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For some time, I have run my own mail server on the stuphi.co.uk domain. The idea was that I could offer email to my family as a service, and I would have full control. Spam filtering would also be under my control. One slight downside was that I did not like the available web interfaces to email. Roundcube and Squirrelmail both seamed a bit lacking.

In parallel to this, I have had a Gmail account for some time. The main reason for this was so that I could subscribe to multiple mailing lists, and avoid exposing my own address to them. Also, the web interface to Gmail and search facilities are the best I have used, in my opinion.

A little while ago, I found out about Google Apps for Domains. After a little reading, I decided to take the plunge, and sign up.

The end result is now I have handed over the email handling of my stuphi.co.uk domain to Google. I did check with my users that they were happy for this to happen, and they had no complaints. I can now have all my spam issues handled for me. A nice web interface for my mail, and I can still use my traditional mail clients using IMAP.

There are those that think that allowing a large American Corporation to handle all my email is not a wise idea. I have always considered email to be the electronic equivalent to a post card. It is not a suitable medium for secure communication, and therefore only use it for trivial matters that I am not concerned about keeping private.

So far I have been happy with the switch. I will keep the option of running my own server open, in case the situation changes in the future. I should have kept some notes on the transition, but in reality, it was not hard. If you all ready run an email server, then you will be able to follow the process with ease.

More fun with Povray

From time to time, I get the the urge to play with Povray.

As can be seen, I am in the process of modeling my home. The idea was I could try out different arrangements of furniture and stuff, and get a view of what it looks like. We even may move some walls around, and this should help to give a feel for how it could look.

At the moment, I am still putting the walls in place. Two big gaps are the fire place, and the front door.

e17 on Ubuntu

Having looked at gOS recently, I decided that it was time to re-visit e17 myself on my Ubuntu system. I have used e17 in the past on Debian before I switched to Ubuntu.

There is a really cool script called easy_e17.sh that does all the work, and here is a how to that details the use of the script.

Now, I followed the steps, and have installed e17. The problem is that I don’t like it. I really want to, but it just does not look right when first installed. Although the themes are easy to install and change, they only affect the e17 elements. Gnome and GTK applications don’t look right.

With some effort it would be possible to match themes in e17, gnome, gtk etc., but I can’t be bothered. Am I getting lazy, or am I just not interested any more in fluff? Either way, it was a relief to get back into Gnome and all that Human consistency.

I will now just wait and see if anybody does a good Ubuntu derivative that has a fully configured e17 desktop. Failing that, I may keep e17 and whenever I am bored, chip away at the configuration until it feels right.

gOS – Something to keep an eye on.

Today I downloaded gOS so that I could have a look at it.

I was impressed. If you are a fan of Google™ then this could be right up your street.

I have no idea who is behind it, but it is based on Ubuntu and uses the excellent e17 version of the Enlightenment window manager. I have liked e17 for a long time, and it is great to see it used like this in a distribution.

The end result is a system that is lightweight, suitable as a portal to common web based services, particularity those provided by Google.

I will be keeping an eye on how this develops.

nuvexport – export files from Mythtv

I installed the Myth-Archive package to be able to backup any shows that I had recorded that I may want to keep. However, it did not work first time, so I gave up with it. It would probably have been better ti fix that, but I could not be bothered, so I have tried a different approach. First I was going to simply query the database and find out which mpeg file is associated with which program, and then manually do the archiving.

What I noticed is that some of the files have a .nuv file extension. This is not very helpful, so I did a quick Google, and found Nuvexport. This looks like a great little program. When it is run, a number of options are presented to you, and it is possible to select a number of programs to process. Options are given for what format it is to be saved in. Once I have extracted the files from Mythtv with this utility, I will use some of these recipes to create some DVD archives.

Update: Nuvexport refused to recognise the aspect ratio. Instead, I am using mythtranscode directly to export the file from Mythtv. It may not be as intuitive, but it works.

WordPress upgrade

I have just upgraded this blog to use the new WordPress 2.3 release. It was so easy, I thought that it had not worked! It is not exactly clear what has changed, but I do now have Tags and a funky tag cloud. Having only one plug-in installed, and a theme that is only a small modification of a standard theme probably helped.

Compiz in Ubuntu 7.10

One of the reasons that I wanted to upgrade to Ubuntu 7.10 before it was released was so that I could have a play with the new developments in compiz. It was therefore more than a little disappointing to discover that it did not work. When I tried to enable desktop effects, it would simply state that it could not, and would revert back to metacity.

At first, I was a little annoyed as I could not even see any error message as to why this had failed. Finally, for another reason, I started gnome-settings from the command line. When I then selected the appearance tool, and tried to turn on desktop effects, some useful information scrolled up the screen.

It would appear that by default, compiz checks that the graphics card has at least 64 MB or RAM before it will allow compiz to start. No doubt this is done for a good reason, but this does not help me with my 32 MB graphics card in my laptop.

A little bit of googling and I discover that compiz in Ubuntu has a wrapper script called /usr/bin/compiz A quick look in here and it is easy to see where the check for the RAM is done. I dropped the limit to 32 MB and tried again. Yay! Wobbly windows 🙂

Now all I need to do is find out how to configure compiz ….

Resist the urge to upgrade

I am currently running Ubuntu 7.04 on two computers at home. In the past, I have always found it hard to resist the urge to install the development version of the next release of the distribution I am running. This started when I was using Debian. With its slow release cycle, Debian stable did start to feel a bit tired as a desktop system.

I would find that the latest version of some software with the features that I was interested in was not available. Rather than muck about with back-ports etc., I just went and installed testing, and then unstable. These are only my own machines, and the need for stability was not critical. The only time this did bother me was when I wanted to print. I found that my printer needed to be re-configured at regular intervals. A couple of times this did bite me as I wanted to print something quick, and due to changes in CUPS or whatever, my printer was off-line.

I then moved to Ubuntu. With its shorter release cycle, I decided that I would have the best of both worlds. I could have the more recent versions of software, and not have unpredictable breakage. Two upgrades a year should be ample. Well I could not wait for the final release of version 7.04 so I installed that a few months early, to try out compiz IIRC.

Now I am trying hard to resist the urge to upgrade to 7.10 before it is released. I fully expect that it is already stable enough for my use, but it would be good to wait until it has been released to try it. Not long to go now!