It isn’t often that Linux fails me, but all I can find are complaints about how Linux Blogging Sucks. I have a few more programs to test but for right now I agree. I am right now testing Bleezer. Although it looked like one of the most promising, I’m not impressed. I’m able to download my last 15 posts, but not my draft posts nor posts older than 15. In the WYSIWYG interface inserting links is rather irritating and I’ve had to come up with "tricks" just to be able to comfortable add links — sort of a non-issue because I’d never use it.

I’m also getting a few weird display bugs and the spellcheck doesn’t actually spellcheck, but I’ll assume that they are just local issues.

I have a few more programs that I’m going to try after this including QTM, Drivel, and BloGTK.

Addendum: I posted this using the program and I have a couple more comments.:

• The checkbox on the left was the one that mattered in the image above, so this ended up without a category.
• Tags are not added to WordPress, but I expected this.
• It uses WordPress’ native image uploading to some extent, so the image I added from my desktop ended up in the right location and is still attached to this post.
• It doesn’t post line breaks even though it shows up in the HTML preview. This leaves me with a very hard post to edit between that and all the tags its WYSIWYG interface adds.

Addendum 2:

Unfortunately, QTM, BloGTK and Drivel also fail to meet my criteria. Neither support WordPress specifically and support a generic API, so they both ignore features that I find important like tags and downloading draft posts. Draft posts are very important to me as I have about 25,000 words floating around in various states of postability, so any program or add-on that doesn’t allow me direct access to these words is not useful to me for all my blogging needs.

I’m posting this addendum with ScribeFire, but it has the same problems of not listing draft posts separately and no tags, but what it does allow me to do is change websites and have my research content directly above the post pane, so I can read and research while I write.

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Anyway, I recently bought a new laptop and I set it up as a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu (I originally had a triple boot system with Open Suse until I remembered how clunky RPM based Distros are and I have a whole post full of “observations” about Vista, but this is all neither here nor there.) I was testing the battery life, ran it down, plugged it back into the power cord, and, for some unknown reason, I right clicked the battery life indicator. It had an interesting option called “power history,” so I clicked it. Turns out that it prints out these nice graphs that show everything from the voltage to the wattage to the accuracy of the batteries prediction ability. Needless to say, it impressed me. I’ve used Ubuntu for a long time now on a laptop and never noticed that little feature.

So while Linux may take a little more effort to set it up, it and the people behind Linux reciprocate by giving you the little extras that make the experience go from droll to impressive. The only thing impressive Vista has given me so far is two blue screens of death since Wednesday.

A few screenshots (each of which only took one button press and one mouse click to make).

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1. !/bin/bash
3. files=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*) # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder n=${#files[@]} # For aesthetics "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.

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Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

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To fix this you need to create the file and make sure that MySQL has access to it. (All commands need to be run as root)

Create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist).

Create the file by “touching” it.

Set the ownership of the mysqld.sock file and folder to mysql.

You can then start MySQL and breath easier.

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