existence trainer

in this post i am basically going to explain why i am unhappy with the direction of ubuntu, and why xubuntu - and the xfce way - appeals to me so much more. ubuntu, unity, and xubuntu for the past few releases (basically since maverick), the company behind ubuntu has tried to redefine how we interact with our desktop through the development of unity. i've been very supportive of these efforts overall. making design decisions is tough and treacherous, and if anyone has a vision to improve the desktop linux experience, then i applaud their efforts. now i want to evaluate these efforts. does unity improve the desktop experience? meh. definitely a mixed bag. the main problem is that everything feels half baked right now, and the improvements in the next version of ubuntu (quantal) don't really fix most of the issues i have. when analyzed from a user experience point of view, the changes canonical has brought to ubuntu can be largely divided into the following categories (i...

a couple of weeks back, there was a huge community backlash to the news that the newest version of ubuntu (quantal 12.10) would send ALL queries made in the dash, via the shopping lens, to canonical as a way to help build revenue. that's right, EVERYTHING you type into the dash (when you search for programs or files or anything) will be sent to canonical for the purpose of advertising directly on your desktop. i protested as loud as anyone. canonical's response (besides defending their position) has been to include a program that can disable all internet activity from the dash. unfortunately, i find this solution unsatisfactory for the following reasons: it is opt-out vs. opt in this angers me. it works to build revenue by relying on people's ignorance of what canonical is doing with their queries. not everyone pays as much attention to the development of ubuntu as i do, and most will be ignorant of what canonical is up to. this is shitty. and unethical. it is not ...

neither aircack-ng nor reaver is in the repos in ubuntu 12.04. aircrack was dropped in the precise cycle because it was dropped by debian temporarily in order to sort out some licensing and maintenance issues, and reaver is fairly new and just didn't make it in time. fortunately both packages are in 12.10. by far the easiest way to get these packages to work in 12.04 is to download the quantal versions and install them in precise. i've done so, and i haven't run into any problems. :) the packages can be found here: http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/aircrack-ng http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/reaver once installed, run: ifconfig to figure out your wifi interface. then put it in monitor mode: sudo airmon start wlan1 next, run 'airodump' to figure out the BSSID of the network you are aiming to penetrate: sudo airodump mon0 when you have found it, cntr-c to exit. then run 'wash' on it to see if reaver is possibly going to be successful....

i am assuming you either you have a hard copy of an article/book/etc., or else a pdf file of a scanned in document that you wish you clean up and make into a high quality djvu file. also, i am a linux user, i have no idea (and couldn't care less) how to do it on windows/mac. here is how i do it. tools gscan2pdf (my fav scanning program presently) scan tailor (brilliant piece of software) steps if you have a hardcopy, i recommend using gscan2pdf (the name is deceiving, it also outputs djvu). it may, in fact, do almost everything you need to get your documents cleaned up. play with it; it is a powerful tool.  if you have a pdf file, the first thing you need to do is to convert it to a multipage tiff file. the highest quality way to convert it that I have found is by using the following ghostscript command: gs -SDEVICE=tiffg3 -r600x600 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 -sOutputFile="output.tif" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -- "input.pdf" this seems to output a much higher quali...

anyone know the difference between the two? does it cut out all the rubbish before someone can actually leave a message?

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