A List Apart: Paper Prototyping

As interfaces become ever more complex and development schedules seem to get shorter and shorter, you may find it useful to give up your user-interface modeling software for awhile in favor of something simpler. All you need is paper, pens, scissors, and your imagination.

Sadly my coding skills are not what I would like them to be and so using a pen and paper makes a lot of sense when starting out with design. It should also make it easier to remember what section of the site is in what <div> section.

Now, there was a time when I found myself criticising Linux for an overdependance on the command prompt and too much enthusiasm to drop to it from the X GUI.
Life being what it is, I then found myself trying to log in without X, straight into console, because I was trying to install the nVidia drivers so that I could try out the 3D desktops. Try as I might I couldn’t find an option to log in in text only. I could change consoles with Ctrl+Alt+F1 etc and Ctrl+Alt+Backspace would only do something when pressed twice. And that restarted X rather than stopping it.
The answer is to switch to another console (probably with the aforementioned Ctrl+Alt+F1) and entering the following text.
su (enter root password when prompted)
init 3

I then restarted the computer once the drivers had been installed by pressing the power button on the notebook I was using  - I can never remember how I got the shutdown command to work, even after reading the help.

Samba for Windows File Sharing | TUX

While TUX is a HowTo magazine about Linux, we are not isolationist. That is, while you may have a Linux system it is typical that you will need to access files on other systems–the most typical being one running Microsoft Windows. A package called Samba is included in virtually every Linux distribution to make it possible for you to share files.

Sharing files is essential if you have more than one computer on a network, especially if they use different operating systems. This is a very good intro to working with Samba. I’m going to miss Tux

Dreamlinux 2.2

If you’re searching for an operating system that allows you to: be free, communicate with the whole world, read, write, produce art, music, drawings, images, etc., as well as use the same kind of stuff produced by a worldwide community and, better yet, fastly, simply and safely share them all, you now have no excuses to give Dreamlinux 2.2 Multimedia Edition a nice try.

This was the first distro I installed with a 3D desktop. The MacOS X look isn’t quite up there with the real thing but very good nonetheless.

BasKet Note Pads

This multi-purpose note-taking application can helps you to: * Easily take all sort of notes * Collect research results and share them * Centralize your project data and re-use them * Quickly organize your toughts in idea boxes * Keep track of your information in a smart way * Make intelligent To Do lists * And a lot more…

I’ve been using the Firefox add-on Zotero for some note taking but this looks like a good Linux alternative

Anger as EU ignores open-source video - ZDNet UK

More than 7,000 angry Linux users have protested against the European Union after it excluded them from viewing streaming videos.

The EU makes streaming videos of many of its most important council debates and press conferences available online. However, this service only works on Windows and Apple computers.