Author: Mark

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

2) Yum!
7) Hmmm, a slice of key-lime with a long, tall glass of iced tea sounds good.
8) Get a herd of sheep and have them nibble the grass to the appropriate height. That way you never pay for gas on the tractor again and the sheep also fertilize the lawn as they mow it.
10-a) For Rosie (the Jetson’s robot) to be real and mine. No more dishes or laundry for me, yeah baby!
10-b) For Mr. Scalzi to finish his sequel to The Android’s Dream.
10-c) Cures for [insert any/all diseases that killed people you loved here].
10-d) A mental time machine allowing me to download all of the knowledge I have today (or at any point in the future) into my younger self. Knowing what I know now, I would have paid considerable more attention in high school and probably would have enjoyed school a lot more.
10-e) A decent resort hotel on one of Saturn’s moons which anybody could afford to visit (even middle-class schmoes). Seriously, what could be cooler than waking up with a view of Saturn’s rings coming up over the horizon?

In response to Things That Would Be Cool: A List.

Note to self: Hey self! You need to seriously work on proof reading your comments before putting them out there for other people to read. Seriously when you make grammatical mistakes like some of the ones in this comment over at the Whatever; you make us look stoopid.

I’m pretty hyped to see this come out. And the new direction of being cartoony/pixar-ish is something I really like about it. Too many games are taking themselves far too seriously these days going for the ultra realism and what not. Along those lines, I have heard the Heavy Weapons Guy actually grins and laughs as you kill opponents and supposedly Valve will give each of the characters some sort of appropriate killshot animation. It sounds like it will be hella fun. The only problem is I’ll have to seriously upgrade my PC as my current box only just manages to play Half-Life 2 in single-player and can’t handle multi-player (too old/slow). *sigh*

In reply to Valve teases us with Team Fortress 2 – Meet the Heavy.

I can think of few things less appealing. I’ve eaten a lot of mix-in ice cream over the past year, a task that has seemed increasingly penitential as it progressed. I ordered simple French vanilla from Cold Stone; from Maggie Moo’s, a concoction called Better Batter Cake Carnival (cake batter ice cream, Twix bars, cookies and fudge); both were unfinishable. Whereas a visit to Ben and Jerry’s or Häagen-Dazs leaves me wanting more, a visit to Cold Stone leaves me wanting a salad and a shower.

Taken from What happened to plain old vanilla?

I have to admit that I’ve visited the local Coldstone Creamery a couple of times and kind of enjoyed the ice cream, but hated the store. I’m really a DQ sort of guy1. I like to be able to go in, get my ice cream and get out. At Coldstone that game plan does not work as well due to the staff singing their bloody songs and trying to make being in the store as pleasing as eating the product. Unfortunately for them it just does not work; especially as it does not distract me from how large a price they’re charging for their ice cream.

1 Actually, I am a Ben & Jerry’s fan but they do not have any scoop shops in my area. So I settle for DQ as being cheap, quick and tasty.

The title on this post is somewhat misleading. The default stylings of AnimeIowa‘s forums make my eyes blee, especially after some of the forum members have taken it upon themselves to give their words extra features ugliness. E.g. putting bright, yellow text on top of a dark blue background. Fortunately, I do 99.9999% of my web browsing using Firefox and there exists an extension for Firefox that will override any given site’s default CSS with the CSS you specify. This means people can do things like take the CSS which makes CoffeeBear.net so lovely and with a few tweaks turn this…

AI Forum Before

Into this…

AI Forum After

And all it took was the Stylish extension and this little bit of CSS:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("animeiowa.com") {
html {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
body {
color: #0F0F0F !important;
background-color: #FFF !important;
}
a:link {color: #D57100 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
}
a:visited {color: #459045 !important;
text-decoration:none !important;
border-bottom:none !important;
}
a:hover, a:active {
color:#6F2314 !important;
text-decoration:underline !important;
}
table tr td {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
color: #0F0F0F !important;
}
font {
color: #000 !important;
}
font .quote {
background-color: #FEFFBF !important;
}
font .catbg {
background-color: #F1EFFF !important;
}
}

Don’t believe this makes that much difference? Then try it out yourself, your bleeding eyes will thank you.

First off, you need to go through a bit of a cultural shift. When you’re looking for/at quirky, little apps; you should be for the Linux version.Secondly, installing and maintaining all your apps under Linux tends to be easier than under Windows. Yes, I said easier. In Windows, you find application “XYZ” on a website. You download a ZIP file and extract it to find an EXE. You run the EXE and it installs, but the program doesn’t run. Why? You’re missing something. It might be Microsoft’s .NET, Java, DirectX, etc…. Only it’s highly unlikely XYZ will tell you in plain English what went wrong. More likely, the app will just die without reporting an error. Then you’re off to Google to figure out what went wrong. Or if XYZ will run, it has no way of knowing when a new version is available or at best it can check their website for updates and when one comes out; you have to download, unzip and install the new version of XYZ (possibly uninstalling the old version first). Since you’re used to this, it doesn’t seem like much but it’s actually a complex operation.

Now let’s compare that to installing/maintaining apps under Linux (specifically Ubuntu). First off, you should enable the extra repositories and after doing so you suddenly have thousands of apps you can install with a few clicks in Synaptic. With the added bonus of Ubuntu automatically checking for updates to every single one you install and then enabling you to update all of them with a couple of clicks. And if some app you want to install requires other packages, then Synaptic will download and install those for you automatically. For the occassional app that is not include in the extra repositories, many 3rd party developers who work on Linux will provide their own repositories which you can add to your sources.list in Synaptic, which gives you all the same benefits as apps in the official repositories. True, there are still other 3rd party developers who don’t provide repositories but for some of these there are sites like Get Deb which offer pre-compiled DEB files for you to use in installing a given app. DEB files serve the same purpose as the installation EXE you download for Windows apps. Lastly, there are those developers where all they provide is the source code. For these, you can generally find detailed instructions on how to compile the app to use it. Though, I’ve been using Linux full-time for about 5 years now and I’ve yet to find a must-have app which was only provided in source code form that I had to compile.

In reply to More Linux at Desperados Under the Eaves.