Missing In Action

I haven’t really been blogging much recently at all. Life has just been so busy. What with uni, church, and now holidays. I won’t be on the internet at all for the next week, as I am away on holiday to Spring Harvest.

Spring Harvest is a Christian event where thousands of Christians come to worship together and also generally have fun in a great big week of funness. Obviously you non-christians out there might not understand how a Christian event could be fun, well, for you it may not. It all depends on your attitude towards it. But to me, it is fun.

So, don’t expect any blogging. I may tweet with my phone, but that’ll be it. I won’t be able to see your tweets either.

I will try and be a bit more regular with my blogging after the holiday, but until exams are over, I can’t guaruntee anything.

I do have a few things I’m going to try after exams.

1. Install Arch Linux and see if it is any good.
2. Install #! 9.04.01 64-bit beta to see if it is stable enough for use just now.
3. Learn python.
4. See if I can make some patches for terminator.

So, I hope everyone has a good Easter holiday, and doesn’t get too fat on chocolate.

Crunchbang Planet

Just thought I would introduce myself to the Crunchbang Planet.

My name is Alistair McKinlay, I am an Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering student at Strathclyde Uni in Glasgow. I have been using Linux almost exclusively for around 3.5 years, and I am hooked. I was addicted to Gnome with Compiz, but I agreed to a bet to use something else for a month. This was when I heard the Linux Outlaws talking about #!, and thought I would try it.

Since then, I have become obsessed with openbox, and #! in general. I think it is amazing the amount of control you have with openbox, and I just find it sooooo great to just play around with it. I also think that #! in general is the most friendly distro I have come across. Everyone is so welcoming and always keen to help.

In my spare time, I help at a couple of youth clubs at my church, and I try and fit in some guitar-playing and some book-reading in amongst the configuring of my computer, and trying to learn some python.

I am also a Christian, and I may post some things to do with that now and again. I do believe that God exists, and I believe his son, Jesus, came to earth to save us for our sins. Now, you may not believe that, and I am up for any discussions you may have on the issue, but I do not like shouting matches, nor name calling.

I hope that you enjoy my blogging. It is my thoughts, my annoyances, my everyday stuff, my life essentially. If you find it boring, tell me. If you find it funny, tell me. If you agree with me, tell me. If you disagree with me, tell me. If you don’t like me and you wish I wasn’t born…keep that to yourself. Nah, I’m only joking . Tell me whatever you think about them. I want you to.

ClawsMail vs Thunderbird vs Spicebird

I have been getting increasingly annoyed with Thunderbird, as it hasn’t had a lot of work done on it, and Thunderbird 3.0 is looking like it is going to take ages to come round. Once it comes out I’ll try it. So…I found this cool program called Spicebird. However…it didn’t quite cut it.

I recently moved to Crunchbang Linux, and realised there was a very cool program that is installed by default. It is called Claws Mail. So I decided to try it.

There are many good things about it, and there are a few rubbishy things about it. Thing is, it seems like a program that wasn’t designed for ease of use. It is very powerful, very configurable, but very hard and confusing.

For example…I wanted to view html emails. I thought this would be simple. But it wasn’t.

1. sudo apt-get install claws-mail-html2-viewer
2. Go to Configuration > Plugins
3. Click on Load and go to /usr/lib/claws-mail/plugins and choose gtkhtml2_viewer.so
4. Configuration > Preferences > Message View > Text Options
5. Untick “Render html messages as text” and tick the 2 below it.
6. Configuration > Preferences > Plugins > GtkHtml2Viewer
7. Tick “Load remote images in mail” If you want it to.

So yeah…7 steps to view html messages in Claws mail.

So maybe it’s not the easiest. But it certanarily is the most configurable I’ve used in a long time. If you’ve not used it, then I would say use it. NOW.