At Your Convenience. This muxtape is the second in an ongoing series of posts, the eight songs I chose are ones that I feel represent a sort of slowed and relaxed state that I tend to find myself in. Otherwise, it’s a relatively unorganized collection of good music. Enjoy.
Muxtape Monday is a bi-monthly feature in which I provide a musical playlist containing a selection of music that has to do with various themes, ideas, etc. The framework established by the creators of Muxtape allows only twelve songs to be uploaded at any one time, therefore, each playlist will only be available for 2 weeks.
I have been remiss about posting any of my drawings online.
Here’s a little something from my sketchbook. I’ve been wanting to post this for some time now, it’s an illustration I did last year one morning at work. This friendly looking lady was drawn on a spare sheet of white paper with a pen and a few markers. Check back soon for more drawings.
One of the biggest selling points that makes Firefox the browser of choice for me are the extensions. I’ve been using Firefox for roughly 4 years now and during that time I’ve gone through my fair share of third-party extensions/plugins. The most important ones, to me, make my browsing happier and easier by streamlining my surfing or making it more safe.
I would like to publicly profess my love for the following plugins:
Del.icio.us – As a del.icio.us user I find it hard to post bookmarks unless I’ve got this extension, or one of its relatives active.
McAfee Site Advisor – This is a really important extension for me. Behind this add-on is a system of automated testing originally developed at MIT that helps me avoid sites that may lead to pop-ups/spam/malware. It also places a handy icon next to links on your search results that work like the color-coded Homeland Security rainbow sans the fear mongering.
Google Preview – I really just like seeing thumbnails of my Google searches in a way that won’t obscure whatever else I’ve got on the screen (yes, that means you Snap.com). This add-on also works with Yahoo! searches.
Ctrl-Tab – Adding Ctrl-Tab support to Firefox isn’t really a necessity, but another usefull feature of this extension is that it adds a useful grid/thumbnail function via the F4 key.
FaviconizeTab – This extension removes the title and close button from selected (or all, in my case) tabs leaving only the favicon. At this point I’ve got 24 30 tabs open in my browser. Yes, when I browse I tend to open a lot of tabs. With this extension enabled I can easily and efficiently reduce clutter, without it I may as well be using IE 6.
Better Gmail 2 – Out of all the extensions created/compiled by Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani this one is the absolute best. It is essentially a compilation of a the best Gmail related Greasemonkey scripts which makes keeping them updated much easier and gives Gmail many additional features that make my life easier.
That said, if I’ve left out any extensions which you find especially useful, leave a comment and share your experiences with other extensions.
I ran across the idea for this post at Warren Ellis’ blog early last month and I thought I’d get my own list together and see what came of it.
“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”
In no particular order:
“No Regrets” – Aesop Rock
A fairly humble song, laden with simple things, yet so well balanced/sequenced that I can’t help but put it on repeat and just listen listen listen. This one hails from the second Aesop Rock album I ever owned, Labor Days. I can’t describe how much I love this song, it makes me think in ways most songs can’t. There’s something incredibly thought provoking about the lyrics in this song.
“Thou Shalt Always Kill” – Scroobius Pip vs Dan le Sac
I ran across this song last summer on YouTube, and it’s just amazing. Its pure, unadulterated, think-for-yourself message is something I wish we had more of in hip-hop today.
“Painkillas” – Busdriver
This is a relatively new to me interest. I don’t have much to say about this song, there’s just something about the jumble of piano and lyrics that makes me relax.
“One” – Eyedea & Abilities
Again, another recent discovery of Hip-Hop goodness, found one late night at a friend’s house. I don’t know what it is about this song that does it for me. Maybe it’s the very primal sound of the drums, or maybe even the lyrics that dance tauntingly over the stale corpse of major record labels’ idea of Hip-Hop. “It’s time to clean MTV outta your ears”
“The Pot” – Tool
I don’t consider myself a TOOL fan, but the introduction to this song is simply mesmerizing.
“God’s Gonna Cut You Down” – Johnny Cash
Another YouTube find, this one from late 2006 and by far my favorite Johnny Cash song.
I now have no problem imagining Kris Kristofferson bludgeoning me to death with a crowbar.
“If I Was Santa Claus” – Atmosphere
This song is available on Atmosphere’s Lucy Ford album. Aided by the quieting instrumentals, I can play this song a few times in a row and it never fails to move me. I was introduced to both Aesop Rock and Atmosphere by my brother-in-law around the same time and have been returning to this song year in and year out. In the true spirit of hip-hop evangelicalism, this is one of those songs that I habitually, no, fanatically, push on people who are unfamiliar with Atmosphere.
My musical interests shift fairly often so I plan on revisiting this post sometime later this year. Though, for now, I suppose that I should pass the buck on to seven other people.
An Investigation In Red. Simply put, this playlist is constituted of relatively new-to-me musical interests and represents a small slice-of-life style array of sounds. Enjoy.
Muxtape Monday is a bi-monthly feature in which I provide a musical playlist containing a selection of music that has to do with various themes, ideas, etc. The framework established by the creators of Muxtape allows only twelve songs to be uploaded at any one time, therefore, each playlist will only be available for 2 weeks.
Wordle is a neat web applet that has been making the rounds lately. It creates cloud art from various text input, including my personal favorite, Del.icio.us tags. Now, you could use pretty much any bloc of text to create a neat image see. I think, however, that the ability to plug your Del.icio.us tags in to create an emphasized text cloud provides a pleasantly simple way to deconstruct your interests. If only there were a way to export the output as some sort of vector graphic.
As a relatively new Linux/Ubuntu user I’ve had my fair share of complications trying to figure things out. Despite the wide variety of wonderful graphical user interface (GUI) tools available to us as Linux users, getting things done through a command line interface (CLI) in the terminal is sometimes the only option to. On one hand, it can be a very rewarding accomplishment, on the other, it can also be a very frustrating roadblock to getting anything done if you are not comfortable interacting with your computer in the mystic realm of text based commands.
If you’ve been using Ubuntu/Linux for any time at all you’ve probably noticed that most tutorials, including the one I posted a little while ago, are usually only composed of terminal commands. You may find yourself avoiding the terminal if you don’t have much experience with it. Unfortunately, your Ubuntu/Linux experience will inevitably suffer as you avoid trying new things. Understanding that the CLI is a powerful working environment in Linux, although not the only one, is important and will help you to get the most out of your experience. That is not to say that you should mercilessly abandon the intuitive visualization that GUIs provide, but rather, nurture your understanding of both environments.
To help get over any insecurities you may have using the terminal, aside from jumping in head-first, I suggest installing a fun little program called DOSBox. DOSBox is an open source MS-DOS emulator used for older computer games and should provide you with a fun and easy way to become more comfortable with text-based commands. On the other hand, if you’re just looking for an easy way to play DOS games, this program is available for Windows and Mac as well.
To install DOSBox enter the following command in the terminal window:
sudo apt-get install -y dosbox
However, if you’re really not comfortable at all with the terminal, the same program can be installed through the Synaptic Package Manager located in the Administration menu (Settings > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager). Just do a search for dosbox and mark it for installation.
After you’ve installed DOSBox you’re going to need a directory to store all of your DOS games. Create it by running the following command in the terminal:
mkdir ~/DOS/
Move any DOS game files/folders you have to that directory and then start DOSBox by typing dosbox in the terminal. Now you’re almost ready to ford that river!
Next, to make the directory your created earlier accessible to DOSBox type the following command in the DOSBox CLI:
mount c ~/DOS/
You can move to the C drive, which you’ve just mounted, by running:
C:
Finally, to launch a game you have to navigate to the executable file which corresponds to that game by entering:
\somedirectory\somegame.exe
Remember, the Windows naming convention uses a backslash to separate directory and filenames as opposed to regular slashes, or forward-slashes, as you will use in Linux.
If you don’t have any DOS games at hand, they can usually be found around the net by practicing a little google-fu. Lastly, don’t be afraid of trying new things, there are plenty of cheat sheets floating around to help you figure out what that command you just entered should have done.
Twhirl is a popular desktop twitter client based on the Adobe AIR platform. Unfortunately, up until recently, Linux users have been unable to easily install the application because an official AIR release was not available and running it through Wine took away much of the platforms appeal. However, Adobe Labs recently released an alpha version of the AIR platform for Linux. Follow these simple instructions to install it.
Enter these commands to get the newest version (currently 1.5.2):
Note: If you receive the error “sudo: unable to execute ./AdobeAIRInstaller” or “sudo: ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin: command not found” the terminal is telling you that the file is not executable, you may have incorrectly performed the chmod command.
Once that’s installed, it’s time to get twhirl. As of this posting the twhirl website wont allow Linux users to click the “Get twhirl” link, simply displaying the message “Adobe AIR is not available for your system”. You can get around this by entering the following command in the terminal to download the file directly:
wget http://d.seesmic.com/twhirl/twhirl-0.9.4.air
Be sure to modify the file name to fit the most current release of twhirl.
Next, right click the file and select the Open with “Adobe AIR Application Installer” option to run the installer. That should get everything installed. The screenshot below illustrates how well it integrates with the system.
One thing I noticed after installing was that it only displayed a generic icon when running. If you run into the same problem feel free to download and use an icon I created, which can be found here.
Update: Now that AIR is out of testing, the stock icons should automatically show up. However, if they don’t you should be able to find them here: /opt/twhirl/icons
