I have started using a wide-screen monitor at work — 24" and awesome — and have been experimenting with having a vertical taskbar along the right side of the screen. I’ve seen the screenshots of Windows Vista with a sidebar and thought it was a bit funny; it takes up too much screen real-estate on a “normal” monitor. However, I can say that with a wide-screen, this setup starts making more than sense: it’s great.
I had a strange desire when brushing my teeth last night to know why toothpaste seems to always be mint flavoured. As far as I could think, there are a couple of reasons it could be:
A quick look over the internet revealed more speculation, but no concrete facts. Interesting thoughts were that mint is strong enough to cover up the weird taste toothpaste would have otherwise and that, back in the early days of toothpaste, mint was a cheap and easy flavouring to get hold of.
I was feeling tired one day this week, so naturally a piece called How to Get Up Right Away When Your Alarm Goes Off would catch my attention. It’s about how to, supposedly, condition yourself so that you will get up when your alarm goes off automatically — to the stage where you become physically uncomfortable if you remain in bed.
Whilst this seems to be a little extreme — sometimes it’s nice to lie there and snooze! — a second article seemed more practical. This was about how to become an early riser ; that is, to get your body into the rhythm of getting up at a reasonable time each morning.
One thing that seems curiously missing from the Internet — based on my searching, at any rate — is how to encode to MP3 in Ubuntu Dapper. By default you can encode to FLAC and Ogg, which is a problem for me because the iPod doesn’t support either of these.
MP3 encoding is provided by the GStreamer lame plugin in gstreamer-plugins-ugly. However, the version of this included in the main/restricted/universe (I’m not sure which) doesn’t include the lame plugin; meaning that even after installing the ugly plugins, you cannot encode MP3s. This confused me until today when I discovered that the standard version doesn’t include lame.
Although I was planning to give David Bowie a few listens, I didn’t get around to it in the end. I liked what I heard, but was distracted.
I was distracted by getting a copy of the new Morrissey album, Ringleader of the Tormentors. I got this because I found the single taken from the album quite catchy and I have been curious about what Morrissey is like for a while. I’ve come away with mixed feelings — I find some of the songs quite addictive, but some are a little cheesy. Saying that, I think overall the album is pretty good. I haven’t really listened to any other of either Morrissey or The Smiths albums, so I don’t know whether the new album is representative of the Morrissey in general. Ringleader of the Tormentors is worth a listen, however; I especially like tracks three and four if I recall correctly.