Has anyone else ever noticed how certain characters in Anime are drawn with one single canine sticking out most of the time? I just realised how much such characters automatically annoy me just because of a few select pixels lol While I suppose that it's supposed to convey a mischievous personality, my brain just tightens up in annoyance every time :S I really wonder what sort of conditioning brought that about :S

I had an issue today where I was stuck with a non-functioning board and 3 power supplies. I couldn't get any response from the board regardless of which power supply unit I was using. However, while the board was new, the power supplies weren't and I really had no way to isolate the issue between the two. Rather than messing with any of my working systems, I wanted to test the PSUs without having to connect them to a motherboard.

This site is fast dwindling into a Linux help site :S

Anyway, today's issue relates to a rather odd video issue I've been facing on an infrequent basis. Every now and then all video on my Gutsy box just goes out of whack. Playing any file which would have played fine 10 minutes earlier would display a screen full of garbled lines. The audio is always fine.

If you constantly see a gnome_screensaver_control error dialog when you open Mplayer in Kubuntu, you can fix it by unchecking the "Stop XScreenSaver" option in Mplayer preferences (under the Misc tab). The preferences and other menu options can be reached by right-clicking on either the video or controls windows.

Looks like a packaging issue.

A few months back, I wrote about my trials and tribulations with Samba in KDE + Feisty, but, now that I had a fresh install of Gutsy to play with, I tested the sharing applet once again. Once again, however, it failed out of the box, although I must say that it was not as fucking bad as the last time.

This is something of a personal reminder of the stuff I do after a fresh installation of Kubuntu:

• Install the following apps:
  1. synaptic
  2. firefox
  3. pidgin
  4. whois
  5. traceroute
  6. sun-javaX-jre
  7. sun-javaX-plugin
  8. sun-javaX-fonts
  9. vlc
  10. mplayer
  11. vim
  12. vim-gtk
  13. msttcorefonts
  14. qcomicbook
  15. flashplugin-nonfree
  16. unrar
  17. unace

If you ever find yourself running into a monotonous

"The following packages have been kept back"

error message when you run sudo apt-get upgrade, then the "fix" is to either run apt-get dist-upgrade which is quicker, but sounds more ... dangerous or to run apt-get install [package list] where package list is a list of all packages that have been kept back.

I've been listening to Steve Vai's latest album - Sound Theories and have fallen in love with the song Brandos Costumes (Gentle Ways), one that I first heard in his Alive in an Ultra World release. The first time I heard it, I thought that it was a good song, but sounded a little flat or even artificial (with respect to the general ambience in the song).

Following my recent adventures with my motherboard, I wanted to set up a temperature sensor on my Kubuntu desktop, so that I could keep an eye on my motherboard temperature. Searching the repository came up with a number of potential options including ksensors. However, when I installed ksensors I couldn't find a temperature option; just memory usage and stuff.

Earlier today, I found that one of my boxen had hung. I tried restarting it, but was met with a keening siren alarm from my motherboard. Giving it a rest and restarting was either producing the same siren or a hang after a few minutes along with some nifty monitor graffiti.