Olympic Enthusiasm

 Media  No Responses »
Jul 132012
 

This morning I caught a news item on breakfast TV about the results of a survey carried out by the BBC into the opinions of people into the effects of the Olympics on the UK. I was particularly interested in the part where it claimed that most people are yet to get “enthused” by the Olympics. Which is quite a common theme – every so often one media group or another goes out to find that people really aren’t that bothered by the upcoming Olympics.

Perhaps the media is made up of excitable types but they make the mistake of assuming that people who are not excited by the Olympics in advance of the events will not be excited whilst the events are taking place. I don’t know how everyone else reacts, but I tend not to get excited by events that are happening 6 months away, or next week. Even if they are fantastically exciting whilst they are happening.

The time to decide if the Olympics has been a positive thing or not is after the Olympics.

Plastic Shopping Bags – Replace With Paper?

 General  No Responses »
Jul 072012
 

I caught a partial item regarding plastic shopping bags on the news channel this morning. I suspect that someone was saying it’s very green to charge for plastic bags, and someone else saying it isn’t fair on those who are not on a planned shopping trip.

Both are right of course.

If you are doing a big shop then taking along special bags to bring the shopping home is not only sensible, it is also the sort of thing that you are likely to remember – those cheap bags that supermarkets supply you with are really quite irritatingly cheap and nasty.

But if you are popping into a shop on the way home from work, you are not so likely to have a stock of bags available and this is when cheap plastic bags are so useful. But it is not the plastic that is the useful part – we want a bag.

And in the past there was an alternative that was greener, and just as convenient. In fact there are many shops still using this kind of bag. It is more expensive than cheap disposable plastic bags, but not ruinously so – perhaps 10-15p per bag. And of course it is recyclable.

So why not? Or at least give us a choice.

The Custom Wallpaper Script

 Linux  1 Response »
Jun 302012
 

Warning: This page details a shell script that I’ve produced for my own amusement; it isn’t a product. It hasn’t been tested in lots of environments, and it will take some hacking to get it to work for you. If you’re looking for something to use, move along; if you’re looking for ideas to improve a real wallpaper setting program, you might want to read on.

So elsewhere I’ve admitted to driving a stake through the heart of GNOME’s wallpaper plugin to allow my own wallpaper script to work. Well, I could hardly do that and not announce it could I? So here goes :-

  1. It doesn’t actually set the wallpaper; it lets hsetroot do that.
  2. It requires a parameter to determine which directory to choose – i.e. ~/lib/backgrounds/one, ~/lib/backgrounds/two, etc.
  3. It uses xrandr to pick out the “regions” of the default screen.
  4. It puts portrait images on my portrait monitor, and landscape images on my landscape monitor by overlaying them onto an overall image the size of both monitors added together.
  5. It waits a set duration, and then repeats.

If you’re still interested in getting a copy it’s available at http://zonky.org/src/set-random-background.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries