In my travels though the interwebs today, i stumbled upon this little gem. As far as i can tell, it is the first documented occurrence of a PDF being used as a 404 error page. I’m no sysdamin, but i’m pretty sure most webservers have the ability to set up re-directs

In Fedora 11, default mouse settings (with regards to laptop and notebook touchpads) have been slightly changed. In previous versions of Fedora, tapping the touchpad to “click” and scrolling using the edge of touchpads was enabled by default. In Fedora 11, these options are now disabled by default. To re-enable these options:

1. Open the Mouse Preferences dialog either by choosing  System > Preferences > Mouse from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-mouse-properties

2. In the Mouse Preferences dialog, choose the Touchpad tab, and enable the options you desire.

Mouse Preferences Dialog

Note: This post documents a change that was introduced in Fedora 11 (F11). Special thanks to who-t for his help on this one

Previously, pressing the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Backspace forced the X.org server (the open source implementation of X11) to instantly restart, returning the user to the login screen. This functionality is useful on unstable systems where the X server frequently hangs, however, if the shortcut is inadvertently invoked, the user will lose anything not saved to disk.   In the version of X.org shipped in Fedora 11, the decision was made in upstream to make the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut disabled by default. To re-enable this option (on the Gnome Desktop):

1.  Open the Keyboard Preferences dialog either by choosing  System > Preferences > Keyboard from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-keyboard-properties

The global response to the Haiti earthquake has been extraordinary and generous. But in the midst of all the reporting, it’s difficult to keep track of the numbers.

In particular, who has given what, who has dug deepest, and how the Haiti relief fund currently compares to those of other tragedies.

This is an image I created for The Guardian Datablog to visualise the international contributions to the Haiti Earthquake recovery effort as of 24th January 2010.

And the data is here for you to explore. (Thanks to Phil Wand and Jeffrey Grabell for the idea).

Sources: ReliefWeb, Guardian Datablog, OECD (PDF).

H264 has it all. Buy-in from the big content providers, compression ratio superiority, mobile device support, and support in all major video editing tools and operating systems. Many people seem to criticize Mozilla for being idealistic and not providing its users what “they want”.

Chris Blizzard wrote a great summary of why Mozilla isn’t endorsing h264 and herding its users into the patent holder’s stall with historic examples of GIF and mp3.

Here is a comprehensive video tutorial, (created by syllie) that demonstrates how to use the awesome new spiro swirls feature in Inkscape 0.47, which was released in November 2009.

The spiro swirls technique was first covered in a mini tutorial by AndyFitz. Andy has also uploaded a few spiro experiments to flickr, including the following:

This is an amazingly detailed tutorial on creating a detailed snowman illustration using Inkscape. This tutorial combines inkscape basics — including path and gradient manipulation — demonstrating how simple skills can translate into an awesome drawing.

This tutorial was originally written in Russian by Yuri Apostol and translated into English by Alexandre Prokoudine. As an added bonus, Yuri has also added the source SVG (released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license) to the bottom of this tutorial. Enjoy!

Over the days leading up to the release of Inkscape 0.47, we are going to publish a series of brief screencasts that demonstrate some of the awesome new features that are in the latest version of Inkscape.

Today’s screencast shows off the awesome new feature that has been added to inkscape that displays a highlighted outline of paths when they are hovered over using the “Node Tool”

The Inkscape 0.47 Release notes has a more detail on this feature:

In previous versions of Inkscape, no visual feedback was given back to the user when hovering over paths when using the Node tool. In this update, hovering over a path with the Node tool now results in a highlighted path outline being displayed. Note: the duration and color of the new path outline feature can be configured in the Tools > Node section of the Inkscape Preferences dialog.

Ogg Format