Author Archives: Donncha

Window Managers – delights of a Linux desktop.

I finally did it. I went back to Window Maker after the longest stint away from it. The Bluecurve theme of Red Hat 9 under Gnome and KDE kept me busy for several months, but it’s now time to throw in the hat and go back to a simpler world.
One reason I’m ditching Gnome/KDE is a simple one. My new camera produces 2.2MB jpeg files. Opening those in the GIMP requires me to shut down Kmail, and even then the machine swaps. Of course I should really close some of the dozen tabs in Moz FB but I may need them later.. 🙂
Via the DockApp Wareouse comes wmFuzzy. It’s a neat fuzzy clock that’ll display “twenty to ten” instead of 9:40!
Lots more dockapps available at the warehouse linked above too.

Apple blooms on Michigan

A new Apple Store opened on Michigan last Saturday. No, I wasn’t there, but I read it in the paper last night. As I walked up that street the other night I took a photo of the store as I knew it would be of interest to the devoted Apple fanatics^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hfans who visit this site. 🙂
What I didn’t capture was the couple at the side of the store taking photos of each other in front of the glowing Apple logo, while brandishing their Apple purchases in each hand… hehe.

Last night I went walking

I walked from Bennigans on Michigan Avenue up to the John Hancock Building. Unfortunately, that was way too far as I meant to go over to Navy pier and meet Martina. I backtracked along the lakeshore and it was a nice evening..


This is the old Carbide & Carbon Building, dating back to 1928. The tower on this building has real gold leaf on it!


This is the view looking south along North Michigan Avenue.


This is taken from the side of the Wrigley Building. It’s almost 90 degrees to the prvious photo. This photo was hard to work on. Auto-levels wanted to add a green hue to the sky. so I manually adjusted it somewhat.


When I finally found my way to Navy Pier I wandered up the pier hoping to get a shot of the City Skyline. Alas, boats were moored, but I got a shot of this sailing ship against the bright lights of the city.

When you get new memory cards..

When you get new memory cards for your camera make sure you format them first. I took about 20 photos at lunchtime and one or two were good enought to go up here, but Linux refuses to see the card, saying,

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera
/dev/sda1: Input/output error
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Time to format the card..
Update! I’m glad I went searching first. The Digital Camera Support for UNIX page is a comprehensive listing of digital cameras that are compatible with Linux and BSD. It lists the Sony DSC-F717 there and says you can use the usb-storage device, or PTP mode to access it. You can use gphoto in PTP mode and download photos using a nice GUI!

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