I switched my desktop over to Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon yesterday. Previously, I was running Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn. Gutsy’s final release is in October and I always get antsy whenever the release dates get close, usually breaking down and installing the beta releases when they come out. This time however, I gave in a bit earlier than usual. Gutsy goes beta in a little less than a month, but I decided to go for it anyway, since I can alway reinstall the older OS version and I also have a laptop for backup if things are problematic, but I want to stick it out and play with things. So, I’m currently running Kubuntu 7.10, Tribe 5 and things are moving pretty smoothly. I see some things are missing or unfinished, but I’ve got a stable and functional desktop and I’m able to do just about everything I need or want. I’m sticking with it.

Another thing I’ve done is switched back over to KDE from Gnome, mainly just to see what’s new. I’m well familiar with KDE, so it’s a smooth transition. I do notice some annoying font issues, but I can probably fix that and though I’ve checked it a few times already, my resolution seems off. I could have sworn my windows weren’t so huge with Gnome. I vaguely recall this being something I had to fix in KDE before, way back when. I have a flat screen monitor on this desktop, so there’s only one resolution and I’ve amended my xorg.conf to retain only the correct one…yet something looks off. I’ll figure it out at some point, I guess. Perhaps it will fix itself by the beta or final release.

One thing I notice with 7.10 is that Kopete, the KDE instant messaging client now comes with built-in OTR encryption support as well as the GnuPG it was using before. I’m loving this, since most other clients out there like Gaim/Pidgin and Adium as well as others, are equipped with OTR. I’d previously switched over to Gaim since I couldn’t encrypt messaging between my friends with Kopete because none of them had GnuPG capable clients.

Anyway, I have a new desktop to play with. Maybe at some point in the near future I’ll put Beryl on it for some eye-candy, but for now, I’m just checking things out.

I’ve been running Xubuntu Feisty Fawn on my desktop computer at home since Herd 4 (so… uh… at least a month I think…?) and I’ve found that there’s not much I can say about it that’s bad. In fact, it’s the first time I was able to upgrade via the “apt-get dist-upgrade” method without a whole mess, complete with a busted X server. I was able to do the upgrade and still have everything working, even Beryl.

Still as successful as the upgrade was, I generally prefer back shit up and to do clean install since I think that a lot of the fun of a distribution upgrade is seeing all the changes, bells and whistles as they appear fresh out of the box (or the ISO, in my case). A dist-upgrade can at times hide these things from my since it may upgrade a program but it still relies on my old config files for the most part.

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I’ve been using Kubuntu for about a year and a half, having switched over from the basic Ubuntu setup. Over that time, I’ve really come to prefer KDE over Gnome. It’s some funky shit—I dig it.

However, a few months ago, I got into Beryl and quickly became addicted to having it. My desktop is a Pentium 4 with a 128 meg Nvidia GeForce 5200 and 768 megs of RAM. As such, the addition of Beryl has made KDE programs kind of slow, clunky and prone to weirdness. My laptop hasn’t really suffered at all much as it’s much more powerful and I guess at some point I’ll slap in a new graphics card and some more RAM into my desktop, but as an experiment, I decided to try Xubuntu with its Xfce desktop environment, to see if it made any difference in performance with Beryl.

After a quick test of installing the xubuntu-desktop package onto my existing Kubuntu setup and getting promising results, I decided to clean my slate, wipe and install Xubuntu solely and see if I could survive on Xfce and Beryl, get a nice looking desktop and have everything I like about KDE, but using GTK+ alternatives. The plan was (is) to get this setup going and try it out, just on my desktop for a few months…say till the Feisty Fawn release hits and then decide, or whatever.

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I’ve decided to try and give up using Firefox for at least one week. In it’s place I plan on using Konqueror and in some cases where I’m using OSX, Safari or perhaps Camino. The real test for me though is to see if I can make Konqueror do everything I’m used to doing (and worry that I can’t live without) with Firefox.

I’ve been falling slowly out of infatuation with Firefox for a while now. Version 2.0 left me mildly underwhelmed and dealing with much of the same-old including an annoying memory leak. Since I use KDE as my desktop environment, I’ve always had Konqueror kicking around and have been very impressed with it’s abilities as a file manager. In my job, where I often have to migrate many files from server A to B, Konqueror’s view splitting features kick serious ass. As a web browser that I’ve had access to for almost two years, I’ve probably used it a handful of times, mainly because of my dependence on Firefox extensions.

This reliance on extensions bothers me. The fact that enough people use it now that exploits are starting to show up isn’t great news to me either. Granted, they’re generally addressed pretty fast, but whatever. Really cool people use fringe, obscure browsers like Konqueror or Lynx.

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I just read this article on security advice by Kevin Mitnick and I’m equal parts pissed and laughing at it. It’s a classic case of ignoring the elephant in the room and it really makes me wonder where Mitnick’s integrity is since I don’t think he’s a particularly stupid person.

He starts the article with the old “We live in dangerous times. Evil hackers can attack you with their viruses!” line and then proceeds to outline ten steps he feels will increase your safety and security. Some are common sense recommendations that I agree with:

1. Back up everything
2. Choose strong passwords
3. Be diligent with applying security updates
4. Use encryption for sensitive data
5. Disable unused services
6. Use a firewall/router to restrict/limit access to your machine
7. Encrypt your wireless networks with uber-strong passwords using WPA

All these points I agree with. All are basic, simple, common sense things everyone should do, but often do not. His other recommendations are what give me pause:

8. Use commercial antivirus products
9. Use one or more anti-spyware applications
10. Avoid Internet Explorer and disable scripts in your email client

This is where I completely disagree. Recommendations 8-10 can be simplified to one step:

1. Stop fucking using Windows already

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When I was a kid, Christmas was never really a big deal for me. What got my blood pumping came about a month early, when all the presents would be wrapped and hidden somewhere. I was on the prowl, hunting them down carefully lifting the Scotch tape, sliding off the paper and playing with them.

Nothing stopped me. Once, when I knew that behind a locked closet door was a brand-spanking new Nintendo game system, after unsuccessfully picking the lock, I just took the door off the hinges, hooked up the system and played it every day, putting the door and everything else back before anyone came home. Subsequently, when Christmas morning came, I had to look surprised at the gift even though I’d managed to win Super Mario Bros. several times over already. I was a horrid child.

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I’m writing this post using Lynx, a command-line, text-only browser, just to see how it works out. I feel cool, thrilled, even daring. Lynx is pretty neat shit, however extremely limited. It manages to handle text, links and frames but can’t handle such things as CSS styling, images and all that newfangled fancy shit.

I first installed it as a fall-back if I should ever have a problem with my X server not starting, which is possible since I like to beta and even alpha test shit. This way, even though I didn’t have a GUI desktop environment to launch my usual browser of choice, I could still boot to just a command-line and hit the support forums for assistance using Lynx.

After a bit of tooling around in the options, I configured Vim to run as my default text editor within Lynx, so in an instance where I would need to enter text (like for this blog post), I can launch Vim and start typing away. Vim is a command-line text editor that I’m sorta-kinda-almost comfortable with. It’s one of those editors that at first glance looks ridiculously difficult to handle, but the more you use, the easier it becomes and if you have the balls, you learn the myriad assortment of commands and eventually become the ultimate text wrangling master. You also never get laid again, ever. A geek milestone that I’m not ashamed to aspire to.

Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can effectively post to my blog with a command-line browser, the likelihood that I’ll do so again is pretty much nil. Yeah, it’s cool, old-school shit, but I do prefer the glittery trappings of the WordPress GUI. Still, I think Lynx is a must-have install for situations like I mentioned above when all hell breaks loose and your GUI has shit the bed and died. It’s also a great barometer of how well put together your website is. Fire up Lynx and check out what your site looks like. Like I said before, CSS styling and graphics will not be displayed, but if you’ve laid things out properly, you’ll see a sane and coherent text-only version of your website. If shit’s all jumbled with stuff that’s supposed to be at the bottom running at the top, then perhaps some redesigning is in order.

So, once again out of a general boredom and desire to up my geekness to the bleeding new shit, I installed Kubuntu Edgy-Eft knot 2. Not even an alpha release. I feel risky, what can I say…I wore a condom.

Of course, my initial upgrade via source list completely fucked my system leaving me unable to boot any kernel. I seem to always have that luck whenever trying to finagle a dist-upgrade. Luckily, I’ve a habit of backing my shit up before doing risky shit like this, so I was cool. I downloaded an ISO and burned a CD on my laptop, wiped my desktop’s Linux partition and reinstalled. The disk install worked fine, booting like a live cd and giving me a little icon to click on the desktop to do an actual disk install. The new installer is fancier than ever and I was up and running in a couple glasses of wine and a nervous cigarette or two.

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This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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I was doing some reading about EXIF data and came across a quirk that I’ve been having some fun fooling around with.

Most digital cameras embed EXIF data into every image, listing such things as the type of camera, date and time the photo was taken and other details as well as a thumbnail of the image so that the file previews faster.

Most of the time, this information is lost or at least updated when an image is edited. However, sometimes the original EXIF data will carry over. Depending on the editing tool or circumstance, an image file that’s been cropped, re-sized, oriented or otherwise edited will sometimes still carry an embedded thumbnail of it’s original state, fresh off the digital camera.

There’s a few tools out there for pulling he thumbnails out of an image’s EXIF data. I decided to use jhead with my Kubuntu laptop (there are OSX and Windows clients as well, but I’ve never used them). After installing, fire up a terminal and type:

jhead -st 'thumbnail-output-filename' 'desired-image.jpg'

If there is a thumbnail embedded in the image it will be extracted to whatever filename you specify. You can then view it with whichever program you choose.

Now understand that there may not be a thumbnail and nine out of ten photos that do have them will be exact miniatures of their parent files. Still, one out of those ten photos can yield some interesting shit. Just take a minute to think of the various and plentiful reasons why a person or organization may need to edit, obscure or otherwise change an image’s original state and you might get the point of this.

To give an example, I took this image from Wikipedia, (mainly because of it’s not under some restrictive copyright and work safe) and after saving it locally, used jhead to extrat the EXIF thumbnail giving me the image below.

If you compare the thumbnail below to the image linked in the paragraph above, you can clearly see that it has been rotated ninety degrees right with parts of two additional statues and a window being completely cropped out of the image.

Here’s a link to a page where someone uses a script to search the internet, checking for and displaying images with EXIF thumbnails whose dimensions are not perfectly scaled (like the file has been cropped or otherwise changed since it’s creation) and displays them for your amazement/boredom.

So many wacky possibilities. Go spend some time on Flickr, Friendster, or MySpace. Try it on documents that have had sections digitally blacked out for confidential reasons. Go forth and be snoopy.