Cats for Barack Obama ‘08

Or how about this!

Surely I’m not alone among Norwegian bloggers in regarding Jill Walker Rettberg as our local “mother blogger” - by her own account she started blogging in October 2000. For years she has been a leading researcher in the field of online social media, and she is frequently invited to comment on these issues in main-stream media. Therefore, I was looking forward to reading her recently published book Blogging, and pleasantly surprised when I received a review copy in the mail some time ago.

The aim of this book aims to give the reader a deep and wide overview of blogging as a genre, its history and relation to other genres and media, both on- and offline. Walker starts by defining the term, and then explains in detail how and why blogs such as Dooce.com and Kottke.org are typical examples of the genre. She puts the blog genre in its proper historical perspective, and goes on to show the similiarities and distinctions between blogs and other social networks.

Citizen journalism, as represented by Salam Pax and students who blogged their reactions to the Virginia Tech massacre, is well covered, as is commercial blogging in its various shapes and forms. There is also a very interesting (especially to someone with a background in the natural sciences) chapter on the narrative aspect of blogging, with subchapters on blogging a self-exploration and the distinction between fact and fiction.

The text is written in a light and engaging manner, with many fascinating tidbits of information. I did not know, for instance, that the playwright Bertolt Brecht described a vision of radio very similar to podcasting in 1932. And the concept of the The Gutenberg Parenthesis was a real eye-opener. The idea is that blogs and other social media are taking us back to the state that existed before the dominance of printed text, when teaching and entertainment was mainly oral and therefore dialogic.

All in all, Walker Rettberg covers an impressive amount of territory in a mere 176 pages. If there is one aspect of blogging I miss, it would be the connection between newspapers and blogs we find in Scandinavia. Here, a large segment of the blogging community uses the services provided by Verdens Gang, Norway’s largest newspaper and most popular website, at vgb.no. My impression is that this close relationship does influence the choice of subjects, as well as the comment and linking practices of many of the bloggers there.

Twingly, a commercial trackback service used by an increasing number of online newspapers, is part and parcel of the same phenomenon. The trackback pings are integrated with the newspaper story, allowing the blogger to give her or his perspective. When pinging newspapers with Twingly, I’ve also found that journalists use the service to engage in dialogue by commenting in my blog. Although local to Scandinavia, newspaper blogs and Twingly are interesting examples of mainstream media trying to connect with the blogging community.

This is only a minor complaint, however. “Blogging” puts a genre that is so often ignored or ridiculed as “pajama media”, on a firm academic footing without inundating the reader with academic terminology. I warmly recommend it to anyone affected by the explosive growth of web-based media, including parents, journalists and - perhaps most importantly - teachers. From now on, this book should be on the reading list of every teacher’s training academy.

Ever since I switching from a IBM Thinkpad T40 with a screen resolution of 1024×768, to a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with a 1440×900 screen and NVidia graphics card, I’ve had problems with external projectors. Whether I’ve booted up the default OS, Ubuntu 8.04, or Windows XP, the projector usually shows a squashed wide-screen image or just part of an image. The laptop’s 16:9 screen just seemed terminally incompatible with every 4:3 projector out there.

But recently I stumbled upon a simple solution that so far has worked with every projector and external screen I’ve connected to the VGA port. Here it is, in three steps:

1. If it isn’t already on, boot up you computer and log in.
2. Connect the cable to the projector/external screen. That’s right: wait until you are logged in, do not connect the cable before you boot up.
3. Restart X server, and log in again. To restart X in Ubuntu, just press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.

By restarting X you will shut down Firefox, Openoffice and other applications that depend on the graphical subsystem. But most of Linux will be untouched, which means that the process should just take a few seconds. Anyway, in my experience it is far more predictable than running the projector application that launches in Windows XP when you press Fn-F5, and faster than using the NVidia application.

There might be a zeroth step here: My T61 is normally connected to an external 1680×1050 monitor, via the VGA port on a docking station. This meant that I initially had to use the NVidia X server Preferences application (normally found in System/Administration/NVidia X Server Settings or started by typing sudo nvidia-settings in a terminal window) to create a dual screen setup.

If you run this while an external monitor or projector is connected, you will see it listed along with the laptop screen when you press X Server Display Configuration. In the menu under the screen layout window, press “Configure” and choose “Separate X screen”, set the resolution to Auto and save the X Configuration file. With this setup as you standard xorg.conf file, the NVidia card seems to detect any new screens and change the resolution accordingly when you restart X.

As a first attempt at creating a cross-plattform application, Launchy for Linux has a lot going for it: it is small, fast and elegant, and has a nice selection of plugins and skins. But for the past couple of weeks, two major bugs have become really annoying: Launchy opens all application scripts in a text editor, which means that half of my applications fail to run, and for some reason several of my most important directories are never indexed.

There doesn’t seem to be a fix in the pipeline, and as a result I installed Gnome-Do instead. It seems just as snappy as Launchy, and although I haven’t been able to find a configuration menu the default installation runs all applications and opens most directories as it should. I qualify my statement, as there seems to be a problem with Gnome’s standard directories. Rather than opening /home/eirik/Documents, say, Gnome-Do opens /home/eirik instead. By default in version 0.4.* directories are opened with the “Reveal” option, and you have to tab to the Options window and type Open to get Gnome-do to truly open the directory. I upgraded to the latest version, and now directories are opened directly by default.

Ubuntu Cola is made with Fairtrade sugar (the kinder, gentler way to obesity), and AFAIK not available in Norway as yet (though Wikipedia says otherwise). Alas, as a can of cola is an essential accessory to any Linux install…

It’s a truth as old as the hills: cats and computers, man.
In this case, a cat-sized and -priced computer.

moar funny pictures

The original series documenting Linus’ hitherto undocumented veganism is flickred, of course…

The screendump above shows a pretty typical power history of my T61 for the two hours and fifteen minutes a full charge lasts. The variation is due to a mixture of writing, watching a an episode of a TV show (that’s the peak around 42 minutes) and talking to a fellow passenger (that’s the trough near the two hour mark). The screen brightness was between the minimum setting and 50 %. Both radio transmitters were switched off, which saves about 3 W. I am also running Powertop and CPU Scaling.

Powertop saves a couple of watts on my machine, while CPU Scaling has no discernable effect. All of which goes to show how bad things still are compared to XP, which gives me three and a half hours with the same kind of usage. This is not limited to Ubuntu or Thinkpad, of course. The one big downside to the success of the Asus Eee, is that it really showcases the Linux battery life problem. This is 2008 - we shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of thing…