I am not much of an artist, but when a friend posted a link to http://twitpic.com/5ncmry/full, I decided to try making a poster with similar feelings but more like the original (which can be found at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Unclesamwantyou.jpg. Below is the result. What do you think?
Home of the Brave
I have been using XFCE recently. KDE 4 is nice and all, but a bit flaky and I am tired of kmail and kopete (occasionally) losing settings after point updates. After switching to Pidgin and Claws Mail, and already using Firefox as my main browser, I figured, why bother keeping KDE? So I switched to XFCE, which is lightweight, fast, and full featured. Of course, my must have KDE apps – like amarok, kalarm, and dolphin – still work just fine.
Thunar is the default file manager for XFCE. There are a few things I don’t like about it, but like XFCE, it does what it is supposed to do and does it fast. Like many file managers, Thunar features a right click “Create Document” menu. By default (in PCLinuxOS at least) there is not much there, just a generic “empty file”. So, how to add new items to the “Create Document” menu?
Simple. Create a directory (aka “folder”) called Templates in your home directory (not the “Documents” directory, your /home/USERNAME directory). Next, put the files you want used as the basic for your new “Create Document” files into that directory. That is all. You are done.
Right click in Thunar and you should see the files from Templates listed in the submenu. BUT, they won’t have the extension (.html, .jpg, .ogg, etc.) so be sure you give them descriptive names – like textfile.txt or webpage.html or BlankWhite1600x1200Jpeg.jpg. The actual name won’t matter when you click on an item from the “Create Document” submenu, because Thunar will automagically prompt you to give the file a new name – and this time, the extension will be there.
I am not a fan of the default header and footer settings that Firefox uses when printing. Too much info, most of which I do not care about. Like having the URL of the website. If I need it again, I have it bookmarked or a quick search for some keywords from the content should be sufficient. If I am printing it on paper, I don’t care about the URL. Same for the date and time. Some people (perhaps in business) may need this sort of info on their printouts, but I don’t need it and don’t want it.
Changing the header and footer info that is printed is very easy. The problem is that it resets after every print job. I have looked occasionally but never found a GUI way to change the info and have it stay changed. So today I delved into about:config. Sure enough, it isn’t that hard to do if you are willing to poke around “under the hood” a bit.
So I am working on my MA TESOL research paper, and decide I want to put include the List of Tables (LoT) in the Table of Contents (ToC). Creating a ToC in OpenOffice.org is incredible easy, but adding things to it is much less so. Correction: finding out how to add things to it is not so easy. Once you know how though, it is pretty simple.
Obviously, you first need to have a ToC and something you want to add to it that isn’t already added by default. If you are using headings (and you should be!), you can easily add heading levels by changing the ToC settings. Right click on the ToC, select “edit index/table”, and set the appropriate level in the text box located to the right of “evaluate up to level”. In the screenshot, I have my ToC include heading levels 1, 2, and 3 by setting OOo to evaluate up to level 3.
