A Collection Of Random Errata

Instead of doing a separate blog post for each minor update I've decided to roll them all into one post in the order that they occur to me. I guess I could have tried to create some narrative out of them but it'd be pointless and forced so a simple errata list is the result.

• Twitter & Identi.ca
• Site stats
• Site theme
• Free Ad Space offer
• IRC & Jabber
• Mint & Xubuntu
• Gas central heating

I have a Twitter and Identi.ca account, of which I use Identi.ca to post to Twitter for me. Given the choice of free or non-free I choose free every time. This means that I may miss Twitter messages or followers which don't get forwarded back through Identi.ca. If you've been sending me Tweets and not getting a reply, this is why.

I'd also been into the habit of joining groups in Identi.ca rather than following individual people. StatusNet (I keep forgetting Identi.ca changed it's name) had technical problems where group dents were not going through, which meant I was talking to nobody for a few days. It's been fixed as of last night. I had assumed that by following individuals who are also members of the same groups as me would create double posts, this turns out to be wrong, so I've started following a lot of people over the last few days, and have no doubt missed a lot more.

My stats show hardly any page views etc at the moment, the reason for this is that I only figured how to turn the logging on a couple of days ago, so the stats only started counting then. I did wonder why I'd look at my stats and they'd be blank when I knew people have been reading my posts as they'd mention them in IRC.

I am pretty much settled on the layout of the site now, although I still have a few things to add. There is no rush to do this, they'll be done when they're done. A while back I made an offer of free advertising space on my site, this offer is still valid. As yet I've had no contact from any projects who want a slot.

I've been refining how I do real time chat too, so that now I'm using Irssi and Finch (the cli version of Pidgin) with the Twitgin plugin in two tabs of the same XFCE4-Terminal. This lets me stay connected to IRC, Jabber and Identi.ca all day without taking much in resources.

I continue to be a regular in the Linux Mint IRC channels, helping out other users where I can. I continue to advocate Mint as an ideal starter distro for people coming to Linux. As a result of spending time in a projects channels around the time a new version is being finalised and released it does build up the "I want it" pressure, however the Main and Universal Linux Mint editions are using Gnome, so "my" Linux Mint, the XFCE edition comes later. It occurred to me that I don't use any of the extra Mint tools, so do I really need Mint?

The last time I tried Xubuntu was around 7.04, which left me very underwhelmed at the time. I figured it was about time I gave it a fresh look, as every distro gets better with time, and a couple of years would be a very noticeable difference. Suffice to say it impressed me enough to do something I never thought I'd do again; switch to Xubuntu. In all likelihood I'll probably switch back onto Mint 8 XFCE CE when it's released.

My home has had some changes as I detailed in an earlier post, which affected my attention and motivation to create new content. For the most part this is all over now, and I'm trying to find a balance between "warm" and "not too expensive". I'll still have to set up an account to pay for my new gas supply, and work out a balance between that and my electric. Before Monday all of my cooking, heating, PC etc use was electric, now my heating is gas so my electric bill will be down, partly replaced by a gas bill. It probably helps that this is happening in the winter as it can only get cheaper in the summer.