My space in the world

VLC now has a festive get-up! I just noticed this systray icon and the mugshot change after the update on 19th:

Merry Christmas to the VideoLan Team

Finally, I migrated to wordpress — installed it on my domain this time. I must say that wordpress is extremely customizable and has a huge variety of themes and plugins. Migration was just a 1 click affair, and viola, I had all posts and comments imported \o/
So now, looking forward towards shaping up the whole website.
Cheers to the planet!

We have constant changes going on at the KDE Forums – http://forum.kde.org
The fresh new forum already has 2840 members and a team of 2 admins, 7 global moderators, 5 moderators and 3 mentors.
Here is a small summary of the prominent happenings:

• Oxygenation pt. 1 and a 1/2: The second group of changes for adding oxygen controls to the forum.
  Find the official announcement here.

• Launch of a team channel: Now we have #kde-forum as our forum team channel. It’s not really intended to be a support channel (#kde is for that purpose). Forum members/non members can join us at the channel. You may discuss all issues related to registration, posting etc.
  Find the official announcement here.

• KDE Café: A new board for offtopic chat, a place to talk anything you like to. New to the forum? Introduce yourself there! Here’s an article from the admin’s blog.
  Link to the forum: http://forum.kde.org/kde-cafe-f-73.html

Behind the scenes:

• We recently did a memory upgrade to the server. That would definitely ensure smoother and more reliable hosting.

In near future:

• We soon will have our Klassroom sessions (Klassrooms are weekly teaching sessions conducted by mentors). Our mentors are working hard to prepare valuable drafts and they would be ready for display very soon.

• Thanks to tkoski, our bot sKreamer is ready for the IRC channel. sKreamer will announce feeds from specific forums to the #kde-forum channel and is equipped with a variety of other plugins.

After reading this announcement, I decided to upgrade to 4.2 beta 1. Though I had been using nightly, but somebody advised me to go for the beta. Naturally, beta has all goodies of nightly (neon), but polished.
After the 135MB upgrade, here are a few basic observations.

Integration of Battery monitor with powerdevil

Lancelot comes by default

This is a great addition to the default widgets.

Systray icons look clean

System tray icons look good with no overlapping.

The zoom slider and better thumbnails

Dolphin shows good looking thumbnails with drop shadows, which can be viewed at a range of zoom levels using the zoom slider.

Previews in the folder view widget

Folder view now also allows selecting individual files with Ctrl + click. Very useful update.

“Examining” and “Transferring” notifications

I fail to understand the purpose of this notification daemon. I open an album in gwenview and keep pressing “Next” and it manages to drive me crazy

Tooltips for plasma

KDE 4.2 has tooltips for plasma. What more, it that when you hover upon another plasma while a tooltip is displayed, the tooltip will gradually move towards the new plasma you are pointing to.
Additionally, you can rotate a plasma widget..

Overall, it’s a great package. Cheers to KDE developers!

Just renovated my webpage: http://sayakbanerjee.co.nr

100% Gimp this time!

I’ve been thoroughly looking around brainstorm ideas today. I found many ideas that already have been implemented in KDE4 :-

Say for example, Dim files when ‘cut’ — Dolphin 1.1 (KDE4) already does that

And this: Timer for resolution switcher — Again, KDE4 shows a timer window (see screenshot)

There are more ideas for giving a handful of good wallpapers (KDE 4.2 wallpapers are beautiful!!). Yet another one asking for an app that would show multiple folders on desktop (Folder view plasma widget)

KDE4 is very well engineered. Cheers to the KDE4 developers \o/

I was trying out everything KDE 4.1.3 gives me and loved this desktop theme Elegance.

Of all the above, I finally set Elegance as the active theme:

Wallpaper belongs to the KDE 4.2 defaults family. I really like this black + green combination.. very soothing! Since about one whole week, I have it on now.. Wow! that’s the longest time I haven’t fiddled with the UI!

I cant help laughing at this. Yesterday, one of my friends came up my hostel room to take some documents from me, took out his USB flash drive, split it open and took the device out from it’s case, and plugged in my laptop’s port!
On asking why he did that, he said “Why? Don’t you know? I do this every time. I read somewhere that it works 200% faster when plugged in without it’s case.”

Really? My God!

I managed to click this on my phone (seeing his face turn a bit reddish at the same time!)

Don’t try this at home

Powerdevil is a feature rich power manager for KDE. I had been using kpowersave on KDE4.1.3, and now powerdevil looks great !!

General Settings

General Settings Screen Dimming, Battery Levels and Notification settings. Powerdevil uses knotify with a sound event and customizable messages for it’s notifications.

Power Profiles

Powerdevil provides 5 default power profiles that are customizable:

• Performance
• Presentation
  
• Powersave
• Aggressive Powersave
• Xtreme Powersave

Edit Profiles

Provides options to create new/edit existing profiles. For each profile, the following fields are customizable:

• Screen brightness
• Kwin compositing toggle on/off
• Computer idle actions
• Power/Sleep/Lid button actions
• CPU frequency scaling
• Turning off CPUs
• Screen power management

Also provides options to Import/Export and clone profiles.

Capabilities

This screen lists all system capabilities that Powerdevil can make use off.

Sadly, my laptop does not support turning off of CPUs. Everything else work perfectly.
Powerdevil is most likely to be integrated in KDE4.2
At first, I was a bit surprised after not seeing a systray icon, but well, I don’t need one really. I use the Battery Status plasma in 4.1.3, while the same widget integrates well with powerdevil in 4.2
This is definitely worth trying..