My friend Steven was raving about a plugin that adds support for the Twitter protocol to the Pidgin instant messenger. I’ve used a lot of other Twitter clients, but this is neat because it fits in with all my other instant messaging protocols.
It would be nice if there was a PPA on Launchpad that offered this, but I don’t have the time to do that, so I just grabbed the source from SVN and did a checkinstall on it for my 64-bit system. Heres the package:
I’m going to be running through a gauntlet of dumb in a “study” I’m calling Stupificated. Here I’ll be spending a week straight unplugged from anything creative, educational, or remotely close to intelligent. We’re talkng about scraping the bottom of the barrel here:
Oh, and somewhere in there is BET, which when someone reminded me I almost called this whole thing off. Every day I’ll be measuring myself with some metrics. I noticed a weird paradox here though, very much similar to quantum mechanic’s measurement problem: the act of measuring my intelligence is learning to some degree. Basically I have to find some ways to subtly measure my intelligence, memory, comprehension, etc. without interfering (much).
Since I know I’m very likely to lose my mind, I’ll be taking some psychological evaluations along the way. Also, as a non-regular drinker, I’m banking on my desire to consume alcohol exploding.
Some irony in the scenario is: there are people who do this all day, every day, and it’s their life. They gave up trying to learn – for whatever reason. This is a temporary experiment for me. To some, my response is: How can you live it? I’ll be counting down the days, while some lost count a long time ago.
I’ll be starting this within the next month, since I have to plan a full week around it. I can’t very well stop tutoring someone and tell them “Oh, I’m trying to be stupid for a week, sorry, can’t help you!” I also have to get it done before some conventions come around, so it’s a slight balancing act with time.
I’ll also be measuring my recovery the week after, and I’m speculating the rebound time will be very quick.
Please give me your ideas. This is another world for me, and I’m just picking the low hanging fruit I can see. If you have an idea of something that breaks the scale of ignorant – let me know! Tweet @KristopherIves with #stupificated or leave a comment below. I’ll be reading this until I start the study, and I’ll be editing this article before and after the study. Ideally I would like to have some kind of “stupid schedule” of what to watch.
A while ago I tweaked Sam’s simple animations plug-in for Compiz, mainly so windows I minimized would slide away to match some of my other settings. This was to strike a balance between usability and performance, since none of these effects use alpha blending. During this time I made some jokes about a Spinner Rims plug-in to illustrate how people rev the Compiz engine when they first hop behind the wheel. Oddly enough, I’ve actually had others ask me for this plug-in and had Google Alerts on random forums about it – as if it was real, which perplexes me.
Sometimes applications don’t always (or can’t) describe a window correctly, which can make Compiz use a different animation. For example, when I drag a tab out of Google Chrome it uses my open animation for the window, which really disrupts the feel of drag and drop tabs that otherwise is very elegant. Another example is with generic frameworks like Adobe AIR or Java Swing, where all the widgets are treated the same. How do we work around this?
Luckily, Compiz is well equipped to handle this. You’ll need the Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (CCSM), which I think almost everyone has installed, and it should exist out-of-the-box so users can see how powerful the software really is. In the case of Google Chrome:
ccsm or Preferences/Compiz Configuration Settings Manager)class=Chromium-browser)Make sure this is moved up the list so it overrides any other settings, since it’s specific to Chrome. You can later go back and click the Grab button again and add more windows to the blacklist. Now when you drag tabs in Chrome they won’t be so awkward. After getting used to no opening animation with one application, I ended up disabling them for all. I still use the other animations, but I’ve enjoyed not having any opening animations for non-decoration windows.