Monday 11 February 2013

KDE is awesome because it can be other DEs


KDE 4.10 was released a few days ago so I decided to tell people why KDE is my favorite desktop environment (DE). I was a Gnome 2 user. I loved Gnome 2.32, the last Gnome 2 release I used, it was fast configurable and generally pretty bad ass. These are the same reasons I like KDE except KDE is better because :
  • It doesn't need compiz for fancy effects they're built in. 
  • It's the fastest desktop for gaming, even faster than xfce and lxde. 
  • You can basically make any of the other desktops using KDE. 
  • It is generally more polished than any of the other environments eg. you don't need to use the extra plugins like in Gnome3 but even if you want to they are built in to the menus in KDE. There's no need to go to a random website to download them.
In my personal setup, I have an activity for regular KDE setup, a Gnome2 like activity and a Unity like activity. I even installed the app menu runner for krunner because I like Unity's HUD but that's the only thing that I use that isn't included in KDE from Kubuntu to get all the setups seen below.

KDE 4 Default:



Gnome 2:


Unity:



Wednesday 6 February 2013

Diary Down, Diary Software based on Markdown

I have been writing diary entries for the last year as part of my project and for other projects. It's a great way of not forgetting anything and I highly recommend it if nothing else other than to keep you sane on larger projects. I have been doing this in markdown, which is an amazing little language to write in that converts to html.

I had my diary in a git repo & scp'd the resulting html to a server every time I was finished writing so I could access the info anywhere. Eventually I wanted to index the entries so I wrote a little ruby script to generate a table of contents for me which worked great until I decided to over engineer the crap out of it now it's really awesome. In any case due to it's usefulness for me I decided to open source it so that it may be useful for others.

It requires:
markdown & ruby & a unix box (It probably won't work on windows)

Here's
An Example Diary
The Github for the project

The README on the github show's you how to use the diary. The git & scp stuff have been commented out but they are still in the code if anyone  wants to use the features. Play around with the example, re-size the windows, use the key board shortcuts & hopefully you'll see this can be useful for you too.