Should Ubuntu announcements seem like a comedy show? As far as HUD goes, I like the idea. I just find the idea of it replacing menus completely to be bonkers mad.

See Video Here

If you’re using a similar setup, I’d love to know how you manage your content library and do remote access. If you’re interested in my fall-over easy python modules for accessing the XBMC library database you can find the code on launchpad and the librarian code too.

View Video Online, MPEG4 Video

• Hardly working Power On
• No Suspend
• No Hibernate
• Error causing virtual terminal
• Hibernating battery detection

Do you have any ideas?

You use a simple X to record when someone was present and a simple dash – to record an absence. But the mood strikes you and you want to make it look a little more professional. So you load up the Character Map program and grab a tick character from the symbols available and paste it into all the marked in cells:

OK so your spreadsheet looks nice, but your reviewer wants to know how many students were in each class total. this should be easy enough and you make a new row and add in the cell SUM formulas. But woe! it doesn’t work. Using characters in a spreadsheet doesn’t count because they’re not numbers:

So to fix the issue you use the search and replace to replace all your nice tick symbols with the number ‘1′ and to be consistent, all of the dashes to the number ‘0′. And it works, you have your totals; but this doesn’t look nice! So you decide to use the format cell option to figure it out:

This brings up the number formatting window. Here you can decide what the cell should look like given a certain value. Our values are ‘1′ and ‘0′, anything else is a problem, so we use the cell formatting code: [=1]"✔";[=0]-;[RED]"Error" which shows a tick when the cell is ‘1′, a dash when the cell is ‘0′ and a red coloured Error when the cell is anything else:

Now everything is formatted wonderfully and LibreOffice Calc has saved us from having to decide between an ugly or a useless spreadsheet, we can have both beauty and functionality!

As a bit of extra curricular, I also created one for deciding if someone loves you:

Check out the video, it’s only about 4 minutes long: To play this video see the source mpeg or go here for flash player.

Post your comments below.

Doing this piece I found there are a couple of pieces missing from Inkscape for doing production work, perhaps this is why so many people use Scribus-ng. The normal workflow from what I have seen is to make artwork in Inkscape and then transition to Scribus for the nitty gritty of doing production.

I also did the structural editing of the book contents. That is using LibreOffice to haddle all the titles, paragraphs and types as class styles instead of ad-hock ms-word inline styles. Also dealing with the pagination and a bunch of other production issues. LibreOffice was an ok tool, but a lot of the interfaces are confusing and could do with some more design being brought in on them.

Your thoughts?

For today’s session I created a full screen video showing you where to get source material, putting together the poster, some notes on copyright and then uploading to the spread Ubuntu website.

Check it out: Making Posters to Spread Ubuntu Video

Comment below if you’ve made something cool you’d like to show.

♬Oh the times, they are a changing!♫♥♥