Another CM10 Upgrade For The Galaxy S+

It’s been here for a couple of weeks, and it installs fine through the OTA installer if you have previous versions of CM10 on your Samsung Galaxy S Plus: CM10 Release 2.5 by ivendor. Contrary to some reports on the XDA forum I have no problems with the camera ;-)

Twisties With The R1100S? More Of The Same, Please!

We have returned from our trip more than a week ago, yet I can’t help but think about it every day… In summary: my wife and I spent 4 days on a trip to and in the French region of the Vosges Mountains – on a motorcycle, of course, and in the company of a few good friends.

In just four days we chalked up 1395 kilometers; we drove about half of those on the small and twisty rural roads of north-eastern France – just what we wanted! We also drove a part of the ‘Route des vins d’Alsace’ under a sunny sky.

Touring the Alsace vineyards (Beblenheim, FR)

The BMW R1100S turns out to be great for this kind of use. The bike handles the curvy roads beautifully, and it is very comfortable: it never made me feel tired. My wife enjoyed the tour as well, even though the last time she rode along was more than 15 years ago. In fact, the riding was so much fun that I mostly failed to stop and take pictures. What more can you want? More of the same, of course!

We found the remnants of snow in the Markstein ski resort (FR)

Non-commercial Dash In Ubuntu 13.04

If you’re like me and you don’t like the fact that by default a search in the Dash also returns products you can buy online, don’t worry. Just start up a command shell and execute a simple command:

sudo apt-get remove unity-shell-shopping

Then log out and log in again, and what annoyed you will be gone ;-)

For a few more tips on tweaking the Raring Ringtail, check out “7 Things To Do After Installing Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail)“.

Awesome Icons In A Font

I have always been fond of typography, but this is a special font: Font Awesome only contains icons. They may be simple icons, but they do look good. No suprises there: these icons were developed for the Bootstrap framework used by Twitter.

Science On TV? Yes They Can

Thank you, Scientific American, for allowing Kyle Hill to express his fandom of the Mythbusters as much as I do. Europe needs this as much as the US: “We need a generation of kids who think an experiment is more important than a preconceived notion or an argument from authority“. If the Mythbusters show can help, then let us please have lots of it. Yes, it would be better if there was even more “science” and less explosions – but that’s American TV, no?

Reclaim Your Social Media Content

From Reclaim Social: “Depending on your personal level of addiction, everyday you create, curate and share things on the internet. Great. You use about 384 social networks, that just don’t belong to you. Still great. Sort of, who wants to own facebook anyway. But if you search anything you shared or liked a year ago, you’re lost. If your account is suspended, your data may be lost completely. Reclaim Social is a wordpress based concept, consisting of some plugins and scripts. It allows you to mirror and store your content and activities around the web on your own blog“.

The Reclaim software is far from finished, so if you know anything about WordPress plugin development you can lend a hand to this open source project started by Sascha Lobo and Felix Schwenzel.

I like the concept, even though I don’t need it for myself: I have almost all of what I ‘produced’ right here on my blog (except for afew hundred not so interesting tweets from more than a year ago). But being able to keep a copy of what you publish is a good idea, in my view. Dave Winer proposes to author your stuff in a single tool under your control, then publish wherever you fancy. Reclaim proposes the inverse way: publish where you want, then copy it all into your blog. Conceptually, Dave’s approach has the advantage; in practice, many people may well find a tool like Reclaim Social simpler to use. And WordPress is a good platform for such a tool, if the reclaimed content can be a part of the normal backup/restore tool in WP.

Netbook Now Running Ubuntu 13.04

Until a few days ago, the netbook was running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. But upgrading to 13.04 was not difficult, just time-consuming. First I had to upgrade to 12.10, which already brought a more responsive Unity interface. And today 13.04 had to prove its worth. So far, so good: being able to drag windows from one workspace to another was something I missed in 12.04 (or did I forget to turn a switch somewhere?), and that’s back now. And everything else – actually, that’s Chrome mostly – seems to run like before. What more can you want from an upgrade?