My mom had been badgering me to get on the Skype bandwagon, so I finally installed the Linux version of Skype on Debian unstable. Everything worked smoothly until I tried to enable video chats with my Pixxo webcam. That's when I bumped up against what the Ubuntu docs refer to as the mother of all webcam bugs.
The suggested workaround is to create a wrapper that points Skype to the right libv4l library. Here's how I did it:
# cat > /usr/local/bin/skype #!/bin/bash LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skype ^D # chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/skype
The most insightful political speech I've heard in a long time was Reza Aslan's address to the Commonwealth Club of California, which aired on KQED radio on June 5. Aslan brilliantly dissects why the Bush Administration's Global War on Terror was a strategic flop, and then points the way toward a more nuanced, thoughtful, and effective strategy against the extremists.
My latest discovery at Trader Joe's is Israeli couscous. Compared to fine-grained regular
(North African) couscous, the Israeli couscous is made up of larger, chewy, barley-sized balls of semolina that take longer to cook. Tonight I made a batch, let it cool, and then threw in a chopped cucumber, some green and red onions, and a little vinagrette. Yum! Even the four-year-old loved it.
There are a number of ugly hacks one can use to solve the PNG transparency bug in Internet Explorer 6. The easiest and most elegant solution I've discovered comes from Twin Helix. All you have to do is download the files and add one line to your style sheet:
img, div, input { behavior: url("iepngfix.htc") }Suddenly all your inline and background PNG images look great in IE6. Twin Helix's solution relies on behaviors,
a custom Microsoft extension to CSS that non-Microsoft browsers simply ignore.
One catch is that the non-standard behavior property will cause your style sheet to fail to validate. To hide the hack from the W3C CSS validator, you can always stick it into a custom CSS file and then use IE conditional comments to load it only when necessary:
<!--[if IE 6]> <link rel="stylesheet" href="ie6.css" type="text/css"> <![endif]-->
I finally upgraded to the new xorg packages in Debian unstable on my Thinkpad. Everything went smoothly until I rebooted. Halfway through the bootup I got the message Setting console screen modes and fonts,
and then the screen flashed and the console text suddenly switched to the ugliest fixed-width font I'd ever seen. A little googling reveals that this is actually a new feature of the console-setup package. To reset the console font back to what it was before, you just run dpkg-reconfigure console-setup and then choose VGA
as your console font.
Still playing around with fonts, I went to the System⇒Preferences⇒Appearance menu in Gnome and experimented with different fixed-width system fonts and font sizes. I finally settled on 11pt DejaVu Sans Mono Book, which is available in Debian's ttf-dejavu package or directly from the DejaVu project. DejaVu Sans Mono is a great programmer's font—clean and readable, with a sharp distinction between digits and letters.