It’s 2:15 am and I can’t sleep, so what do I do? I hope on my laptop and try out new linux software! First of all, I wanted to note that I’ve been afflicted by the mysterious case of the disappearing xmms. Xmms is a linux-based audio player nearly identical to >”Winamp. Traditionally (several months ago) I could just type sudo apt-get install xmms; xmms and xmms would install and run on my Ubuntu system with a user-friendly frontend. Now it seems that xmms is gone – replaced by xmms2 which appears to be an audio server with no front end. Wha? I didn’t put much effort into trying to figure out how to get a front end to xmms2, but brief Googling suggested that xmms2 doesn’t actually have a front-end. Today I realised that you have to install a completely separate package to get a front-end, based on xmms2. It basically acts just like xmms did (pictured). The program is called audacious, and can be installed with sudo apt-get install audacious on an Ubuntu system. Yay! Back to normal.
response to inquiry: the songs in the playlist is a short collection of songs by Splashdown (an extinct late-90s indie band I fell in love with when I was ~13) – believe it or not, all of their music can be downloaded from this website – super awesome huh? I especially recommend halfworld, ironspy, running with scissors, and waterbead (in that order). A few songs in the list are actually from Universal Hall Pass which is a different band with the same lead singer (Melissa Kaplan).

I have to admit that tonight I was blown away by the awesomeness of Inkscape – a vector drawing tool (similar to Adobe Illustrator) which is going to become my next best friend. Like I said, it does pretty much what Illustrator does, but for free! (Illustrator is about $250) It does so much cool stuff and I just realised it would be so freaking awesome to design a website layout using it. I have to admit, for the first 20 minutes I was totally lost – I had a hard time figuring out how to draw a line! But after a little more time, it became really natural, and this program is – jeez – I can’t get over how useful this can be. I decided to get used to this program by drawing-out a schematic of the circuit from my DIY ECG Project (The result is posted at the bottom of this entry, and a screenshot of the creation process is pictured to the side). I know that I will have tremendous use for this software, possibly in the creation of diagrams of the autonomic nervous system for my master’s thesis or perhaps even for a publication… [ponders] Okay I have to get to bed!

Take it from me. Download InkScape (it looks like they have a Windows version, btw) and if you have Ubuntu, install audacious for your music. Scott out.