So with Guild Wars 2 coming out and my current computer being about 4 years old and not really on the high end The hubby & I decided it was time for me to have a new one.

Adding Google+ to your desktop is simple for KDE users. Simply download and install the PhoneWebView Plasmoid and use the following url as your default url https://m.google.com/app/plus/?force=1 There you have it..a beautiful mobile view of G+ right on your KDE Desktop!

Today I purchased the humble bundle and I’m very glad I did. The humble bundle is a collections of cross platform(meanin they support windows, mac, and linux) collection of games. You decided what you want to pay then you can even decide how what you paid gets diveyed out, such as how much to developers and how much to charity. They are pretty neat games as well. If you get a chance I suggest checking out the bundle.

http://www.humblebundle.com/

Lately I’ve been finding myself perusing the MMO Market. Maybe it’s just a listlessness because for the most part all MMO’s are starting to feel the same, just with a different lore behind it. I’m trying to be as patient as possible but the more information that is released about Guild Wars 2 the harder time I’m having being happy with my current MMO choices. I have been quite happily playing Lord of the Rings online. Just being in Middle Earth more than makes up for the games quirks. Since I already have one max level character I haven’t really been playing so much.

Recently I read a review over at Massively about a little game that is both quite new to

So I installed Kubuntu 10.10 only to find it’s now using pulseaudio. In all honesty it seems to work fine with one exception. Kmix the system tray volume manager & mixer only showed pulseaudio channels instead of my standard alsa channels. I could access them fine by going to command prompt and typing alsamixer, but in kmix it was a no go. So I went on the hunt to see what I could figure out.

After a bit of googling I found the following steps could restore kmix to it’s former alsamixer glory:

• Close Kmix by right-clicking on it in the system tray & clicking quit
• in konsole run the following command

kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

• You should now be able to access your normal alsa channels via kmix

To make it run on on startup I did the following:

• open kate or your favorite bash editor
• add the following code to the document

#!/bin/bash kquitapp kmix && KMIX_PULSEAUDIO_DISABLE=1 kmix

• save the document to ~/.kde/Autostart
• make the document executable

chmod 755 ~/.kde/Autostart/kmixfix

• Log out and back in and you should now have your normal alsa channels back in kmix upon login

This is just a simple fix and I’m sure there are much cleaner ways to get it to run on startup. But it works for me and I now have all my mixer channels back in kmix where they belong.

Well Lord of the rings online is going free to play on the 10th of September. Some of us over at the Ubuntu forums were wondering if pylotro would be updated. So I email the developer and asked him and he has since posted over at the forums that he indeed plans on updating pylotro for the change. So good news for all you linux loving lotro players, including me!

I wanted to share how I have gotten both Lord of the Rings Online & Dungeons & Dragons Online Eberron Unlimited working on my Kubuntu 10.04 install

My Methods will require you to either have a copy of windows running in virtualbox or a dualboot with a working LOTRO install.
First I downloaded pylotro Though the program is called pylotro it is a launcher for both LOTRO & DDO. I also download and installed wine. My current working version is 1.2-rc1

1. I used the regular download manager from turbine in Virtualbox and downloaded both LOTRO & DDO . You should make sure to do full download of all game files, be forewarned it could take a while.
2. I created a folder called Turbine in
   /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/
3. Using grsync I copied everything from
   C:\Program Files\Turbine\
   to
   /home/angel/.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine
4. Using winetricksI installed
   • win2k
   • gecko
   • vcrun2003
   • vcrun2005
   • vcrun2005sp1
5. I then installed pylotro in wine
6. Once I ran pylotro I had to go into the settings and point it to my LOTRO and DDO installs. While I wasn’t able to patch DDO I can play it just fine. With LOTRO I was able to patch and everything runs just fine.
7. Note You’ll have 2 folders(1 if you only play LOTRO or only play DDO) in your /home directory called
   Dungeons and Dragons Online
   and
   The Lord of the Rings Online
   These would generally be the folders that would appear in your Documents
   folder in windows.This folder will normally hold your
   UserPreferences.ini file along with your lotro.keymap file. For reference HERE is a copy my UserPreferences.ini file

I haven’t had any sound issues and my game seems to run fine. Of course I
don’t use pulseaudio being on kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. One thing I
did notice is that settings aren’t saved to the ini file so if you say
adjust your sound one session then log and come back later your need to
readjust them. I worked around this but just editing the volume settings
in the actual UserPreferences.ini file instead of using the in game
options.

So after having heard, seeing, and experiencing numerous Scares while using windows systems in the past, I thought I would share here a list of things anyone who uses Microsoft Windows Should be aware of.

Protect Yourself

• A website tells you that you have a virus, or spy-ware/malware has been detected.

First don”t panic, second don”t trust the source. Their have been many cases where people have been infected by malware because they clicked on the “FREE VIRUS SCAN NOW” advertisement in their browser from a website claiming that they have malware, It”s a very old trick. I personally was shocked to discover how widespread this practice actually is, but even some very well known sites have been “tricked” into running what they thought were legitimate ads on their websites only to discover they were actively infecting their visitors. Here are a couple of examples of Fake Virus scans:

Fake Vista Scan	Fake xp Scan

• Make sure you run updated anti-virus on your windows system – I  recommend Avast it”s free and updated quite regularly.
• Make sure you run updated anti-spyware on your windows system – I highly recommend the free Spybot S&D Make sure run regular scans of your system.
• If your using firefox there are a few more ways to help you avoid those types of fake scans and javascript/flash based attacks. Two extensions I make sure to install on any firefox installation are Ad Block Plus, and WOT(Web of Trust).
• Be Smart, think about what the website in front of you asking you to do. Legitimate Visus & Malware scanning sites, generally wont just pop up in your face, and beg to scan your sytem.
• Stop handing out your email address – You don”t have to give your actual email address to every website that asks, actually there is a free service that helps stop spam in your inbox by giving you a temporary email address that you can use  to register at that one website you just have to check out. Mailinator.com allows you create any email address at random and then check it just by using the email address you created, there is no actual account and no registration required. Be aware though, all email is deleted after a few hours.

Back up and Maintain!

Remember Computers are like car”s you can just Gas & Go, you have to perform regular maintenance.

• Start a back up schedule – Hardware doesn”t last forever, and losing all those precious photo”s or a huge media collection can really make things difficult for you. The best thing you can do is get some external storage, and start a backup schedule. If you don”t have much to back up you can always get a free Dropbox.com account, and have your important files backed up the web. But in case you need more than 2 gig”s of storage space and don”t want to pay for extra an external drive is really the way to go.  DeltaCopy is a great Open Source program for backing up your file. It offers Incremental backup, Task scheduler, Email notification, &  One-click restore features.
• Back up those bookmarks online – Xmarks (formerly foxmarks) works with Internet explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Google chrome to keep your bookmarks in sync and backed up across computers and browsers.
• Find our more about System Restore – Answers.com provides great insight about how to use the windows System Restore feature, using it you can create restore points to set your computer back to should something go wrong.
• Clean Your registry – Ccleaner is a great way to make sure your Windows Registry stays clean, as well as helping you clean any temporary files from your system.
• Defragment your files –  Windows XP comes with a nice interface for Defragmenting your hard drive, however  in vista your left with a command line only option of Defragmenting your hard drives. Luckily there are 3rd party  alternatives to windows built in interface, which works with both XP & Vista, I recommend Defraggler.

Are you tired yet?

So once your tired of maintaining your system on a regular basis all the while having paid to have your computer tell you what to do during your free time, Keep your windows for games, and Use Ubuntu/Linux for everything else!

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I have 2 hard drives in my system, all my music & videos are kept on the second hard drive which I mount to /storage up until last night I hadn’t been able to figure out how get actual links to the folders in my home directory without dolphin file manager opening in a new window. Then last night out of the blue it hit me that I all I had to do was create symbolic links to all the files in the folders in my home directory. So I ran these 2 commands in terminal:
ln -s /storage/Music/* /home/angel/Music
ln -s /storage/Videos/* /home/angel/Videos
the * is a wild card and means that anything in those folders will be linked to. But I knew this and really felt it was a “Duh” moment on my part…..lol

I just discovered that you can go into your myspace account settings and under the option “Sync” you can set it up so updates to your twitter will now also update your myspace status. Which I think is completly great, since there is currently no myspace desktop clients for linux.