Well, I did it! I converted my Gmail account in Thunderbird from POP3 to IMAP this morning. I have never used IMAP for email in my life. I have always understood the benefits but never really cared…POP3 worked fine for me and it was what I was used to. I thought that I would give IMAP a workout for a little while since Gmail users get the option now. After all, I use my Gmail account more and more and I have it configured in Thunderbird on three computers: work, home desktop, and home laptop.

I am not a typical web mail user. I rarely view my email through a browser. I just cannot get used to that. I have been using email the same way for nearly 15 years now. Using a client like Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, or Evolution just makes practical sense to me (Well, no Microsoft applications make sense but you know what I mean). Perhaps I cannot be “re-taught”. On the other hand, I find web email useful when I am not traveling with my laptop. For instance, I can hop onto any computer with an Internet connection and check my email. I rarely do that but it’ nice to be able to. Most of the people that I know use web email like it was intended to be used. I am aware of the dying email client but the very thought of that scares me. At the moment I love Thunderbird and I am not ready to say adios to it.

So why did I switch to IMAP? Well, I’m not totally sure yet. I think it’s because I want the emails that I reply to be accessed centrally instead of sitting on the computer that I replied from. That’s what I keep telling myself. That’s one drawback of using POP3. There might be some other benefits to IMAP. I intend to keep an open mind about it. I’m going to give it a chance. Of course if I don’t like it I can always switch Gmail back to POP3.

I have other email accounts that offer IMAP as an option. Gmail is the guinea pig here. If I am satisfied with how it works then I may change my other accounts. Who knows? Maybe in a short time I will realize what I had been missing all of these years.

Wish me luck.

Several weeks back, Chess Griffin put the call out for contributors to a series of guest segments over at the fabulous LinuxReality podcast. A couple of weeks ago I pulled up my knickers and gave it a shot. If you’re interested in some talk aimed at people who are new to Inkscape, you should check it out. My full recording was an hour with the intent that it be split into a two parter. Part 1 is now up as part of Episode 82. Thanks for the opportunity Chess!

After doing that recording, I have to say that I have a ton of respect for Chess and others. It was very tough. It took me a couple of awkward moments before I got into any sort of groove (if it even merits the term ‘groove’). Chess, Dave Yates, and others do such a great job just to do it so naturally week in and week out. Props to all of you podcasters who make my commute so enjoyable!

Since I’ve now achieved fame (fortune not so much), I’ll be signing autographs in my car outside the Burger King in the north end of Mississauga over the lunch hour. I think I’ll spend the rest of the day bossing around heathenx to celebrate.

The latest GIMP 2.4 has been released and a refreshed website to go along with it. Weeee!

Release notes.

It has been a while since I have uploaded a new screencast. Been pretty busy lately. I’m sure everyone understands. Anyway, Episode 043 is kind of a neat one. In it I demonstrate how to make pin buttons in Inkscape. The origins of this screencast came from the great Photoshop tutorial website over at psdtuts.com. The tutorials over there are superb. I suggest you check them out.

Well, so far so good. Got Ubuntu 7.10 installed on my aging Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop. I still had to manually configure my xorg.conf file for proper 1400×1050 display. My display is not even usable at boot time off of a fresh install. It looks like a scrambled satellite channel. I have to boot with Knoppix and fix my xorg.conf file manually. This is the third release that Ubuntu cannot get right in this aspect. I’m sure Dell is a little to blame for this too. In comparison openSUSE installs flawlessly on this laptop and correctly sets up my xorg.conf file. In my opinion openSUSE has better hardware detection anyway. But this isn’t a rant on Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a solid distro and it’s remains one of my favorite. I’m not sure that upgrading from 7.04 to 7.10 is worth it really but I’m a sucker for the latest and greatest. Afterall, I upgraded from openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 and there wasn’t anything major in that release either. As long as I get a stable desktop experience with some improvements for my efforts then it’s worth it.

Many things annoy me on a daily basis but Linux users bashing other Linux users for the distribution that they choose to use has to be near the top of my list. I get irritated when users and even developers bash other Linux distributions or projects. Why is that necessary? Can’t people show some maturity. We’re not all in the 7^th grade anymore. Linux is Linux in my book. The very fact that someone uses it usually gets a free pass from me. I use Linux because it works the way that I would expect it to.

Distributions like openSUSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, PCLinuxOS, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo, and ArchLinux, just to name several popular ones, are all fabulous distributions. I know from experience. Take my word. All of them have strengths and weaknesses. All of them do things a little differently then others. But you know what? No one is better than the other. They’re all good. Got it? Great. Remember it.

Peace out!

Sweet! There has been an update to the opensuse-xgl-settings tool. Compiz-Fusion was added to it for openSUSE 10.3.

I don’t care who you are. If you are a male and you listen to Air Supply on a regular basis you deserve to be punched in the stomach.

Interesting

A while back Richard was looking for a blogging client. Since I am somewhat new to blogging I just figured that folks who do this sort of thing on a regular basis must log into their accounts through a web browser and start writing away. Never put any thought into a client until Richard made me aware of it. Often times I write my posts in OpenOffice because I get pulled away from what I am writing, especially when I am at the office. My office is like Grand Central Station sometimes and my phone rings constantly. This breaks my train of thought so I save my work and come back to it when I can.

So I started doing a little research myself regarding blogging clients and why I needed one. I found a few, installed a few, and tried a few…I even found an extension for OpenOffice. Made sense since that’s what I was accustomed to. But after trying several others and somewhat liking them, the one that stuck around was Deepest Sender which is a Firefox add-on. This add-on, however, can work independently of Firefox. This means that Firefox does not need to be running in order to use it. The best thing…I can use this on my Linux and Windows machines. Also, I can save my work and come back to it just like I did in OpenOffice when I am pulled away from writing.

Deepest Sender isn’t feature rich (like Scribefire) but I guess I didn’t need it to be. There’s just enough there to write a decent post without screwing anything up. And believe me…if there is a way to screw something up then I’ll be the first to do it. Since it is stripped down this client might not be for everyone but it’s perfect for me. It does exactly what I want it to do. Simple yet practical. Maybe someday I will require more from my blogging client but until that happens I am perfectly satisfied with Deepest Sender. I now use it 100% of the time since it works great with WordPress. If you are a bloggin’ noob like me then check it out. On the other hand, if you are a pro like Richard then perhaps you should follow his lead.

P.S. It took me 2-1/2 hours to write this post. See what I mean?