Smoke

Smoke
I have been trying to get a photo of Smoke in his new dining area, but it requires flash photography for which Smoke has a very low tolerance. After two flashes, he stalks out of the area in disgust. That white stuff on his mane is snow, not an artifact.

Fedora Core 3

This afternoon, Fedora Core 3 will be officially released. I have been running the final release candidate for over a week now, and am quite pleased with it.

I can now drop my digital camera in its cradle, and push the button, and a menu will pop up asking whether I want to download my photos, opening gThumb to view and manipulate the photos. (This is a features of the Gnome desktop.) Also new to Fedora Core is the presense of Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird .8 as part of default distribution. After a few days of using FC3, I read the Release Notes.

Yesterday, as an impulse item, Jack picked up a 128M Micro Advantage memory stick at OfficeMax. I just plugged it into a cable, and an icon popped up on my desktop allowing me to browse the empty device. Then I dragged a few folders to it and everything just worked as desired.

It is very odd to think that a small device that weighs almost nothing can hold six times as much data as the hard drive on our first Intel machine, an XT clone.

OpenOffice.org and labels

Garry Knight’s Linux Stuff has a useful looking tutorial for creating flat file databases using OpenOffice.org, along with some other Linux stuff. Evidently, you can create and populate dBase format files from OpenOffice.org.

I spent yesterday coaxing OpenOffice.org to produce labels on our aging laser printer (ActionLaser 1500, a LaserJet III clone), but used a spreadsheet as a data source. Making the labels was not particularly intuitive, but the documentation included with OpenOffice.org worked. I printed the labels one page at a time because our printer’s feed mechanism is almost worn out, and tends to jam when presented with anything other than plain text weight paper. I plan to retire the printer when the current toner cartridge empties or the printer jams so badly I can’t free it, but it just keeps going and going. Those old laser printers were tough little beasties, unlike the current crop of inkjet printers that look like they would blow away in a mild breeze.

There seems to be a bug (or at least a distinct lack of flexibility) in using OpenOffice.org to make more than one page of labels. I managed to do, but the label synchronization process slowed to a crawl. It wasn’t a big issue, because of our printer limitations, but would be annoying if you had a more functional printer.

1999 Australia Trip

A few years ago, Jack uploaded a bunch of photos from our 1999 trip to Australia. Due to the space limitations that we had at the time, we had to take it off our website. Then we lost the source for the commentaty, but not the photo scans themselves. Last weekend, Jack recreated it as a photo album, and it is now on his weblog, Exempli Gratia.

TargetAlert

TargetAlert is Firefox plugin that I found when someone mentioned it for its ability to alert that a clicked link will attempt to load an Adobe Acrobat file. What I really value though is that it warns (by a little icon beside the link) that a clicked link will open in a new window, allowing me to Ctrl-Right Click (or Middle Click on Linux) so that it will open in a tab instead.