Solid Smoke

Full disclosure: My only contributions to KDE project are several bug reports and perhaps a few new users. So my qualifications to comment on the issue is of course almost non-existent. But hey, I've been a faithful KDE user for all these years, and so I think I have some right to make comments at least from a user's perspective. ------- There's been some discussions on KDE land regarding replacing Nepomuk (or Nepomuk-KDE for the politically correct) with a new project named Baloo . The Baloo project is headed by KDE developer Vishesh Handa, who apparently was very much involved in Nepomuk as well. Baloo wasn't announced officially to the 'public' till now, but thanks to recent Phoronix articles , it's been gaining some attention. The article titled "KDE's Nepomuk Doesn't Seem To Have A Future" went on to say: "It appears there isn't much of a future left to KDE's Nepomuk framework that was developed at a cos...

I just read a post titled Schedule your torrents in Ubuntu on Planet SMC . It uses the sleep command (not specific to Ubuntu) to delay the execution of the torrent client (Deluge). I've been using another method to schedule KTorrent for the past couple of years. I'll post it here, in case anybody finds it useful. There are three things to be done for 'autonomous' KTorrent (or perhaps any other client): Start the client program (KTorrent) at a particular time Make the program start downloading Exit the program gracefully The first problem can be addressed by the 'sleep' method, or using cron . I prefer the latter since I wish to start the downloader everyday. Here's how to do it. The command: crontab -e lets you edit your cron jobs. The vi-like editor allows you to specify the date/time and the command to be executed. For example, the following entry in crontab will execute the 'cp' command at 2:10AM everyday: 10 2 * * * cp /var/log/messages /mn...

KDE 4 has a great collection of small games and educational tools. Unlike the edu-package, the games hadn't got much publicity IMHO. I was testing Fedora 10 Preview Release , and I came across this game called KNetWalk . It's a wonderful game, and I'd strongly recommend you give it a go, if you like those small puzzle-solving games. The objective of this 'build the network' game is to connect all clients to a server (the icon looks more like the Internet) using wires . The screenshot explains it well. You can click on the wires (and the server/clients) to rotate them. In the above screenshot, 3 machines have connectivity and 3 don't. I don't know if the game was in KDE 3.5. Check your KDE to see if it has KNetWalk. The Fedora 10 Preview is looking quite awesome and I can't wait for the final release. Update: It seems the game is theme-able. In the game settings, there was an electronis theme. Instead of building a LAN, you've to connect ICs to a ...