Big Fat Ostrich

Today I got the BEST BIRTHDAY PRESENT EVER!!!! (other than those also awesome socks and pyjamas). Handmade stuff just makes me so fucking happy. I mean, check this out, isn’t it the loveliest thing?!

Oh and uh, in other news. Mortal Kombat, L.A. Noire and The Witcher 2. Three great fucking games. How’s that for a tiny review?

Anyway, I’m preparing something crazy awesome for the very very near future, so stay tuned. (HINT: It has a hobo and puke in it).

Later!

– D

Never go grocery shopping on an empty stomach.

If you do, your stomach will make the decisions and some of those might be some bad choices.

18 percent meat protein!

I spotted this Presidents Choice Tandoori Chicken last week at the local Loblaws. My stomach immediately said YES but my brain was saying NO! Don’t DO IT!

Well I did it. And you know, they’re kind of gross. It’s like, weird Tandoori flavor on breaded chicken strips. And although I do love my chicken finger strips once in awhile, you probably shouldn’t mess with the traditional flavor, which is just plain breaded chicken.

I did manage to salvage them because I couldn’t find anything good to dip them in. Mustard made them extremely revolting, and mayonnaise made them taste even more disgusting. I soon realized what my problem was.

I wasn’t thinking like an Indian!

Enter…YOGURT. Of course, everybody knows that tandoori chicken craves Indian yogurt sauce, but we didn’t have any. So we improvised. With yogurt. Blackberry yogurt.

And it worked.

Why did it work? Well there’s a number of reasons. For one, I love blackberry yogurt to the point where I can eat a whole container of it in a single sitting. If you’ve never done that before, I wouldn’t recommend trying it. It’s something that you have to work your way up to. Like doing 50 push ups or something. Start small, like maybe a quarter of the container, and then work your way up to half. Before you know it, you’ll be a yogurt eating machine!

Secondly, the tandoori chicken is tangy and hot out of the oven, so every bite dipped in the cool sweetness of the yogurt became a battle for taste supremacy in my mouth. Hot versus cold and sweet versus tang and the winner was myself since I was really hungry and ended up quite satisfied.

But I don’t think I’ll be buying these again.

If you do it, here’s the “recipe”.

1 box of President’s Choice Tandoori Chicken
1 container of Liberty Blackberry Yogurt
1 spoon
1 plate
1 fork (to eat with)

Cook the chicken finger strips for 20 -30 minutes, take them out of the oven and put them on a plate. Get the spoon, and heap a few dollops of blackberry yogurt on the plate. It should come out like this. Eat.

This is what 10 year old brake pads look like.

I’m going to make this short and painless. Take a look at my old brake pads. Do your brake pads look like that? They do? Well follow me because I’m going to show you how to change the brake pads on your bicycle.

I probably put up with really shitty worn out brake pads for the last two summers. Pretty lazy if you ask me, because without brakes, your chances of dying increases greatly! Trust me on this one.

$6.99 a pair!

Here’s what a fresh pair of Jagwire Comp Mountain XC bike brake pads look like. I bought two sets for about $6.99 each. I have no idea where they rank in terms of quality, but they HAVE got to be better than what I was using.

The perfect fit

Pro tip: To find out which one is the right one and which one is left one, look real close on the portion that won’t be touching the wheel, and you’ll see a little left/and right indicator on the respective pads.

And that’s it. Grab your trusty allen keys and unscrew the old brake pads. They’re probably really dirty, so be prepared for that and don’t be a wimp about it. When you put the new brake pads on, make sure that they follow the curvature of the wheel. This part is very hard to mess up, so pay attention!

Pro tip 2: You might want to install the brake pads “loose” to begin with, just in case you DO screw up.

In the end, it was a piece of cake. Brake pad replacement is one of the easiest tasks in doing bike repair yourself.

And that’s how you replace your old brake pads with brand new ones. Enjoy, and safe riding!

Finally got a copy of Radiohead’s The King of Limbs and I found it very easy to hear on the first listen. No, do not take that to mean ‘easy listening’. It’s not like that at all. I’m just really digging the arrangements on this one, and there’s a definite drum and bass throwback thing happening in the way that they’re using loops and samples.

If you’ve been following Radiohead over the years, you shouldn’t be surprised by anything that they do anymore. Sure, back in the day, Kid A was probably THE most freakish departure, but like all things Radiohead, you’ll probably ‘get it’ after a few listens, and ‘it’ is usually awesome.

Thom Yorke’s voice still has that haunting, ethereal quality to it. It’s like his voice has taken him yet one more step towards enlightenment. You can’t understand a single word he’s saying, but there’s beauty in the phrasing, which is sometimes a single word stretched out to an impossible thinness, only to be somehow wrapped around the wind and sucked back into the earth and combined with some ancient aquifer. That’s the best I can do to describe it short of breaking it down into individual atoms, which I’m sure is pretty close to what Thom is actually singing about.

Ostrich Track Picks: Little By Little, Feral and Separator

Every time I see an article with a title like 5 Essential WordPress Plugins, or 10 WordPress Plugins That You Can’t Live Without, the Optimal Title plugin is always in the list.

What this plugin did was move the separator so that your blog title would appear after the title of your blog post. This is good practice in the pseudo scientific world of writing with SEO in mind. Have a look at the title bar of your browser right now. See how the title of this post comes first, and the blog name (Big Fat Ostrich) comes second? Search engines like that, and the search results are clearer to the person obtaining them.

However…

I only recently discovered that WordPress has actually had this functionality since WordPress 2.5, or from around 2008! When anyone decides to put together a website using WordPress, they’ll invariably run a search for “best WordPress plugins“, and end up using a list of plugins from 5 years ago. This is why it’s important to check on the development status of any given plugin. Here at BFO, we’ve learned this lesson as well. However, if you look at the download stats for Optimal Title, you’ll see that it’s still being downloaded on a regular basis. You’ll also see that it hasn’t been updated since 2007.

Optimal Title was actually an excellent plugin that filled a need that WordPress couldn’t pre version 2.5. Since WordPress now has the separator argument built in to the wp_title() function found in header.php, you just need to make a small change in your header.php file.

It may depend on which WordPress theme you’re using, but the format below works for us. Many new themes actually use the search optimized title formatted correctly so you won’t need to do anything.

<title><?php wp_title(‘&raquo;’,TRUE,’right’); ?><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?></title>

 

Ubuntu 11.04 has changed some of its default applications one being the move from Open Office to Libre Office and the other being a move from Rhythmbox music player to Banshee. I don’t really care which Office application Ubuntu uses, but to play music, the application actually needs to perform properly.  Let me list some of the issues I have with using Banshee to play and manage your mp3 collection:

1. Banshee 2.0 crashes often: If you have a large music collection (over 10000 songs) expect Banshee to freeze. I’ve never had this problem with  Rhythmbox. I’d rather use a stable Rhythmbox than wait for Banshee to figure this out.

2. Guitar Tabs: This is one of THE most important plugins for me. The Banshee music player doesn’t seem to have a guitar tab add on. Rhythmbox uses the tab-rhythmbox-plugin to query the guitar tab archive and displays them right alongside your music library, in the same window. No brainer for me.

3. iPod Support: Banshee seems to detect my old 3rd generation iPod without a problem, but so does Rhythmbox. Not enough reason for me to switch.

4. Naming your software Banshee: Have you tried using Google to search for “Banshee music player”. Yep, you’re going to get a a lot of results for “siouxsie and the banshees“, which I don’t mind all that much since they were kind of a cool band anyway. With Rhythmbox, your search results will be more precise and therefore, easier to find support. I’ll admit that this was a bit of a stretch.

In the end, all I want is a music player that just plays music. I don’t care what it looks like as long as it indexes my collection fast and efficiently.

Honorable mention goes to Clementine which would give Rhythmbox a run for its money if it also had…you guessed it…a Guitar Tab plugin. It doesn’t from what I’ve seen, but Clementine 0.7 does pretty much everything else. They’re at version 0.7, so they’re obviously very new. If you can prove me wrong and they do have a guitar tab plugin, let me know! Overall, I find using a combination of rhythmbox and mplayer works out just fine. Or you could use VLC if that’s your thing.

Well it took a day, but I fixed the monitor problems on Ubuntu 11.04!

After experiencing THE most unstable Ubuntu upgrade yet, my external display resolution was basically a sea of Technicolor vomit. The display on my Dell 1564 i3 was fine, but attaching an external VGA monitor resulted in an unusable display of flickering madness. I also figured out why they called the distro Natty Narwhal: because it acts like a beached whale with a spike in its brain! Fucking Natty.

Anyway, this is how I fixed the garbled external display problem:

1) The Easy Way

a – Open System > Administration > System Testing
b – After entering your admin password, click next. You’ll have a list of many items to test.
c – Chose Monitor Tests and Video Tests

Run the tests with your external monitor detached.

When the tests are complete, run them again with the external monitor attached. You may have to position your mouse on the ‘Test” button before you attach the monitor, since the display resolution will still be garbled once the monitor is attached. When you’re ready, click “Test”. When the tests complete, you should have your external display back. If all looks good, you’ll just have to configure your display settings. And that’s it!

2) The Hard Way
a – Open a terminal and type xrandr
b – You’ll see something similar to this:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1680 x 1050, maximum 8192 x 8192
LVDS1 connected 640×480+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
1366×768       59.6 +
1360×768       59.8     60.0
1024×768       60.0
800×600        60.3     56.2
640×480        59.9*
VGA1 connected 1680×1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 434mm x 270mm
1680×1050      59.9*+   60.0
1280×1024      75.0     60.0
1440×900       75.0     59.9
1280×960       60.0
1152×864       75.0
1024×768       75.1     60.0
832×624        74.6
800×600        75.0     60.3     56.2
640×480        75.0     60.0
720×400        70.1
HDMI1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

Choose which display you want to be your primary and form your command like so: xrandr –output VGA1 –primary

Honestly, this isn’t the best method if you want to fix it visually. Running the Monitor Tests from the System Testing menu uses xrandr anyway and should get your second external monitor up and running. Hopefully things will run better in 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot which will be out in October 2011.

Next up: How to Uninstal Unity

Hey Natty! Less time drinking tea, more time fixing bugs!

Did you upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04 aka Natty Narwhal? I did, and for the first time since using Ubuntu (I’ve been loyal since 6.10), I’m very disappointed. There are some major issues with this upgrade. What we’ve come to expect from Canonical is a solid operating system, and most importantly, smooth upgrades. In fact, the last few times I wrote about upgrading Ubuntu, I almost had nothing to say because the upgrades were so smooth, they could have been unattended upgrades.

So let’s get down to it.

1. Crashing at first boot (external monitor support): This is open to interpretation. I’m using an external monitor with my Dell Inspiron 1564 and Ubuntu 11.04 didn’t exactly crash. The problem is that there’s a major bug when using an external monitor with Ubuntu 11.04 on various laptop makes and models. So after first boot, both monitors went black. After I unplugged the external monitor, I saw the Unity interface (more on Unity later). I logged out of Unity and into Gnome. When I attached the external (analog) monitor, the image resolution was completely corrupted and unusable. This is a problem with the VGA driver. Read about the bug here.
Note: My display was fine when I connected it to my Samsung via the HDMI port.

2. Unity: Fine, using Unity instead of Gnome 3 might take some getting used to, but could the menu bar have some options? It would be really nice to have some control over its orientation, and at the moment, there doesn’t seem to be any. Isn’t Linux about having control? Freedom? Remember that word?
Unity looks like it’s trying to be an iPhone. Or an iPad. Or like it has a hard-on for Apple. It refers to “Apps”, which are just its regular programs and this just makes it sound like it’s trying to be something it’s not. Basically, Unity makes me feel the way I felt about Amarok when Amarok 2.0 was released, and it wasn’t a positive experience,

3. Flash: After logging into Gnome, I tried browsing and watching videos. You Tube was a mess with videos playing, but with the control buttons flashing and intermittent flickering. Very nice. I ended up fixing that issue by installing Flash Aid which is a Firefox plugin that figures out which version of Flash you need. My question: Why couldn’t the people behind Ubuntu do that?

4. Firefox 4: I haven’t tested Firefox 4 on any other system besides my unstable Natty Narwhal, so you can call me biased, but Firefox 4 has been crashing like Firefox 2 did awhile back. Are we back to the memory leaks from 4 years ago? I’ve been blaming Ubuntu 11.04 and its 2.6.38-8 kernel. Flash is also very choppy on Firefox 4, where flash is fine on Chrome. The test: try playing some Facebook game like Mafia Wars (check the property pages) on Firefox 4 and then try playing it on Chrome.

5. Everything Else: Ok, not everything is bad. When things work, they’re snappy and quick. Even Firefox seems to be as fast as Chrome normally is. I do think that there’s potential here, just that Natty appears to have been rushed for release, and that’s never a good thing. They compromised stability in favor of bling that’s less than impressive. Just give us an OS that works. Remember what happened with KDE 4.0? DO YOU?

1 Amazing thing that actually DOES work: ssh freezing problem: Yep. ssh no longer freezes when authenticating via wireless to my LAN or any external network. The freezing ssh session issue was an annoying bug last year (which I thought was the fault of my crap D-Link DIR-615), but it now works and my wireless ssh sessions are stable. Bonus.

Pro Tip: Touchpad Control: Did you install Natty narwhal on a laptop and found that you lost control of your touchpad? Yeah, me too. Fix it like this:

gconftool-2 –set –type boolean /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true

By the way, what’s the deal with Byobu? Is it necessary? I’ll be trying out this enhanced terminal soon.