... and now something completely different

I think it is about time I posted something which dose at least some justice to the name I gave this blog. Here is a short list of Indie artists who you'll see climbing up my charts on Last.fm and Libre.fm. I got to know them via the recommendations made to me by Libre.fm community radio and have downloaded their music either through their websites, or via Jamendo.

As I have been listening to plenty of main stream music, I'll try to put their characteristics in perspective by pointing to the mainstream artists who are like and not-so-like them. Unfortunately, as I have not been listening to the latest music a lot (I am out of touch with 80% top-10 artists on Last.fm for 2010), pardon me for slightly arcane comparisons.

Merging images in Gimp

The problem
You have two (or more) photographs of the same objects (with different lighting/focus/time lapses, etc.) and you would like to merge them but the photographs are a little off. The end result of such an operation would be akin to this (click to see the larger version):

Merged images (dA link)

Books are becoming middle class economically aware

Update:
As some of you pointed out: excessive usage of budget might indicate Nation's budgets instead of personal budgets.

At least that is what the usage of terms cheap, expensive and budget in books over time tells us (via Google Ngram):

Usage of the words in books (click here to see the webpage)

This graph shows out of all (uni-grammatic) words used in books published each year, how many of them were cheap, expensive and budget. More details on interpreting the graph are here.

Unexpected Return of Investment from HDD

I recently upgraded to a 500 Gb HDD from my puny 80 Gb one, done primarily because I wanted to download the HumbleBundle without having to uninstall Eclipse and Firefox from my system. And I am quite happy with the results.

However, doing the upgrade also had some other interesting returns of interest:

1. I am definitely happy about finally having all my music collection on my laptop instead of having to revert to the Backup Hard drive every time I had a craving for that one special song.
2. I can finally run the 1080p HD movies on my laptop! So the bottleneck was the Hard-drive and not the CPU. (Anyway I could have figured it out sooner?)
3. I copied my large Photograph collection to my laptop and I set my screen saver to "Picture Folder". Now every time my laptop goes to the screensaver, it is like taking a walk down the memory lane.

Serendipity.

Better navigation options in Nautilus context menus

Am I the only one who is so used to the 'Right Click' + 'Back' option on Browsers that he keeps creating untitled folders everywhere in Nautilus?

Context menu in Nautilus 2.32.0

However, on a browser, it is the more convenient 'Back' option:

Context menu in Chrome (almost the same for Firefox and Internet Explorer too)

Volume of notification sounds in Empathy

I have been away from Gnome for too long, I guess. Until very recently, I was on the Awesome window manager but after upgrading to a new Harddrive (yes, I still upgrade my hardware old-skool way instead of buying something new), I though I'll give Gnome another look.

Also, I was feeling a little guilty about Ubuntu ditching Gnome for Unity.

While shifting, I also thought that I'll move my standard chatting program from Pidgin to Empathy, which seemed to be better integrated with Gnome. However, I had this constant problem of not getting any sound notifications when anyone pinged me (also because I keep playing music continuously in the background). The preferences did not give me an idea of what was wrong:

Rhizome 7/7 conference

On 16th April, 2010, seven leaders in Technology and seven leaders in Art were paired up and left for a day to develop something new. The results were shown the following day in the New Museum in Ney York. This was the Rhizome Seven on Seven conference. Here is a list of videos with a line of summary for each.