Steampunk robots ftw

A recent Facebook graffiti drawing I have done. My first time drawing anything steampunk, but I thought it turned out pretty well. Definitely something I'll have to keep doing.

'Tis the Lady Jingly Jones!

I make it a point to briefly check through my spam folder to see if there were any false positives. Today I came across some very interesting one-line emails, containing only a short URL and these gems:

"Lady Jingly Jones, farewell"

- On perceiving all his toes were gone

"A sea-green Porpoise carried away"

- Mr Quangle Wangle Quee

"Tis the Lady, Jingly Jones!"

- She mixed the dough with sour cream

Adding some eye candy

In a bout of boredom the other day, I decided to spruce up GNOME on my laptop which runs Ubuntu. I have always been a minimalist at heart; a panel at the top and bottom of the screen packed with various tools has always been enough. However, I found myself wanting a bit more.

Enter GNOME Do. Everyone had been talking about it a few months back, but I didn't jump on the bandwagon... until now. I dispensed with Do's normal interface (a mid-screen popup) and opted for Do's Docky, a pretty powerful and eye-pleasing panel.


Gnome Do, unfortunately, was not the first piece of software that I tried. I tried Kiba Dock, which was acceptable, but not quite what I wanted. I then moved on to Avant Window Navigator which looked pretty much perfect—until I really started to use it, and all of the bugs started showing themselves. I also tried Cairo Dock, which just seemed to try too hard to be eye candy while sacrificing usability. Simdock seemed like a decent choice, but ultimately rendered pretty poorly and was not very configurable.

While not necessarily docks, I figured that desklets might be a good thing to try. I started with adesklets, which was pretty good for eye candy, but bad if you hate getting errors for each desklet. But if you really hate getting errors, don't even think about trying gDesklets, which is easily one of the worst applications I have had the honor of trying; you'll find yourself sifting through hundreds of nearly identical desklets, which are mostly useless (unless you want a hamster in every square inch of your desktop) and mostly broken (lots of errors, some which won't go away).

In the end, Do's Docky offers great usability (especially since I am a big fan of keyboard shortcuts), great eye candy, and enough configuration options to make me happy. Now if only they would fix bug 316978 rather than just get rid of the option...

Facebook Graffiti: Mountains

This is my latest drawing through the Facebook Graffiti application. Click play and watch how I drew the scene.

Even the Web page got better

As this before and after picture of The White House Web page shows, the arrival of the new president has brought some awesome changes already. Also note Brian Warren's comment on his picture, "It validates." Hooray for Web standards and better design in general!

Spelunky

I've recently started playing a pretty great game called Spelunky. It's a platformer with retro graphics and awesome randomized gameplay. It was written by one of the guys from Bit Blot, so you know it's got to be good.

Overall, the game is very fun. Easy gameplay (very casual, no real storyline besides the opening scene (which is also random!)), great graphics, and a very polished feel. The only thing I don't like about the game is the amount of buttons it requires. Even on a gamepad, it's pretty bad. Fortunately, you don't need to press most of the keys very often.

So the next time you're sitting around, bored out of your mind, give Spelunky a try. I highly recommend it!

A very interesting site

I stumbled upon an interesting site just now. It's called Sleeveface, and the premise is that the sleeve of a record obscures part of a picture to create an illusion.

Some of my favorites include the above one with Freddie Mercury, this one of Peter Gabriel, and Bruce Springsteen.