It’s on America’s tortured brow that Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow…

It’s been slow and boring lately. I’ve had exams, revision and all those horrible things that go with it. The only thing that’s kept me remotely sane is the World Cup. I never really got into the last one as much (can’t quite remember why, to be honest) but I’ve been happily watching this one. There’s been some great matches, but some of the better teams aren’t playing as well as they should. Brazil, France and Germany are the biggest offenders. I suppose it’s partially to do with them all fielding older players. As time goes on, the coaches still feel as though they can play their older players, even though they’re nowhere near as good as they once were.
Anyway, I’m sure you may possibly be interested in who I think will win? I’m being honest when I say that England stand a good chance this year. Brazil, after seeing that game against Croatia, don’t look too good. France played terribly in their game against the Swiss and the German defence seemed shaky against Costa Rica. The Czechs were doing well, but their key player was injured in the match against America. Italy are a shadow of their former selves, but are better than most of the other teams.
In the end, though, the best contenders are England, Argentina and Holland. Holland will probably be taken out on penalties (their biggest weakness), leaving Argentina and England. I suppose we’ll get a better picture in the next games, but that’s what I think at the moment. The only thing that can hold the English squad back is Sven. We nearly lost it in the second half of the Paraguay match, and the substitutions made were pretty terrible at the end of it. We should see a full-strength England squad when we play against Sweden which should, theoretically, be virtually unstoppable.
Roll on World Cup final!

Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box…

So, you've finally installed Ubuntu. If you haven't, I'm now ordering you to read the below post and then go here and download it. Today's post is about programs for Ubuntu. Just like with Windows, there's a huge amount available, each with their own different goals and features.

The very first thing you should do is download and install Automatix. Run it (Applications > System Tools > Automatix) and select what you want to install. I'd recommend installing at least the following:

• AUD-DVD codecs.
• Firefox 1.5.3 plugins
• Gdesklets
• MS TTF fonts.
• Multimedia codecs.
• Sun Java 1.5 JRE

This fixes a lot of annoying problems, including the audio/video formats that don't play and dodgy java/pdf/audio/video support through Firefox.

Anyway, on to useful programs. First of all, let's look at web browsers. The obvious choice is to use Firefox. However, there are a few other possibilities. First up is Epiphany, which is a very simplified browsing experience. This can be found in Synaptic by searching for Epiphany. Another possibility is Opera, which may be installed through Synaptic. Unfortunately, the menu bar looks a bit out of place, so try the guide here to fix it. This will help for a lot of other applications that use Qt, so it might be handy to do regardless.

Email clients now. I've never been a fan of Evolution, but there are two other pretty decent programs available: Thunderbird and Sylpheed. Both are good clients, with Sylpheed trying to be as lightweight as possible (as well as candidate for strangest application name). Both should be found in Synaptic.

Next up is music players. Now, there's two basic styles of interface here, the iTunes-type interface and the WinAmp-like one. For the former, Rhythmbox should do you fine. As well, there's another nice program called Banshee, although it's still under development and a fair bit from completion, although that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it! For the WinAmp style, you'll want Beep Media Player. It even supports WinAmp themes (or so it says, I can't say I've ever tried)!

I could probably go on like this for several days, so I'll just list a couple of other useful programs that you may or may not be interested in before departing:

• F-spot, an image manager similar to Picasa.
• Gdesklets, a desklet manager program a bit like Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets, a bit less glitzy, though.
• Democracy Player, a nice browser to play online music. Not in Synaptic, go here and download the Ubuntu package.

Well, that's it for now. I've done it a lot already, but I'm again going to recommend strongly using Ubuntu. With the unfortunate exclusion of most games, it's a worthy and (in many cases) superior competitor to 95/98/2000/ME/XP/Vista or OSX.