$sudo life

Yar, there be monsters 'ere!

2010-11-14T17:18:00.002-06:00

Ha, so turns out the reason they wouldn't publish the homecoming Freshmen comic because it didn't fit the theme of the paper for homecoming. Totally understandable, but all they told me was that it needed to be in black and white. That and I guess vikings aren't H-rated.

On the pleasant side of things, I got lots of good feedback on this week's Freshmen. It's got me stoked for the final edition of the semester, and it's going to be good.

I forgot to post the comic from pledge week, too, so it's been posted today as well. They are all on the same page.

Latest Freshmen comic

Extras reject page

Some updates, a bit of editor rejection, and the phone keeps saying it's charged -

2010-11-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

- when I know very well it isn't!

Right, so I added a couple of pages to the thing. As aforementioned, the 'extras' page holds unedited comics that were changed for the sake of the paper. That page will also be giving way to its first 'reject' comic, which would have been published in The Bison this Friday, save the supervising editor felt that certain aspects of the cartoon didn't relate to Homecoming, so they're going to publish a back-up instead. Probably one of Amanda Pruitt's "Harding Squirrels" or maybe the guy who was doing the "Life Lessons" comic last year.

At the same time, I felt that I was following guidelines that were set by the graphics editor, and I had no intention of referencing the opposing team at all. The point was to point fun at the Homecoming traditions and ask, "what if?" What if the crowning of homecoming queen was absurdly interrupted by a crazy random happenstance that took everyone off guard? The people who decided to go buy a hotdog and a coke instead of watching the crowning ceremony would wish that they hadn't left the stands, because all their friends would be talking about it.

Anyway . . .
The second page that was added serves my fetish for random nerdiness while helping out the so-called 1% of Harding Linux users (Linux Mint and Ubuntu mainly. I use Ubuntu, so there. Though I'm starting to want to try Arch...). It's basically just a tutorial for accessing your m-drive from your computer. Astoundingly, most Windows and Mac users I've talked to didn't even know you could access the m-drive from a personal computer. There is a tutorial on Dormnet's PBWiki for you other people not utilizing the freedom of open-source-edness.

Dumb phone.

New comics page

2010-10-15T09:14:00.001-05:00

I added/updated the "Freshmen" page. There is now a nifty link to the comics at the top there. So far the first four including the one from today is up. Happy Friday!

Freshmen #1

2010-10-14T11:00:00.001-05:00

This was the first one published in the school paper this year.

Lemme get this straight...

2010-10-11T22:30:00.001-05:00

Right, since the start of this blog, I haven't actually paid that much attention to the goings on of the Ubuntu community and so forth. In fact, if I was you, I'd probably check out OMG! Ubuntu instead of this infrequently updated blog.

With that in mind, I'd like to re-dedicate this site mostly exclusively to my comics and maybe one or two posts about something different, like some crazy game. At some point I'll learn some real html and make this comic blog real spiffy, but not now.

As a glimpse, I've been cartooning pseudo-professionally for our school newspaper for actual money, which is pretty cool. It puts ramen noodles on the table. I'll be posting those here, as well as some random stuff that doesn't really fit in the opinions column of the paper, but needed to be done anyway. Keep in mind the newspaper comics contain some inside material, which can get pretty obscure for you people who don't go to college, or just don't go to Hading University. Maybe you should just pay a visit.

I'll post this week's comic on Friday, and post previous comics on the Fridays when the school doesn't put out a paper. After that, we'll have at some of the less exclusive stuff.

-Mandy

EDIT> Hey, there is now a really nice link up there on the bar thing that goes straight to the newspaper comics that I do for The Bison. You should really check that out. I'm posting the first three right now and #4 on Friday.

Google Chrome themes are for making friends!

2010-07-03T12:48:00.000-05:00

Not really. But making a Google Chrome theme is something I have wanted to do since I switched from Firefox. I've got two now:

You can get them both here.

Mr. Unsmiley (aka Shadow the Hedgehog)

Silver the Hedgehog

Out of the two, I much prefer the Silver one. Probably because I put more work into it. I plan on doing some non-Sega related themes later.

[DIY] HDD wind chimes ftw

2010-06-19T00:20:00.000-05:00

Since a recent article on Lifehacker, I have been trying to make my own hard drive wind chime. My first was kind of a dud - it made pretty noise, but only when it wasn't all tangled up. It also did not utilize the platters from the hdd, just the separators and other parts. Unsatisfied, I went back to the link in the Lifehacker article only to find that the link had died.
So I went and googled the topic, and found another diy on Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories that called for eight 3.5" platters and one 5.25" platter. Yay!
This is the example from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

I only had five 3.5" platters and nothing bigger, so I took the instructions and made my own version. The one from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories is much more elaborate, but I feel I did a pretty good job compared to my previous fail.

THE INSTRUCTIONS themselves:
I used -
(1) platter to tie everything to.
(5) platters to dangle in the breeze.
(3) little ring things that separate the platters when inside the drive
regular fishing line (not your dad's 50-dollar 20lb-test line, mind you).
(1-2) shoelaces (I actually used a really long piece of coated wire).

STEP 1: Drill all the holes

I started with the platter everything was going to hang from. Since I only had five platters and I wanted them all to hang, I took two DVDs with nothing important on them and hot-glued them together so the shiny data sides were facing out. This makeshift platter was 4.75".
Since I like to be exact when I make stuff, I found the circumference of the platter and divided by 5.

3.14 x 4.75 = 14.915
which is approximately 15 inches.
So each hole had to be drilled 3" apart. I drilled each hole approx. 1/8" away from the outer edge of the platter (red dots on photo).

Then the three holes had to be drilled near the center of the platter for the little ring beaters. I made 3 marks 5" apart on the edge of the platter and used a ruler to copy the marks to 1/4" from the center edge (green dots on photo).

[note] Drilling the holes made the dvd platter want to fall apart, but hanging the other platters from it fixed that problem.

Next, one hole was drilled into each of the other 5 platters at 1/8" away from the outer edge.

STEP 2: Tie it all together
Using the fishing line, each of the 5 platters was tied to their own hole on the outer edge of the 'master' platter. I tied them at different lengths so that they would appear more aesthetic (aka it looks more awesome).

Then the 3 rings were each tied with fishing string from the 3 center holes. I also tied them at different lengths so that they would beat on all the platters and make noise in the wind. They are shown in the purple highlights in the photo over there. ->

STEP 3: Make it hang-able
In my case, I didn't drill the 3 center holes big enough to fit a shoelace through them so I could hang the windchime. So I took a really long wire from my brother's old faulty power supply and was able to force it through the holes quite well. I cut 1/3 of the wire off and put it through 1 of the 3 holes, and threaded the rest of the wire through the other 2 holes. As I knotted them together, I adjusted the length of the wires so the windchime would hang level. Then I braided the three 'leftovers' and knotted them into a loop at the top so it would could hang from a nail. For safety, I took a pliers and gently clamped/flattened the knots so they'd be less likely to fall apart.

Desktop Requests? What?

2010-05-15T10:17:00.007-05:00

I've had a couple requests for the background I used in the Lucid Lynx countdown. To be honest, it's a heavily Fractalius-ed version of the new 10.04 bg. Since I didn't save the original before I made it tiny, I replicated it as closely as possible. I came up with two different versions:

The only real difference is a slight variance in color.

If people want to see the lynx in there too, lemme know.

Moar Stuff

2010-04-14T19:45:00.000-05:00

Apparently there is now a Facebook app that lets you put the Ubuntu countdown on your profile. Check it out here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=115718008445537&v=wall

I can't really express how excited I am for Lucid... though now that I've figured out how to use Ubuntu Tweak, I'm not sure whether I'll be doing a clean install or installing through the update manager as I can just delete the old kernels to free up some space. With a clean install, there might be a different version of GRUB, which would be great as I strongly dislike the one that was packaged with Karmic - it's not very compatible with my dad's old laptop, as I can't "xforcevesa" to get in and change the graphics setting so that I don't have to "xforcevesa" in the future.

It doesn't matter anymore, though: they got a new optical drive for it, so I left a copy of Winxp sp3 with them when spring break was over. It's an upgrade considering the laptop originally ran Win ME, and dad doesn't have to try and learn a new operating system, though he's capable of it, I'm sure.

Oh, and dual-screen monitors is the best thing since sliced bread; I'm officially addicted. You should try it sometime.

Time for some fun. I guess.

2010-04-07T23:25:00.000-05:00

The countdown banners have begun: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/countdown

Meanwhile, here is a nice comic for your time by yours truly. Only some of us will get it right away, as it is slightly obscure.

Uffda no. 2

p.s.: Brass players, scrub out your lead pipes once in a while. I cleaned my horn tonight, and you don't want to know what came out.

Alrighty Then!

2010-03-31T22:48:00.000-05:00

The countdown contest for Ubuntu 10.04 is what got this little blog started. My entry placed second. Say, "Thank you, Lucid Lynx."