There are days when I just want to tell friends and co-workers to just use Linux even when they express so much fear.  Why?  Because there’s nothing to fear!   I haven’t had something as tricky as a kernel panic for the longest time.  When it comes to drivers, there are a lot of helpful forums, plus our sys ads are capable of helping us.  Even if they don’t know everything, they are skilled enough to help us through our problems, whether it’s on Linux or Windows.

I see that some of our co-workers have family members who use netbooks with Linux.  If they can use it, why can’t my co-workers?  Right?  Absolutely!  A lot of our software engineers are actually using Linux on a daily basis because of the development machines that they have come with Linux.  But I do know that there are those who have chosen to use Linux even at home.  Imagine! At home, they even share the computer with other people and yet they use Linux.   This is one of those times that I think that what is really making it hard for people to even give Linux a chance is that mindset of losing touch with the familiar.

I recall the time that I practically made my mom use Ubuntu at home.  She basically just asked me how she’d know if she’s online, what she could use to chat, what she could use for writing, etc.  It wasn’t totally easy but because she asked me what applications she can use, it was actually alright.

Maybe it’s time to emphasize on how much Linux can do even if it’s not totally the same as what they’ve been used to.  The reality is not so happy but we could find something to make it work. :)  Maybe the Linux mascot Tux can help me find ways to make users feel at ease.  After all, it does look cute and cuddly and everything.

I’ve been learning how to sew with a sewing machine and it’s been difficult sewing in curves. However, I really want to make a lot of things and that includes a penguin plushie. Fortunately there are patterns thanks to the Free Penguin Project.

I have a couple of penguin plushies but they were mostly given to me by my friends. When I learn how to make one, I hope I could replicate it and give them to other people. I was thinking that it will be awesome if I finish some and give them to the children of my co-workers. Yes, introduce Tux to their kids early enough is the plan.
The finished projects of those who have downloaded and modded the patterns are awesome. Some of the interesting things I saw:

• inflatable line laundry Tux
• Tux made from from fleece
• Txulhu - a Cthulhu Tux!
• Love Dilbert? Meet Tuxbert!
• Captain Tux! Yaarrr!

If I will make some for children I should make sure that the materials I will use are kid-friendly. The project team is really awesome for coming up with this. If you want to make pins, there are also images that you could use for it.

I never really had troubles viewing videos but for those of you who might have been having issues, then this blog entry about How to Fix Full Screen Flash Videos in Linux and Firefox will help you. They’ve written a guide for all of us who are/might be afflicted with this problem.

In summary, they said that you need to get libGL.so.1 and preload it before starting Firefox (or Swiftfox). Basically you will do this by writing a script to do it. You have to make the script executable or it won’t work.

I don’t have much trouble but maybe that’s because I use clive to get videos from YouTube. In any case, check it out if you need to fix watching videos in Flash format.

We know Tomboy is this awesome sticky notes application which basically also acts like a wiki. We also know that we could organize lots of notes through ‘notebooks’ but I just learned recently that you could actually use it as a blogging client. Surprised? Good. Now let me show you how.

Download and installation
Download and install the Tomboy Blogposter plugin written by Robin Sonefors. For those on Ubuntu, you will find it in the repositories. Else, download the tarball or get it from Github.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

What to do next

1. Activate the plugin. Run Tomboy and from the “Search all notes” dialog, go to the Edit menu and select “Preferences.”
2. In the “Preferences” dialog, select the “Add-ins” tab and you will see “Post note to your blog” listed under “Tools.” Click the “Enable” button while it is highlighted.
3. After enabling the blogging plugin, you have to add the URLs of your blog/s. There are various URLs depending on the blogging platform you are using.
   • WordPress - <blog_url>/wp-app.php/posts ; make sure that the option for Atom Publishing must be enabled.
   • Blogger - View the source of your Blogger blog. Then check the address in the <link> tag that has the rel attribute set to service.post. Therefore, it follows the template http://www.blogger.com/feeds//posts/default.
   • LiveJournal - http://www.livejournal.com/interface/atomapi/<username>/post
4. Start writing a new note. When you’re done, go to the “Tools” menu of that note then select the option to post it on the blog URL you’ve saved.

It’s really awesome when you finally get to try it. The note’s title is automatically the title of your blog entry. From there it will be easy for you to just upload any note you want to share with anyone.

Have fun!

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At work, we often look for the best tools that will help us deal with the information we have to analyze. Sometimes we have brainstorming meetings that make things either confusing or clearer. Either way we get tons of information that we have to process and sometimes we need concept maps and mindmaps to make it better.

Enter, Xmind, a collaboration tool and mind mapping software. It has different templates that will help you analyze and/or present information better. The interesting thing about this tool is that there is Xmind for Eclipse users so the software developers I work with can easily view it on their favorite IDE.

Xmind. Image Credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Xmind lets you create a topic and its subtopics. You usually start with a new page with a new topic and then when you right click it, you will find the various options available for you like adding subtopics and other topics. You could even add new notes to the items you’ve written already.

Xmind’s workspace is reminiscent of Eclipse. It has panels that help you with defining its properties, as well as view the outline you’ve created. For the properties, you could define the background color for the entire map. You could also define the colors of the rounded rectangle. You could change the font face you are using too.

Another nifty thing about Xmind is that there are a lot of markers that help you point out which are pending tasks, done, or should be flagged. You could even add smileys to the items on your mindmap. This would make it more graphical and help you remember better or would help you communicate your topics better to your colleagues and/or friends.

There are free downloads which are available as a plugin for Eclipse, installer on Ubuntu or portable version that does not require you to install it.

Designing mock-ups of your applications could be tricky sometimes especially if you just want quickly drawn wireframes of the screens. I personally don’t want to use GIMP for that because it seems to complicated to use for such a task. Thankfully there is a tool you could install on Firefox called Pencil. (View more about it on the homepage of Pencil.)

Once you have installed Pencil, you should restart Firefox and then look for it under the Tools menu of Firefox. It will open a new window with a new page waiting to be ‘drawn upon’ with a mock-up screen. On the left side is a pane with the shapes you could use.

• Common shapes such as rectangles, lines, text areas.
• Annotation for your comments. Balloons, arrows, etc. make it easier for you to write your own comments fast.
• GTK widgets help you come up with mock-up screens of GTK-based apps.
• Windows widgets help you make design for the Windows user interface.

A sample mock-up screen. Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

One of the nice things about using Pencil is that you could put the shapes one on top of the other if needed. You could just drag shapes from the panel and drop them in to the space for the page. It is also nice that you could resize and rotate those shapes. Resizing is done by clicking it and you will notice the points around the shape become blue. Then, move your mouse pointer to stretch it in the proportion of your choice. If you will rotate the shape, click the shape until the points around the shape are red. Then start moving it in the direction of your choice.

You could create a new page with a button click on the “New Page” button. You could specify the size of your ‘canvass’ It’s up to you how you pick the size of the screen. As long as your team knows it’s what your designing for then well and good.

Creating a new page on Pencil. Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Whatever you make with Pencil is something you could export as an image file so you could use it for presentations, etc. if you need them.

Thanks to Tech Source From Bohol, I learned more Twitter Desktop Clients for Linux. I don’t use Twitter as often as I used to but it’s nifty to have a Linux desktop client when you’re always following people. The clients I learned about today:

• Tweetdeck
  
  Interestingly enough this seems to have a lot of nifty features. One of them is creating groups of people to follow, manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages, manage multiple Twitter accounts, view photo thumbnails from Tweetdeck, avoiding Twitter spam via the Spam button.
• Twhirl
  
  This runs on Adobe Air. You could find it easier to use this to connect to your Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts plus cross-post your updates via ping.fm to boot. This also allows searching of tweets via Twitter Search and Tweet Scan.
• Choqok
  
  Choqok is the KDE microblogging client and it currently supports laconi.ca and twitter. It supports multiple accounts too. One nice thing for those who prefer keyboard shortcuts to launch this: Ctrl + Meta + T does the trick.

I’m more of a GNOME user so I might have not been posting much KDE apps here but I am glad that this blog entry pointed out one KDE app for Twitter. I wouldn’t know about it if not for this. It seems that Choqok is still relatively new so it looks like interesting to follow if you’re a KDE user.
May you find a good Twitter client for you to use!

Asus was practically the first to popularize netbooks with Linux on them back in late 2007. However, times have changed. It seems as though Asus really has turned its back on Linux. Why? It’s because the people preferred Windows XP. That is why there aren’t many machines with Linux.

They said that it was a business decision to lessen the models with Linux on their netbooks. Other manufacturers like HP and Dell were said to have triggered the change. The Asus notebooks with smaller hard drives paled in comparison thus losing marketshare. I hope that they won’t totally eradicate Linux. After all, they have helped create a community around their EEE PC and they have created ways for us netbook users to use Linux without much trouble.

Sad to say decisions like that are based on business and income. It’s not a matter of advocacy. I’d like to hope that there will be companies that will really have their decisions considering the principles of free and open source software.