This past year I purchased a laptop that came with two drives, a small 24GB SSD and a larger 1TB HDD. My configuration has placed the root filesystem (i.e. /) on the SSD and my home directory (i.e. /home) on the HDD so that I benefit from very fast system booting and application loading but still have loads of space for my personal files. The only downside to this configuration is that linux is sometimes not the best at ensuring your SSD lives a long life.

The default sort order in Nautilus has been changed to sorting alphabetically by name and the option to change this seems to be broken. For example I prefer my files to be sorted by type so I ran dconf-editor and browsed to org/gnome/nautilus/preferences. From there you should be able to change the value by using the drop down: Seems easy enough Unfortunately the only option available is modification time.

A while back I made it my goal to put together an open source project as my way of contributing back to the community. Well fast forward a couple of months and my hobby project is finally ready to be shown the light of day. I give you… CoreGTK CoreGTK is an Objective-C binding for the GTK+ library which wraps all objects descending from GtkWidget (plus a few others here and there).

Here are some of my recent posts from over at The Linux Experiment. How to backup and restore an SVN repository with full commit history How to backup and restore a Trac project Big distributions, little RAM 6 Make printing easy with the Samsung Unified Linux Driver Repository Installing Linux to an external hard drive (+ driver issues) An Ambitious Goal The real lesson to take from Elementary OS One license to rule them all?

I came across two interesting articles that look at the insider struggles that have faced Nintendo over the past couple of console generations. A Dolphin’s Tale: The Story of GameCube The Secret Developers: Wii U – the inside story

I, probably like you, use open source software on a daily basis. From running operating systems, like Linux, to every day applications, like Firefox, it is very rare that I go an entire day of computing without using at least some open source code. And yet after years of doing so, and years of ignoring calls for donations from the various projects, I’ve never actually contributed any money toward the projects I use and love.

It has been a really, really long time since I changed how this website looks and I decided what better time to make a change than at the start of a new year? So welcome to the new and (hopefully) improved look and feel of the website!

I came across a crowdfunding site for GnuPG with the tag line: The world needs GnuPG encryption more than ever – a new website, new design, and new content will make strong crypto friendly. If they can actually do something to make GnuPG, and computer security in general, more user friendly and approachable than it may actually be a cause worth supporting.

Below you will find my OpenPGP Key Transition notice signaling my intention to migrate from my current key (0x1CD3E3D8) to my new one (0xFEEEFA8F). Note that it is very likely that the software used on this website will render the notice in such a way as to invalidate the signature below. Instead please see the plain text version here to do proper validation against or check out my About Me page for full details.

I found this article to be quite interesting. It’s always neat to get a glimpse into the inner workings of a design team working for a company like Microsoft and to understand what trade-offs were made and why. In the same vein I would also recommend reading Dean Takahashi‘s excellent books Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution, where you get to hear about the internal fights to keep Windows off the original Xbox, and The Xbox 360 Uncloaked: The Real Story Behind Microsoft’s Next-Generation Video Game Console, where you hear the story of how Epic Games cost Microsoft over $1B by convincing them to include 512MB of RAM instead of 256MB.