ronny.haryan.to

After a few months of “winter” we finally got a taste of Sydney’s infamous hot weather yesterday, and again today. The average temperature was around 22° for the past month or so, yesterday’s high was around 35°! And right now my weather applet says 34° and it’s going to get hotter in the afternoon. I look at the swimming pool outside my window, it’s so inviting!

Many times I came across pictures that I thought would look great for my desktop background wallpaper. However, after I set them to be my wallpaper, they were so good that they looked too “sharp” and they made it hard to distinguish between the desktop items and the wallpaper. (I know some people like having a clean desktop with nothing on it, but I beg to differ.)

I don’t remember exactly how I came up with the idea, I think I saw one of tigert‘s wallpapers, it was blurred. It seemed strange at the moment, I thought “Who would want to look at a blurry picture?”, but I gave it a try anyway. And it actually looked good, it created the illusion that the wallpaper is pushed farther to the background. Just like when you take a photo of your friend, for example, you focus on your friend and not the background.

It’s very easy to blur a picture using GIMP. Simply open the original picture, and apply one of the blur effects/filters, I normally use Gaussian Blur (RLE) with a radius of 5 pixels. You could experiment with other filters and the radius because your screen size (or “resolution”) might be different from mine. This simple trick works great on scenery type of pictures but not celebrity close-up photos and the like.

Original:

Blurred:

My Yahoo! Mail is rendered funny in Firefox 1.0PR (Linux).

I suspect it has something to do with some image being blocked, but the wierd thing is that I don’t block any images from yahoo.com domain! I tried opening the same page in my flatmate’s Firefox 1.0PR (Windows XP), and also using a different user in the same Linux box, it was rendered fine in both cases. I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t have time to look into this as I don’t use Yahoo! Mail that often. Has any of you encountered the same problem?

Those of you who use Gentoo Linux and GNOME would be pleased to hear that GNOME 2.8 is no longer hard-masked, at least for x86. There are a bunch of new dependencies below that I had to unmask before I can emerge gnome 2.8. This list is not complete and may differ for your system, if I miss anything below please post in the comments.

dev-libs/libcroco
net-libs/libsoup
dev-util/intltool
gnome-extra/gal
gnome-extra/libgtkhtml
dev-util/desktop-file-utils
x11-libs/pango
gnome-extra/evolution-data-server
app-admin/gnome-system-tools
net-analyzer/gnome-nettool
media-sound/esound
net-misc/vino
x11-libs/libxklavier
gnome-base/libgtop
gnome-extra/evolution-webcal
gnome-base/orbit
dev-libs/libIDL
dev-libs/atk
gnome-base/gnome-volume-manager

I’m compiling right now, and will post an update on it a bit later.

Update: emerge told me that linux-headers and libgtkhtml are blocking, so I removed them and emerged linux26-headers instead since I’m using a 2.6.8 kernel anyway. emerge also wanted to upgrade gettext first before linux(26)-headers but it would fail to compile, so make sure you install linux26-headers first before gettext.

Update: 9:34pm – Finally it finished compiling about an hour ago. I’m now writing this from GNOME 2.8.0 with no problems. I just have to do ‘sudo rc-update add hald default‘ to make hald (and dbus) start at boot/init time. Kudos to the Gentoo GNOME team and the GNOME developers, I’m sure it must have been quite an effort to make it work together and nicely after waiting for quite a while. It was worth the wait for me. I don’t need to write another review of GNOME 2.8, do I? :-)

Did you receive an email from me with an “unknown” attachment? If you did and you want to know what the “unknown” attachment is and why I “attached” it, then please read on.

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