Well, you may notice that the front page of this site looks a little different, or at least, the entries do. This is because Livejournal, which normally powers it, seems to have gone down.

I’ve modified things according to the advice of the Homepage Security Agency – see, I kept prepared, Donald Rumsfeld was right – so I can make entries. It’s not ideal but it should work.

This shit better not continue, is all I can say. I paid a large sum to Livejournal for permanent membership on the basis that its run of stability would continue.

Found a GTK theme to mimic Aqua. You can see the results in the following screenshot, if you’re interested:

XLiquid_GTK-1.0.1 screenshot using Gimp (147K)

The theme can be found here on Freshmeat. So, at least my X11 apps will look vaguely like they fit in.

I was experimenting with different Windowmaker themes, too, but while they may look nice, Apple’s quartz-wm window manager is still technically superior. It interacts way, way better with the rest of the Quartz desktop, unsurprisingly. Stuff like windows behaving more like individual Quartz app windows and being properly stackable, cut and paste integration and so on. So I’ll stick with that unless I start using almost all X11 apps for some reason.

I realised yesterday on the train to Baltimore that I am most relaxed while travelling, or more accurately when actually in transit. Travelling on the whole is a stressful and tedious thing. I hate waiting for trains and buses, I hate things being late. But I’ve noticed before that I like railway stations, airports, other transport cathedrals, they relax me. » Continue reading “Happiest In Transit”

KDE wasn’t working, and wasn’t practically going to, so I went a bit more basic and installed Windowmaker.

Screenshot of standard Quartz-wm (138K)

Screenshot of Windowmaker (139K)

Windowmaker certainly works, but I’m using Apple’s X11 which has the Quartz window manager, and that has the advantage that your windows are properly integrated with Quartz ones – you don’t have to bring the entire X11 app to the front to get them. The appearance is also slightly jarring (if not too bad). I’m sure I could get some sort of theme for Windowmaker that made it look like Quartz, but not as well as Quartz itself.

Of course, after I did that, I was playing with the .cshrc files and managed to stop X11 from loading. Being an idiot, I then installed a new copy of X11 for no good reason to see if that would fix it. All it needed was a reboot. My disc space seems to have gone down by a couple of hundred meg from doing that, and I have no idea where. Maybe I’m just imagining it. Maybe it was never there in the first place. I’ve managed to use up 27.94 GB of my disc in the few weeks I’ve had this thing. Perhaps I should stop ripping all my CDs into iTunes. But it’s just too easy, dammit!

I downloaded the new version of iPhoto (screenshot here, 91 K, some identifying details blurred) but frankly, apart from the addition of a trash bin, I can’t see any difference. It appears to start up a bit quicker though, which is good, and I’m told that you can archive pictures to CD and DVD more easily.