Sunday Miscellany - I can haz new toy!

So I formatted the laptop and slapped Ubuntu 11.04 on it - the "Natty Narwhal" release.  So far so good, though the touchpad just sucks in this OS.   I mean, the touchpad just about sucks in every OS, but this is remarkably bad.  Oh well, USB mice are cheap.  (On the A+ exam, one of the questions asked about troubleshooting touchpads, and one of the multiple choice answers was "Plug in a real mouse."  I knew this wasn't the correct answer, but I wanted to choose it anyway.)

The only tricky things so far have been the install of the DVD playback support and the wireless drivers.  And man, for a Linux install, finding the terminal window is a lot trickier than it should be.  After some false starts I was able to dredge the remnants of what UNIX commands I learned back in the Wild Wild West days of the internet and successfully navigate the CLI.  That, and remembering about case sensitivity, should be my big challenges.  :)

I've gone purely Linux on this, and removed Windows completely.  If I may channel Marko Ramius for a minute, "When he got to the New World, Cortez burned his ships.  As a result, his men were well-motivated."  If I have to use it, I'll get better faster than if I have the option to slip back into the familiar.  So we'll see what I can learn here.

(Wow, is it just me or does this OS handle graphics a lot better?  I mean, I knew it always did, back in the day, but VGA wasn't that hard to beat.  There's a noticeable difference from even the Win 7 ATI driver.)

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I actually have another new toy!  My tabletop warp-weighted loom came in from Lacemaker USA.  I haven't had a chance to warp it up yet - I'm reading through Marta Hoffman's The Warp-Weighted Loom first.  The nice thing about this model is it has holes in the beam, so I can warp it without having to weave the threads into an inkle band first.  I'll give that a try at some point, naturally, but I'm keen to get started.

Looking at the design, I'm pretty sure I could tweak it to do a 2/1 twill, though I'm going to start with a tabby and see how that looks.  Without the top selvedge, naturally, it's impossible to prove whether something was done on a warp-weighted or a horizontal loom, but they're pretty sure people were doing 2/2 twills in the Bronze age, if not the Neolithic.
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I'm woefully behind on all Things Fannish, lately.  I haven't even seen the new Pirates of the Caribbean,  much less the new Harry Potter.  DH said that there were people dressed up for the premiere on Friday.  I have GOT to get a Minerva McGonagall outfit together.

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Cool stuff I found recently:


A fascinating article on city-wide pneumatic tube systems.  Seriously, a literal system of Intertubes.

The Prague Pneumatic Post. I have GOT to go see that someday.

Questioning the Inca Paradox.  In which is discussed the possibility of the Inca using knotted strings as a type of written message.  I learned a new word:  any system of notation that conveys information without being related to the speech sounds of a particular language is a semasiographic system.  (The article uses the examples of musical notation and Arabic numerals.)

A remarkably even-handed article on fanfiction.  Look, I know a lot of people on my various f-lists are NOT fanfiction, em, fans, but I am.  I will freely admit, the vast majority of it is complete dreck.  I mean, you end up staring at things going, "Really? An actual person wrote this, or has someone gone crazy with a Markov generator?"  But the stuff that's good is really, really good; it feels like you've found another episode of your favorite show, or that your favorite author wrote another chapter.  And that gets addicting.

Plus, it's people trying to write who might not otherwise.  And is a more constructive hobby than watching TV.  So there.