Easy Steps Towards Lucid Dreaming

Many people enjoy Lucid Dreaming as a hobby, or as a method of self exploration. While there is no guaranteed method to achieve regular lucid dreaming, there are some steps you can take to increase those chances. Here are some bullet points.

* Don't wake to an alarm. Alarm clocks prevent good dream recollection, which is considered to be very important towards inducing lucid dreaming. If your lifestyle mandates an alarm clock, you might be out of luck.

* Keep a Dream Journal. This is a great tool in improving dream recollection. Many people find it easier to remember their dreams going backwards; starting with the last thing they remember and trying to move onto what preceded it.

* Using Intent. Asserting that you will remember to lucid dream, or remember that you are dreaming while you go to bed. The dream journal can be used to jot down thoughts of intent such as these, as well.

If you're willing to modify your regular sleep schedule, other methods include waking yourself after five hours or so and then using the Intent method as you fall back asleep. It's a very well researched area of dreaming, so you should find plenty of resources on the Net or in a library or book store.

My Design for Python Icon

I was playing around in GIMP the other day and decided to whip up a new Gnome icon for Python. I think the blue and yellow icon is rather ugly, and short of finding something satisfying on the web, I decided to make my own.
You can download the xpm file here.

Energizer Dock & Go

I've found this to be a handy little charging device. I will break down my experiences quite simply into advantages and disadvantages.

Pro: The battery 'pods' are useful to grab off of the stand and throw in my backpack. It seems to charge the batteries at a good pace. The "vertical" design saves some desk space. The light indicators are helpful.

Cons: The 'pods' are rather delicate. The hinge on the top of the pod separates into two pieces very easily, and also snaps back into place with the same amount of ease. Placing the pods into the stand can be a bit tedious, as they fit in at an angle. I find it to be a process that requries two hands. Lastly, I have a suspicion that if I lose power in my apartment, the charger starts draining the batteries. I have not done actual tests to prove this, but if I take the batteries out after the charger has been unplugged for a while, it seems that are not as charged as they would be otherwise.

Firefox 3 Beta Crashing Randomly Ubuntu Hardy 8.04

There appears to be a bug with a combination of Firefox, pulseaudio, and the libflashsupport packages in Ubuntu Hardy Heron. This causes sites with flash to sometimes cause the browser window to close. The temporary solution here is to remove the "libflashsupport"package.

This will only help if your sound card supports mixing, as it will default to ALSA instead of pulseaudio. If this is not the case, you may want to remove pulseaudio from your system and just use ALSA entirely.

Gnome-Do bug hogs CPU or Won't Open

Gnome-Do is a handy little application for quickly launching applications or documents:
If you've tried installing it in Ubuntu, you may have run into problems with huge CPU usage and/or the application doesn't open. These are the telltale signs of an infinite loop [edit] but I'm informed that this is not the case. This is almost certainly because of the amarok plugin that is available in the standard Ubuntu repositories. This bug is listed here on launchpad.

It's an easy fix, just uninstall the plugin using apt or synaptic. Unfortunately there is not yet a fix or work-around for it. Looks like us Amarok users will just have to be patient for Gnome-Do integration.

Don't like F-Spot? Go back to Gutsy's Default Photo Importer

If you recently upgraded to Hardy Heron, you might have been a little surprised when you went to upload some photos from your digital camera. For Ubuntu 8.04, F-Spot has become the default image application. While this program is supposed to be more comprehensive than gthumb, I simply don't like it as much.

gThumb is lightweight, created folders based on the date and time of importing, and has the basic tagging features I like.



Making this the default application again is easy.

Step 1: Download gThumb
In a root terminal type:
"apt-get install gthumb"

Step 2: Change Preferred Application
Go to System > Preferences > Removable Drives and Media


It should open to the first tab, "Cameras".
Make sure that the checkbox is selected.
Erase anything that's in the "Command" box, and type in:
"gthumb --import-photos"
without the quotations.

Now you're all set, no more bulky F-Spot! You can now go into synaptic or a terminal to remove F-Spot if you don't want it on your system anymore.

What Do I Do Now?