Recently, Firefox started using the speakers when it pops a dialog. (I think it started with 3.5.) In a typical replaying of the old and angst filled story, the developers insist that this undesired behavior is not a bug. Firefox is just using your system sounds like it's supposed to, they say. Many of us in the minimalist camp insist that our system doesn't have system sounds. No, of course we don't have a system sounds control p… Continue

I moved my post from the forum to here, because it turns out it probably should have been put here in the first place. Sorry!

I was installing the Catalyst developer framework in Perl using Local::Lib the other day, and i could not help but notice an annoying sounding warning stating that my version of Perl, 5.10.0, which comes with the Slackware 13.0 GNU/Linux distribution, has the "Unknown error bug". Which makes fuzzy errors or doesn't report anything at all if there is something wrong with… Continue

I'm up to three Gentoo machines around me and one elsewhere, and I've been seeing the use for nightly syncing. I've been syncing by hand about once a week, but experience shows that I tend to miss a week if I'm unusually involved in something, and there's far too much chance that the week I miss will be the one when some attention requiring upgrade hits stable. This leaves the choice of picking the simple upgrades out by hand, which uses much more time, or raising the priority of the complex upg… Continue

Unless you're superhumanly careful, if you have computer knowledge, you'll end up being the go to person for someone's computer questions. And sooner or later, they'll get a camera or a scanner and an account on Facebook or Myspace, and they'll want to rotate, crop, and resize an image before uploading it for all their friends. All the users who can handle The Gimp will probably have found it and won't be asking the question, but what to do for the ones who can't handle its complexity?

S… Continue

Fans of the web comic xkcd (warning: sometimes not safe for work) who use Firefox 2.0 are familiar with the frustration of viewing the source to read the entire title tooltip behind the comic image. Firefox 3 fixes that, but before it's released and hits stable in distributions of choice, there is the Long Titles extension. (Thanks to… Continue