Fast Ubuntu Tweaks

Over the past few years I went from absolutely loving Ubuntu to liking it, to almost disliking it now. Yes, it is a great distribution; but the teams that make it seem to not be taking UNIX design philosophy seriously.


Ubuntu seems to be building up a pillar of their own custom software. I was disappointed when they removed the option to change the GDM greeter a few years ago. Since then they seem to be obsessed with cohesion by removing options and doing half-ass jobs on building interfaces. (Have you noticed that when you right the indicator applet panel, the gradient is duplicated all the way down the menu?)

Unity is an excellent example of this; sure the desktop needed an overhaul, but don't push untested beta version software to users that has essentially no built-in way to change its options. And let's not even start with the problems it gives me on with my Nvidia!

But talk is cheap, so I'll show you the code. Three lines and a few config options should fix things up:

sudo apt-get purge ubuntuone*
sudo apt-get remove indicator-me indicator-messages
sudo apt-get purge zeitgeist*

Those three lines remove the ubuntuone client (do you use it? is it worth the program running in the background and trying to phone home?) Removes the indicator applet (that thing with the mail button, and your social media accounts), and removes zeitgeist (who uses it, really?)

Next: edit your "Startup Applications", what is this, Windows? Few people want VNC to be started when their computer does, if they do, they'll enable it manually.

With all this hate out, I'll say that my next computer system will either be Elementary OS (cohesive, yet follows UNIX design) or Windows 8.

TI BASIC

I just dug out my old TI-83 Plus and was poking around the PRGM menu and found a few old programs that I had made.  Most of them were little helper programs that I created while the teacher was lecturing in my tenth grade pre-calculus class (I didn't take calculus until three years later, by then most of it was gone).

I had learned BASIC two years prior to learning TIBASIC, in an old math textbook that a teacher of mine had collected.  My original programs were written on a sheet of lined paper, and did simple things like solve triangles.  I was unable to find an suitable interpreter as BASIC had taken its leave years prior, I was simply born about ten years too late.

A freshman in that class (who was a genius and later became a dear friend of mine), was very patient in teaching me the essentials of the language, I started off with a few simple things such as making the program distributed by the teacher to solve quadratic equations run twice as fast.  I also made a minesweeper, but that seems to have disappeared off the calculator.  Later on I also made PONG, but this too has gone (PONG ran very slowly, but none-the-less worked).  There was another game I made that made you race around the screen attempting to collect items...

Anyhow that is enough reminiscing for today :)