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By Keith, August 31, 2010 6:05 pm

I thought that these hot sticky days were the dog days of summer; days that we should all be lazing about like dogs on a shady front porch, conserving our energy, doing as little as possible.  As is often the case with things like this, boy was I wrong!

It turns out that the dog days correspond with the rising of Sirius, the dog star, and have nothing to do with actual real life lazy dogs lazing about in the sultry summer heat.  Also, the dog days occur from July 3 to August 11, so I’m off by a few weeks.  I just assumed that the dog days were whatever hot muggy days during any summer month that I did not feel like doing any physical activity whatsoever.  So basically, I thought it was any/every day during the summer.

None of this has anything to do with the idiom that every dog has its day, which has everything to do with school shootings and mailmen going postal.  I suppose that since dogs are notorious for chasing mail carriers, one could find some tenuous connection there if one squints really hard. >.<

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By Keith, August 10, 2010 11:49 pm

I don’t THINK I have an addictive personality, but I think I have some new addictions that I need to confess.  Since I don’t have a religion, would the readers of Think Obvious mind if my blog becomes my confessional?  I thought not.

In case you haven’t noticed, by posting this today, I’ll have blogged every day for the last seven days.  I’ll have blogged every day this month save two.  It seems that the blogging bug (or was it a blogging spider?) has bitten me again.  I don’t know whether I’m suffering from a latent desire to share my thoughts with others or some perverted impulse to literally (pun intended) expose myself.  Whatever the reason, I intend to continue streaking like this.

My other new addiction revolves around mobile phones.  I have added multiple news feeds about Android phones to my RSS reader so I don’t miss any news that might come out involving some as yet unannounced über-phone with a bigger screen and faster chip.  I check these news feeds every night when I wake up, on my breaks at work, and in the morning when I get home from work.  Even though I’m at least 6 months away from a mobile phone purchase, I’ve become a little addicted to Android news.

The other new addiction I’m struggling with is Kubuntu Linux.  I’ve come to enjoy using it more than Windows 7.  There is just something cool about using a free OS built by geeks for geeks.  Sometimes things break a little, and I get frustrated, but it only adds to the addictiveness of Linux.  The frustration is part of the fun.

Thanks for listening.  If you can absolve me of my “sins,” please suggest my penance in the comments.

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By Keith, August 8, 2010 5:07 am

My friend Paul made a great point in his comment on Part 1 of this series.  I should probably say a few words about some applications that I could use, and why I don’t.  I’ll try to do some of that in this post.

Image Editor
These days it seems you cannot swing a (digital) dead cat on your PC without hitting some sort of image editing program.  Some quite awful image editors are packaged with digital camera software, but are rarely very useful.  Most are slow bloated crippled garbage that I would not bother installing.  I like an image editor to do a few things very well; crop, resize/scale, and adjust levels.  Of course I also prefer an editor not be bloated, meaning it should load and close quickly without eating up too many system resources.

On Kubuntu (Linux) I use a program called Krita.  It’s quite powerful, but not super bloated like Gimp.  Krita works very well for editing images, and it’s also nice for drawing.  It can be used to adjust levels and supports layers.

Krita

There are some other decent image editors for Linux, but for various reasons, they fall short of Krita.  Gwenview is more of an image viewer than an editor.  When resizing images, it only gives you the width to change, instead of letting you see the height scaled to the width.  Maybe there are plugins to help it, but Gwenview does not let you edit levels.  In Linux, the other main option is GIMP, which I use from time to time, but it is powerful a bit bloated and slow.

To be completely honest, there are several great image editors for Windows, and I’ve not tried all of them.  I hope someone will point out any omissions.

For the most basic editing operations, I use a program called IrfanView.  From a system resources perspective, it is tiny.  Its small size is deceiving, because it does a lot for me.  I use it for taking screen captures (caps), cropping and resizing images, and tweaking contrast/levels.  For those things, it is great.  It does not, however, support layers.

IrfanView

Another great free Windows image editor I should mention is Paint.net.  Don’t let the name fool you.  This is a desktop app, not a cloud app, and it is GOOD.

Audio Player
My current favorite audio player on Linux is Banshee.  With the right codecs, Banshee can play just about any sound file.  It supports extensions which let it show lyrics and even handle some internet streams.  Banshee can play video as well, though I don’t use it for that.  It can be used as a podcast catcher too.  I was happily surprised at how powerful Banshee is.

Banshee

Another very good Linux audio player is Rhythmbox.  It does most of the same tricks as Banshee, and even looks a lot like Banshee.

Rythmbox

I’m a little ashamed to say this, but since I began writing this post, I have switched to using SMPlayer, a front-end for MPlayer, on Linux for listening to audio files.  I found a weird quirk with Banshee where the codecs would stop working if it had to share them with some other application.  Is SMPlayer boring?  Yes, but it works.  Does SMPlayer show lyrics?  No, but it has a playlist and the codecs don’t break.

SMPlayer

On Windows, I generally use Foobar2000 for streaming NPR.  Foobar2000 is a tiny program that doesn’t offer a lot of bells and whistles, but it’s quite good for playing .mp3′s.

Foobar2000

For listening to music on Windows, I almost always use Winamp with a couple of plugins.  When installing Winamp, I choose the advanced options and uncheck such things as Winamp Agent and don’t let it track my usage.  If you install only the bare bones program and don’t let it steal all of your video file associations, it’s a very good audio app.

Winamp

One audio player I don’t use and rather hate is Windows Media Player 11.  It is a bloated piece of trash that is counterintuitive.  I could say the very same thing about iTunes.  Unless you have an iPod, if you have iTunes installed on your PC, I laugh at you.

BitTorrent Client

On Linux, I’ve been using KTorrent, because it’s easy to configure and it supports RSS.  The other nice think about KTorrent is that when it is downloading, it doesn’t break the internet for all other internet applications the way some other torrent clients do.

KTorrent

On Windows, I think there really is only one choice for bittorrent client that makes any sense, and that’s uTorrent.  It probably has the smallest memory footprint of any bittorrent client.  It supports RSS feeds, and it’s very easy to set up.

uTorrent

Personally, I think it’s not even close on Windows.  uTorrent is far and away the best client.  On Linux, Deluge is pretty good, but since I was unable to get RSS support working, it’s nearly useless for my needs.

Software Updater
I doubt that most people (Windows users) even bother to use a software updater or even know they exist.  Surprise!  They do, and a couple of them on Windows are quite good.  The one I use most is Filehippo Update Checker.

Filehippo Update Checker Scanning

Filehippo Update Checker Results

Another good updater for Windows is Software Informer.  It’s a bit more thorough, but might be overkill for most people.

On Kubuntu (Linux), I use Synaptic Package Manager.  To me it seems a lot more intuitive than KPackageKit, the default software manager.  Updating is very easy.  All I have to do is click “Reload” then “Mark All Upgrades” then OK the upgrades/updates, and my packages are installed for me.

Synaptic Package Manager

These are my favorite desktop apps.  I hope you will post a comment with your own favorites.