Nautilus is Gnome’s file manager. One of its features that I enjoy is the little function called nautilus scripts. When navigation the file tree with nautilus, there are a group of scripts available anytime on the right mouse button. Here is a link for beginners to help you get started with these scripts.

As part of my work with Ubuntu’s documentation team, I’ve been learning an application called Subversion. Subversion is an open source application for revision control. It is the tool used to develop and maintain all the documentation and keep everything sync’d up between contributors.

I saw a post by Christer Edwards over at ubuntu-tutorials.com that got me going in this direction. Here’s how I added svn functionality to nautilus. Enjoy!

In a terminal -

Winter Refrigerator

I’ve talked about our refrigerator before. Some things change and some things stay the same. Here you can see winter fruits and store bought veggies. We still have some carrots and beets from the summer. These keep great. Same water bottles and the condiments haven’t yet expired. I missed a couple of days posting as we had another wind storm which while not as strong as the last one it did cause problems with our Internet connection. This posting every day is hard. See you tomorrow.

Will

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200), which is my primary PC, started mis-behaving. It runs fine for ten to twenty minutes or maybe more then the CPU races to 100% utilization and the twin fans roars and the GUI becomes very sluggish. Trouble shooting the problem is frustrating. On occasion the laptop will run for several hours without any problem. I then feel like I got it fixed. Reboot and come back later and the problem is back. When the problem is occurring, if I reboot without powering off the laptop, the problem persists. I’ve tried many things to rectify this but I’m getting nowhere. I can’t even tell if this is a hardware or software problem. Because my /home is on a separate partition I was able to reinstall Ubuntu but even this did not help. I’ve rebuilt the kernel to be sure SMP was not enabled and to specify support for my Pentium M processor. There must be some desktop/user configuration that is the culprit. Wish me luck.

Moscow Mountain Christmas Eve

At first glance the phrase ‘Abandon Mediocrity’ seems to be about not being mediocre. Looking closer I see that this phrase is more about renunciation rather than being ordinary. Ordinary really means normal and together, normal and ordinary point to reality. Just what is real. Not a question but an seeing. Reality is very ordinary and can’t be anything else. ‘Ordinary reality’ is redundant but you get the point.

‘Abandon reality’ — wasn’t that the battle cry of the 60’s and 70’s? Most of us who were alive then, went about abandoning reality in not so healthy ways. Abandon your clinging to your mental construct of reality and just live. Live and let live. Still a good plan.

This morning I read a little piece about how a pine tree supports the other trees and the forest just by being. The tree doesn’t expect an extraordinary existence. It is a fine example of mediocrity abandonment. The birds come and go — insects come and go — water is transpired through its needles — the nutrients that support growth are returned when it falls. Never any expectation of recognition. Perfect accord with reality. Mediocrity Abandoned

This picture was taken this last fall.
This is the Lewiston, ID/Clarkston, WA Valley.

Fast forward to now — it is Christmas. The weather is delightful. We’ve started our special dinner preparations. Pineapple Fried Rice. Yahoo. Warm, safe and loved — I wish everyone could be warm, safe and loved. Metta.

Saturday, it snowed on the Palouse.

I notice now that the image above is a little over sharpened but I’ll leave it.

We had a great discussion with the book reading group this morning about wisdom. I can’t remember who said it but recently I heard ‘the wise don’t believe their thoughts’. This is pretty tough for most people to understand. We want to identify with our thoughts because they feel important, relevant and interesting, or at least entertaining. Yet wise people and creative people will tell you that wisdom and creativity increase in intensity the quieter the thoughts become. In fact there seems to be an inverse relationship between wisdom and creativity, and our thinking. We have all experiences this at the so call peak moments when life flowed with out thought rather that was in sports, in nature or in some creative endeavor. I’m sure you’ve experienced how unclear things become when the mind races.

We can’t give up thinking. Minds think like hearts beat. It is too easy to let the thinking carry us away and distract us from what is happening right now. Too easy to attach meaning to our mental creations and then have to defend them. It seem more healthy to see thoughts for what they are - just stories we tell ourselves. I’m enjoying relaxing my mind and giving my thinking a break. You should try it too.

Visable Earth

Continuing with my fascination with maps, here is a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet. There are a lot of cool images made up of a composite of several images, sometimes hundreds of images.

http://quickones.org/

Matthew East of the Ubuntu Documentation Team pointed me to a great series of screen casts. Alan Pope of Ubuntu-UK has created some cool introductory videos/screencasts. There a quite a few screencasts and look for new ones coming in the future. The sound quality is great and Alan has a great way of pacing the action. I highly recommend these and I’ve learned a nugget or two watching them. I’ve just got to figure out how to do this as I really feel these screencasts are the wave of the future.

I think the grand daddy of the screencast in this format is Jon Udell. Formally of Infoworld, Jon continues to evangelize the practicality of screencasting. Screencasting on Ubuntu has been difficult but the challenges have been overcome.

Buckminster Fuller was one of my childhood heroes. Even though most of his important work was done in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, he is still revered and honored today. Above is his map of the world with an unfolded Fuller projection, also known as Dymaxion Air-Ocean World map. 1954 final version for an icosahedron, with folding lines. This map shows the land masses as there true sizes. I remember another projection of this map that showed the oceans in the center and the land masses on the edges.

Maps are on of the coolest things. Here is a link to my favorite map retailer. Raven Maps and Images.

Bucky deplored waste and was an original ecologist. He espoused the values of a principle he called ephemeralization, which means doing more and more with less and less. Quoting from wikipedia:

Wealth can be increased by recycling resources into newer, higher value
products whose more technically sophisticated design requires less
material.