I haven’t been a detractor of Canonical’s attempt to improve the Ubuntu desktop experience and since April, as well as for a time earlier, have been using the Unity interface. But as part of my general movement towards making things a little simpler, I thought I would take a step backwards. I’ve noticed lately some stability issues with both of my Ubuntu machines. Sometimes the mouse will mysteriously stop working – or rather does not respond to clicks – and other strange behavior. I’m not sure where this comes from, but it could be that going back to lighter and more tested configurations will bring greater stability.

I think some of those who are up in arms against Unity have not observed that it is extremely simple to go back to the old Ubuntu interface. You just log onto “Classic Ubuntu”, which is already there, installed alongside Unity. So on my home computer, that’s what I did. I also installed Docky so that I would have a nice application starter. I thought about Cairo Dock, but remembered some stability issues there from my previous use of it. I tried AWN, but at first it would not work. Docky didn’t work at first either. I found a couple of suggestions about how to resolve this issue, but the best and simplest was to edit gconf and get Metacity to use the compositor. However, I also decided I wanted my Desktop not to show icons. There’s another setting in gconf for that. Unfortunately, as soon as you ask not to show icons on the desktop, you also lose your wallpaper. But I’m happy enough to have a cleaner desktop. So back to Gnome 2, with Docky, and so far so good.

On my other laptop, at the office, I was a bit more radical. I installed XFCE, the XUBUNTU interface. There were a couple of suggestions on doing this. I think the wisest of them was probably what I ended up doing: not to install the entire XUBUNTU desktop, but only XFCE. I did add the extra Xubuntu themes, etc. It took me a while to tweak the XFCE interface into something I could live with. I duplicated some of the qualities of an application dock by adding launchers to the bottom bar and making it autohide. A couple of people in XFCE forums recommended that and, for a minimal keep-things-simple desktop, there is some logic in using just the native abilities of the GUI. So, there at work, I’m also quite happy now with the interface. With XFCE it’s easier to configure the desktop not to show icons, and you can choose between one of the wallpapers that come with XUBUNTU. That 3-4 year old computer is pretty snappy now with XFCE.

So tonight we went to a wedding. It was near Kibbutz Naan. When we went in they couldn’t find our names. Eventually they wrote out seating cards for us anyway. We dropped the cheque in the safe and looked around. “Maybe it’s the wrong wedding,” I said: I don’t see anyone I know here.” “Wow, maybe it really is,” said Dorit, also peering round to recognize a face somewhere. So it dawned on us that there must be more than one wedding hall near Kibbutz Naan. It took a while to get someone to retrieve the envelope from the safe and for us to go and find the right wedding.

As we walked in they were just reciting “and if I should forget Jerusalem may I lose my right hand – or however it goes.” At first we didn’t see anyone we knew there either. One wedding’s as good as another wedding, I thought. But it wasn’t so bad. The salads were excellent, and I managed to finish several chapters of “No more enemies.”

On the way out we took a different way, through the fields. Two young guys came up along side us and signalled us to stop. I thought they might be criminals. “Police”, they said. “Police?” – “We are police,” they answered, “Where are you going, sir?” “To the road.” “Where are you from?” “Neve Shalom. Shalom.” I said, winding up the window.

I’ve been thinking lately that the minimalism that I’ve been trying to achieve lately would have seemed to me bourgeois sophistication just a few years ago. The items and gadgets I possess are opulent in comparison to then, and the amount of time I squander on the computer is similarly insane. When I extrapolate from what I know of the change in my own habits to wider circles, I can only conclude that there must be something seriously wrong with our koyaaniqatsi world.

Anyway, today I was looking up on the web things that I might like to take to India with me. Last year I took along a meditation pillow and was glad of that but it’s too bulky. So I looked up inflatable meditation pillows. Amazon was selling one called the “Mobile Meditator”, and there were a couple of competing products on other websites. There’s an inflatable zafu from bodyfriendlyfurniture.com, and Wisdom Travellers also have an attractive set. After much deliberation I opted for the Mobile Meditator. But Amazon said it would only ship around July 5 and there seemed to be no way to alter the kind of delivery. So I looked further and found the company that sells the pillow directly – Brightspot Solutions. Their website was friendlier than Amazon’s. The product + delivery was also cheaper and, best of all, it has already shipped today. So if I’m lucky, I’ll have it in good time for India.

I also looked at light travel yoga mats. Here I ran into the problem that most companies didn’t ship to Israel. There’s an Israeli retailer, yogastore.co.il, that sells Jade travel mats. But yogamatsandmore.com have one that folds as small as a newspaper. That would be better for me, even if it is less comfortable to use.

Finally, I looked at clothing. I’m tempted by Ex Officio’s line of travel t-shirts. And there’s one unique company called Makeyourownjeans.com, which would definitely interest me if it weren’t for the time-frame. I’ve bookmarked them for another time.

My goal is to fit everything into the Chinese rucksack that Yonatan had shipped to me from China. If I can make do with just a single change of clothing, I think I can succeed.

On my afternoon walk I suddenly remembered what a dismal failure I’ve always been as a whistler. Ordinary folk may not be virtuosos, but they can get out a simple 3-tone sequence. My wife told me that, when she was growing up, her family had one of these as a kind of shiboleth, to attract one-another’s attention. But when I try to whistle, while some sort of sound will emerge, it’s always been a hit-or-miss affair. As a child, I remember this as a mark of shame. Since then I haven’t thought much about it. But on my walk this came to mind again and it riled me. How come I’m such an inept whistler? Is it something physical about the shape of the mouth, lack of coordination, shyness or what?

I spent the next 15 minutes trying to improve my whistling – out in the fields, where only the birds could hear me (I could imagine them cocking their heads in derision). Surely, at the age of 55, I could finally master the art?

The result? The same! I’m just the same lousy whistler as I’ve always been.

I’m continuing to play with Nanoblogger and through it learn more about the unix command line, ftp, and other things. I understand now why the script used to publish the blog does not publish the archives (mput * does not work with folders recursively). I have tried to replace it with wput, but the connection fails repeatedly. Tried also “cadaver” – a command line webDAV client, but this failed too. I’ve decided to simply upload files with Filezilla for now, when I feel like it.

I’ve also placed a mirror of the blog on Ubuntu One. That makes it possible to keep a mirror also on my other computer, and solves the problem of using different machines. It would work permanently. Dropbox – a similar service – also makes it possible to use a CName. It solves the upload problem completely if I like.

That brings me to think again about Opera’s Unite service. I realize now that it would be better if they offered the option of a caching proxy – actually just like Dropbox. That way it would not be necessary for one’s computer to be on all the time, and the service would also permit the download of files more quickly than if the user were to download these from one’s slow computer. They could charge for the option, by capacity.

A few weeks ago Kent lent us Invictus – Clint Eastwood’s movie about Nelson Mandela. We don’t have a working DVD player in the house. At first I couldn’t get it to work on my Linux machine. It took a while to understand that I could download the necessary codex and then it would work. Tonight we decided to watch it, so I connected the external hard drive to the laptop and the laptop to the TV via VGA cable and sound cord and presto!, the film hit the big screen. Or rather didn’t. Bits of the Linux screen moved over, and other parts didn’t. So I switched over to Dorit’s netbook on Windows 7. However, Windows Media player complained about a missing codex. I downloaded VLC player, and it worked, though it was impossible to get the shape right for the TV.

Invictus itself is a pretty good film. I didn’t check for authenticity, but the story rang true. It worked as a fim thanks to a very tight plot – it fastidiously chooses only two or three elements which seem at first glance quite minor, and focuses on them. Mandela evidently did the same. It’s moving to watch the reshaping of a national identity, through the minds and hearts of individuals. As Deb says (NME), identity change is often less about removing old parts of identity (difficult), but in adding new layers. At least in the beginning.

I ordered a Kindle back before intending to visit my parents in Virginia, in early May. But that trip didn’t happen, and I waited for someone to bring it over. Now it’s arrived, and I quickly finished off a Murakami that I’d mostly read (using Amazon’s service) on my I-pod touch. Now I’ve got started on No More Enemies by Deb Reich.

I opted for a Kindle rather than a tablet computer, since I know that having a device that can do many things would distract me from the experience of reading.

I love Kindle’s display. Ergonomically, I think the device isn’t perfect. There’s too small of an area to grab without accidentally hitting navigation buttons

Richard Stallman has famously spoken out against Amazon and the other book chains, and I agree with him. But the convenience factor steps in; I’m just happy Amazon make it possible to buy books here in Israel/Palestine, unlike B & N, Google and the other ebook publishers. For print, I’d started to use The Book Depository – a UK merchant that ships all over the world, for free. (I’ll bet it’s still cheaper to order from India.)

Deb Reich’s book is brilliant by the way, though I’m still in the early chapters.

Before our last trip to India I purchased 2 pairs of “Ex Officio” underpants, which came with a slogan that went something like “17 countries, 45 days, one pair of underpants”. The company makes products of light, quick drying material, and the idea is that you can wash them and wring them out each night and put on a fresh, sweet-smelling pair every morning.

So indeed, when we went to Tamil Nadu for a month, I took along just two pairs (sorry, couldn’t get it down to one!). I washed them out each evening and by afternoon of the next day they were dry, usually. It needs to be mentioned that the coastal regions of that part of India have a dank tropical climate and even for there, there was an unusual amount of rain last August. Sometimes it took days to dry a normal load of laundry, and the climate makes you want to change your clothes three times a day. So it was a fairly good test of Ex Officio underwear. On the other hand, my wife succeeded more or less as well to wash and dry her own less-pretentious underwear, since in India it is considered impolite to give one’s bloomers to the hotel staff or dhobi.

Last weekend, I did my laundry at home, and it came out to three washing-machine loads. In Israel’s dry summer climate, you put laundry out on the line and it’s dry within a couple of hours. But Dorit commented on the quantity of laundry that I manage to produce in a couple of weeks and this got me thinking. Why not do the same as we did in India? So now, for the last few days, when I get into the shower, I also soak my socks, underwear and a shirt,then rinse it out and hang it on the line. It takes a couple of minutes. I put on the previous days set, after ironing my shirt. I figure in this way I can cut down drastically on the amount of clothes I need, and not have three loads of laundry to hang and dry every second week.

Also, I should mention that light cotton shirts dry even quicker than my fancy-pants hi-tech Ex Officio underwear. I have a couple of hand-spun shirts from Delhi’s Gandhi Ashram that I love.

Excited to read about this.  There’s a whole new world of static, database free blogs.  This would be the answer for using Opera Unite or Github as free blog providers, or my Fastmail system (which I already use for email and for photo albums).  Basically, it’s possible simply to write text files in any editor, and transform these into instant blog posts.

Here are some links I discovered so far:
http://www.subspacefield.org/~travis/static_blog_generators.html

http://rog.rubyforge.org/

http://blog.notmyidea.org/pelican-a-simple-static-blog-generator-in-python.html

http://jinja.pocoo.org/docs/

http://jekyllrb.com/
can import from WordPress.com

jeykll on fastmail http://tomalison.com/reference/2010/04/03/webdav/

Using github as a free blog provider
http://eclipsesource.com/blogs/2011/04/05/how-to-blog-using-github-and-eclipse/

github pages:
http://pages.github.com/

http://samsoff.es/posts/new-blog-on-github-and-jekyll