The Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle”

So, a new release of Fedora was set free just last week, the so-called “Beefy Miracle”. A couple of releases ago (or maybe last release), I had really thought I might wait at least a month after a release before upgrading. Turns out my curiosity got the best of me, and I went and upgraded my laptop mere days after the release. Fortunately, this release has been much much better right out of the box.
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“Video” Editing in Linux

Video editing is one of those domains for which there are some expensive options and several attempts at open source alternatives. Unfortunately, few efforts have even gotten past the first few months. A couple months ago, I had to do some “video” editing. I put that in quotes because in fact, it was more of a slideshow. I had done something similar a few years ago in PowerPoint. After the pain of that experience, I was quite certain I didn’t want to do it that way again.
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Fixing the Toaster

Sometimes, things just break. Maybe it’s planned obsolescence; I don’t really know. But I don’t want to be wasting things just because they “seem” to not work anymore. Speaking of things not working, our toaster-oven (a Bravetti) recently stopped turning on. (You didn’t see that coming, did you?) Turning on the timer didn’t light the lamp, and didn’t electrify the elements. A bit of a problem when you want to toast things (pizza in a microwave just isn’t the same!
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Translating for Fun and Profit

Okay, so maybe I’m not entirely sure about the second one, but it certainly could be fun depending on your interests. Writing translations is probably one of the simplest ways to contribute to an open-source project, especially if you don’t know/like coding. There are a couple of things you’ll need to do: Get the stuff to translate. Translate the stuff. Send it back and get it merged. You’ll also need some software.
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Adventures in GNOME3 Land

Over the past few weekends I’ve been trying out GNOME3 via the Fedora 15 Beta. I’ve already read many a blog post in opposition to various things, so I was not overly surprised when I tried it out. Fortunately, I have a pretty boring setup because I only tested on my desktop, meaning I didn’t have to worry about external monitors or suspending. In fact, with respect to working with the whole thing, it wasn’t a terrible experience.
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Skule Nite 1T1

Last weekend was Skule Nite, a “musical sketch comedy revue”. Quite hilarious, of course. Just for your listening fun, here are most of the songs on which the parts were based. You’re going to just have to imagine the words are funnier, though. Let’s Bring it Back - OK, so I’ve been listening to the rest of the songs so much, I don’t remember how this one sounds… I Don’t C.
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Trying out the LibreOffice build

In case you haven’t heard, there was a little fork of the OpenOffice project not too long ago. They can explain the reasons for it a whole lot better than I can, so I’m not going to. Normally, I never built OpenOffice on Gentoo because I knew it would take a darn long time, and the pre-built 32-bit binaries worked well enough. With the fork, I decided to try it out anyway.
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Another College Puzzle Challenge!

So this weekend was another College Puzzle Challenge. Just as fun as last year, but slightly different. There were no waves, so we got all the puzzles at the beginning. I guess that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It’s somewhat daunting to have so many puzzles to decipher. On the other hand, you’re almost never at a loss for something to do. The biggest problem is that it lets some teams finish in three hours!
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Jumping on the Fedora 14 bandwagon

Fedora 14 was released just a day or two ago. I figured I’d be cutting-edge and upgrade on pretty much the day it came out. Of course, as with last time, I’m trying to do so on a laptop with little room for any more stuff. This time though, I tried as hard as I could to get preupgrade to work instead of doing a new install. The Free Space Issue /boot The first issue was, of course, the lack of free space, on both /boot and /.
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