rec - linux mint

There's a newish build of Linux out that Brother Linux just recommended to us last week. Linux Mint is a fast-booting, streamlined, easy-to-use distribution that comes either with Gnome (vaguely Mac-like) or KDE (slightly more PC-like) OS and has an elegant, streamlined look. It's based on Ubuntu but, unlike Kubuntu (which Wax and I have both been using fairly happily), it works fine out of the box. Wax put it on Locutus the Laptop the other day and... on install, there's no fiddling with drivers, flash players, etc - it just works. The default look is really nice, too, although it doesn't appear to allow you to set different images for each desktop.

I'm contemplating switching my computer over to it - I've been having a couple of problems lately, including software updater bugs, flash player issues and occasional crashes with Opera, and the latest update of Moblock (my IP blocker) blocking livejournal and the translation server. Anyway, this seems to be another step closer to entry-level usability. I'm not confident yet that my mom could handle it, but I'd give it to my dad or my sister without worry.

possibly the first mention of dreamwidth around here

I'm going to move to Dreamwidth when it's possible mostly because of the more aggressive feature development, and the features they've already promised, like the separation of reading-list from people-who-can-read-your-locked-posts list.

There's also an element of Owning The Servers. That's the cry of the Organisation for Transformative works: "If only we owned the servers!", something that was borne in upon us here in fandom yet again just a few weeks ago when Scans Daily was TOSed and years worth of lively fannish community and data lost.

Yesterday metafandom carried synecdochic's announcement that the Open Beta period starts on April 30, and if I don't have an invite I'm going to buy an account then.

Dreamwidth will make it easy to move there, including a tool that imports your entire livejournal or insanejournal with comments. It won't import your friendslist (yet), but because of the two-pronged nature of their flist-replacement system, that's probably just as well. It should be easy to move to DW and continue interacting on lj, or to keep up both at once, but of course, the more of fandom that goes there, the better it will work; so I encourage you to check it out.

I also encourage everyone to check out zvi_likes_tv's lj - an amateur DW evangelist, she has a lot of information up, including how-tos and explanations.

sneakers of the day

Rocket Dog's "Zombie". I really, really want these.

icons: desserts and teacups. and a blue rose. idk.

16 icons. Credit required, modification ok, no comments necessary.

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the wee free men

A few months ago I was transferring my maternal grandparents' geneaology research to electronic form at the geneology-social networking site Geni, which is quite useful for keeping track of familial trivia and lets you zoom in and out and such, much more practical than the non-hypertext way of storing such information. Anyway, I learned lots of hilarious family trivia, including the fact that I'm about 1.4% Scottish via a couple of ancestors who immigrated to the US around 1700. This is the tartan that would have belonged to my recentest Scottish ancestor (McFarland, an Irish cadet branch of the MacFarlanes). I'm not sure why Scotland is so funny, but it really is. Tartans! Ancestral symbolic cloudberries! Outlawed for thieving and thuggery! The tartan is quite attractive, if you imagine it on a schoolgirl skirt or a kilt.