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the avatar of Matthias Hopf
the avatar of Matthias Hopf

Forging knives!

I have a spleen for rather - say - exotic weekend activities (remember the R8 tour?). This time, two friends of mine and I went close to the middle of nowhere to the local blacksmith in Hallerstein (his web page is German only), for a two days forging course .
The event was fantastic, apart from some major problems with the local power supply (the whole village went dark three times), so we had to setup a mobile power generator in order to power the fan for the smith's hearth. It went well, apart from the starter breaking on the first attempt to start up the generator (it was brand new ), but we were able to improvise.
After a lot of hammering (also involving a pneumatic hammer we used for pattern welding for our Damascus steel knifes), and hours of grinding and polishing, every one of us was the proud owner of two self-forged knives, one of monosteel and one of Damascus steel.

It was an amazing experience, but you definitely need the help of an experienced blacksmith like our Axel, in order to get good results even on the first forging attempt. I guess I'll do it again, in the future. Maybe I will come home with a fully sized Katana next time .
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

EBay

I cocked up..

I forgot to monitor my ebay Auction - and well lets just say congratulations to Andrew Hussak from Summerseat, Bury, Lancashire who picked up a copy of openSUSE Retail for just £0.99p!!!

That will teach me to set a reserve price on the auction however with only a week until 11.4 perhaps I can recommend him to upgrade to a more up to date version very soon.

Next time I will figure a reserve price auction!!

He better leave me a review on Ebay and Qype!!
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Flisol 2011

The Flisol (Festival Latinoamericano de Instalación de Software Libre or  Free Software Installation Latin American Festival ) is the biggest Free Software diffusion event that is celebrated on 18 countries all over Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina simultaneously in more than 200 Cities.

The Idea of this Festival is spread the knowledge about Open Source in general and Linux in particular by installing it on the participants machines. I has been participating for the las 4 years by helping with talks, openSUSE DVDs, etc.

The FLISOL 2011 will be celebrated the next April 9. If you live in Latin America of will be in some of the countries that celebrates FLISOL, you can check where and at what time will be celebrated in the city that you will be.   Always is good to hangout with other people that wants to get to know about openSUSE and the Open Source  in General.

This Time I will be participating in Mexico City in about 3 different places with talks and giving away openSUSE DVDs and T-shirts.  Sorry but all the links are in Spanish, Google translate is your friend 😉

the avatar of Gabriel Burt
the avatar of Gabriel Burt

Canonical's New Plan for Banshee

This is an update to my previous post. Canonical asked the Banshee maintainers to join a conference call about an hour ago. They announced their new plan, calling past proposals mistakes:
  • Banshee's Amazon store will remain enabled, with Canonical taking a 75% cut of all affiliate revenue; 25% on Ubuntu will now go to the GNOME Foundation.
  • The Ubuntu One store for Banshee will remain enabled by default, but now Canonical will donate 25% of its revenue to GNOME. They will now do the same for Rhythmbox.
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar
a silhouette of a person's head and shoulders, used as a default avatar

Выход новой версии opensuse

У меня две хороших новости.

Одна — скоро выходит новая версия любимой операционной системы, Opensuse 11.4.  Я так нечасто бываю на официальном сайте, что (о стыд!) подумал, что можно уже загружать. Ну, а осталось ждать всего две недели. Я доволен и текущей версией, но всегда ожидаешь нового, неизведанного. Так что уже скоро!

Второе — обновился WordPress до версии 3.1. Это не всем будет интересно, но вордпресс стал так часто обновляться! Раньше месяца четыре было без обновлений (когда я только его установил), а теперь каждый месяц почти обновления выходят. Ну и ладно, главное — чтобы хорошо работало

Удачи всем линуксоидам, линуксоюзерам и блоггерам!

the avatar of Thomas Thym
the avatar of Thomas Thym

GSoC idea 3: Store annotations within PDF

As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

GSoC idea 3: Store annotations in PDF file

Application/component: Okular/Poppler

Brief explanation:
It is possible to store annotations with Okular. They are saved in separat files. One of the most wanted bugs is 151614 (123 comments, 739 votes). It would be awsome to have that feature in our wonderful Okular.

Expected results:
  1. Store annotations in the PDF file.
  2. If that is not enough apped support to modify the PDF (insert, delete pages etc.)
In my next life I will become a developer and the I could mentor that project myself. Until this happens I am really hoping someone else steps up.

the avatar of Thomas Thym
the avatar of Thomas Thym

GSoC idea 2: Improved (more elegant) keygeneration in KMail/Kleopatra


As I mentioned in my previous post I can't mentor GSoC students myself and therefore are looking for a developer to jump in for me.

GSoC idea 2: Improved (more elegant) keygeneration in KMail/Kleopatra

Application/component: KDEPIM/KMail and Kleopatra

Brief explanation:
Signing and encrypting emails is very old, however only a minority is using it. One reason might be, that it is not easy enough for regular users to use it. The importance for private and business users is still high. Private companies started to sell proprietary, secure e-mail services (e.g. in Germany DE-Mail and e-brief). There are good key creation, signing and other key management functions present in KDE software. The goal of this proposal is to make it easy and fast to work with signed and encrypted emails.

Expected results:
  1. Analyze and optimize the key creation, signing etc processes, make it dumb easy to create and use a key/signature. One way could be to add a button “Generate Key” (next to “Change”) in the KMail – Identity settings – Cryptographie; start the key creation wizard from Kleopatra and take the name and email address from that identity (at the moment you have to enter them manually). The user just has to enter the passphrase and is done. Offer a button “Save private key and revoke key on usb” or something like this and “send public key to server” / “Make key public”. Add the key creation (or import possibilities) into the identity / account creation wizard of KMail. Add the possibility to create revoke keys within the gui (when sending the key to the server, there is an information message yet.) 
  2. Guide the user through the whole process of signing and encrypting/decrypting emails. Offer possibilities to learn about the topic in an easy and fast way (offline help, online help / wiki, videos, tutorials etc). Show how they use the keys, how they get their keys signed, how they sign other keys etc. 
  3. Integrate other free/open services like CAcert. 
These are just some ideas. If there is someone interested I could go more into details if necessary.

the avatar of Matthias Hopf
the avatar of Matthias Hopf

It's X.org election time!

As all members of X.org should have noted in the meantime, it's election time again! After some efforts we actually do have more candidates than seats for the board of directors .

Some community members have asked a (rather large) number of questions, I have consolidated the answers I received in this wiki page. So far only three candidates replied, so for me at least the top three candidates are clear - it's better to vote for persons that do have an opinion and voice it, than for persons who prefer to stay quiet .

So go to members.x.org and vote!

the avatar of Thomas Thym
the avatar of Thomas Thym

GSoC: Mentors wanted! - Elegant display settings for presentations

I recently mentored some students during the Google Code In project. Now the preparations for Google Summer of Code have begun. Unfortunately I am not a hacker, I am a promo guy and I can't mentor here. Nevertheless I have some ideas for GSoC and I hope to scratch somebodies itch so she or he will mentor that idea. 

Idea 1: (More elegant) Display settings for presentations 

Application/component: Plasma

Brief explanation: The handling of multiple screens has continuously improved during the last releases. The handling of a stationary setting of two screens seems to be rather good. When it comes to presentation-mode with a projector I would be delighted to see even more elegance (simplicity).

Expected results: When doing presentations there is in general only one question to decide. The presentation mode:
  1. The same picture of both screens or 
  2. The notes on the notebook, the presentation on the projector. 
To 1: Autodetect the smallest max. resolution of the two displays. Instead of scaling the picture to full screen it would be nicer to keep the ration and leave some space blank on the left and right notebook screen.

To 2: Autodetect the max. resolution of each of the two displays and set those different resolutions. The panel, all the widgets and all the open windows should stay on the notebook screen. The projector screen shows only the wallpaper. It does not matter if the projector “screen” is located above or on the right or wherever of the notebook screen.

It would be very useful to link that dialog to the keyboard shortcut (e.g. Fn+F7) or to start it automatically when a projector is attached. (At the moment I have to start krandrtray from krunner first or have the symbol in the taskbar all the time. I am not sure if a new users could work that out in a couple of seconds.)

Save the display/plasma settings (esp. widget positions etc.) to restore them when the projector is detached. (Perhaps that could be solved with activities.)

Extra points: It is possible to save the standard settings. In a second step different screen setting profiles could be saved and loaded (like in powerdevil). Presentation-mode 1 and 2 could be such profiles and a user could modify them (e.g. projector on top or right) if it is necessary.

So what do you think. Is that scratching your itch? Can you imagine how cool this would be to have? At least for me as a presenter that would really rock.