page to have a little vote in them, just for fun. :)

... now, on with the rambling blog!

Saturday 15 October 2011

sidness

i just re-read http://digitslinuxblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/so-browsers-n-stuff.html and realised, when i mentioned i was on squeeze, that i hadnt told my blog what i did after that... i upped my crunchbang to debian sid. the bleedin edge debian. :)

it's actually rather nice. quite quite useable. ok, so i wouldnt recommend it to complete newbies, but it's totally useable, and not yet throwing any nasty bumps at me, so doesnt seem to warrant, at all, the scaremongering i've witnessed it receive in the 7 years i've been using linux. "oh no, dont use sid unless you really know what you're doing".... well i dont "really know what i'm doing", and i managed gentoo, slackware and arch ok, so i think sid shouldn't pose any problems i can't handle either. :P

also... it's not quite as bleeding edge as arch, or even gentoo for that matter. heck, by comparison it's downright ancient! from all the hype, i really expected more problems, and newer software. this feels barely a scratch above squeeze! (and remember, squeeze is now their stable branch, not their testing branch).

anyways, having said that, and being someone who's gotten spoiled with gentoo, arch and slackware, sid is definitely preferable to leaving my crunchbang lagging behind the times with a stable branch. ....'he says for now, before there's been any trouble'.

idk, maybe the hyped warning was more viable back in the day, and all the stuff synaptic seems to have been doing to protect me from installing broken packages, is a more recent addition. whether new or old, it's probably the biggest factor in making sure my sid box remains useable.

...anyways, that's enough waffling to my blog.... i got stuff to do. :)

mypaint n other musings

just been playing around with mypaint.

oh my!

tis very lush indeed.


right from the off, i am quite taken with this piece of software, and shall be installing it on all my operating systems asap.

i'm a wacom fanboy. i have my wacom intuous1 a4 usb tablet for the big workstation, and my lenovo x60t is also wacom "penabled".

mypaint makes the gimp look rather "industrial". stoic, sterile and starchy, even.

mypaint has now even got me considering reviving "the worker", a comic strip series i started back in 4th year of highschool, during "graphic communication" short course class.

it's such a joy drawing with this.

somewhat like "painter" that those of you from the proprietary software world will be familiar with.

given my recent increase in development interaction [started writing bug reports and feature requests for sunflower file manager and others], methink's i'll be getting to grips with this and seeing if i can lend a hand or drop some suggestions.

oh how i love free software.

the longer one is away from proprietary software, and the more one spends time with freedomware/"free software"/"open source software", the more one blends and becomes one with the software.

like just recently i saw a thread about visualisations in vlc (seems to be one of the areas of fluff it lags behind other media players), and how a guy from slackware had got them working... hehe, those slack guys live so much closer to the metal, if anyone was gonna sus it, it'd be a slacker. praise bob! XD

suffice to say, i'm living the dream more and more.

bring on the free energy, so we can make our way towards the negligeable-reproduction-cost for hardware, so the free software movement really will need to change their name to the freedomware movement, to include the free hardware movement too. :) viva liberty!



...

oh, but back to sunflower... mmm, i do love it when you find something that not only do you love massively, but also find so much room for improvement!

sunflower has got me thinking of ditching pcmanfm, my long time fave file manager. only thinking though. not likely to put any action towards that for a while. there are still a few niggles with sunflower. but certain enough i've rearranged a few keybinds in my openbox* configuration to accomodate it.

*yes! shocker! i'm back in openbox, not xmonad or scrotwm just now. ... partly/only because i'm on a fresh crunchbang install. i had realised i didnt have a proper working useable os on my laptop anymore, having been tinkering around making lightweight slack, slitaz and arch distros in numerous partitions. it was a distro-development minefeild... not a properly working and usable [for the every day joe] laptop anymore. ... so i've been installing a number of games too... and wine apps.... like musagi!

yes, indeedy, creativity and creativity's productivity, are returning. the development insanity is retreating. ... well... i'm still working on the EPIC install/remaster script for witch... got it up to being ready for some first test runs, just for the gentoo installation section. there's still millions to do for it. debug and clean up the gentoo install section, write the install sections for funtoo, exherbo, etc etc etc, and debug them, re-write as smaller functions so it becomes more modularised and interchangeable between distro bases, and of course, last but not least, the remastery bit which rather than a hack of slitaz's tazlito, looks more likely now i'll hack out a script version of: http://blahonga2.yanson.org/howtos/livecd/ (phew, i thought i'd have to use metro if i wanted a more gentoo-esq native way... good ol slackers to the rescue again)

nnnnnoice.

oh, and one last bit about the creativity...
i've been making a few more audio tracks recently (not just with musagi)... i might get that next album out soon after all...
heh, there, i've done it now, we'll see if that saps the projects energy, or lights a fire under my ass to get it done. SURELY i have enough tracks by now to pick from for "pHĎ•morphia". ...oh man, i havn't even thought what the cover will look like yet...

ah the joys of productivity. i better not work too hard, and have a repeat of winter 2008/09, where i worked so focused and like a workaholic, i neglected my vitaminD levels, fell into a deep ass nasty S.A.D. that triggered the worst anxiety episodes of my life (yeah, even worse than when i was getting subtle death threats n being told i was getting too close and too loud... but that's a story for my biography, not my blog, lol.)

rather looking forward to the future again. they say those with aquarius sunsigns always think 50 years ahead, and yep, that's pretty close to the truth of it, though as laudible and high minded as that might sound, living it, can be incredibly painful at times. i think it's more like we're from the future, and get born into the past. ... so i get incredibly impatient waiting for stuff to come to fruition, like how i remember/expect them to be, and sometimes, it gets fucking terrifying that it might not pan out like that, as we experience the [alegedly] necessary brinkmanship that causes us to realise where we're going, and steer a new collective path.

what caused this turn around in perception? maybe it was the year of supplementing with 5000iu of cholecalciferol (vitD3) a day to bring my levels back up. maybe it was just that cumulation of experiences on the course that tipped the balance. or maybe it was that moment when i looked around and counted how many wind turbines i could see from my house, and i remembered how far we'd come in my lifetime, and consciously eased my impatience with that aquarian future-born expectation, and just took it as a sign that we are heading in the right direction after all. we are heading to satya yuga.

...and it's hands on.

:)

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