There will be not one but three presentations:

• Jure Repinc will show what’s new in the KDE Software Compilation, with a focus on Plasma and Plasma Active
• Andrej Vernekar, the Slovenian translation coordinator and Linux user group president, will have a presentation about translating KDE.
• Miha Čančula (myself) will talk about programming for KDE, my experience with the mentorship programs, and how KDE makes a programmer’s life easier.

More info is available on the community wiki or in the Slovene version.

Predavatelji:

• Jure Repinc je študent računalništva, ki v svojem času poskuša čimveč prispevati k raznim odprto-kodnim projektom, v največji meri pri KDE.
• Andrej Vernekar je zaposlen kot vodja pisanja tehnične dokumentacije, v prostem času pa prevaja KDE-jevo programsko opremo in je koordinator slovenjenja KDE ter predsednik društva LUGOS.
• Miha Čančula sem študent fizike, ki pri projektu KDE razvijam šahovski program Knights in Cantor, ki je vmesnik za matematične programe

Lokacija:

Kiberpipa (zemljevid)

Povezave:

http://community.kde.org/Promo/Events/Release_Parties/4.8#Ljubljana

English version

Playing against Stockfish, a strong chess engine using UCI

A handful of new themes appeared on kde-look which can be downloaded from the Knights configuration dialog.

St. George theme by Dave Kaye, with visible history and clock widgets.

Move history can be save quickly from the history widget, or from the dialog which appears after a game is over.

Knights can be downloaded from their usual site at kde-apps:

Related articles

• Upcoming features in Knights (noughmad.com)
• Knights 2.4 Released (noughmad.com)

Why

The coolness factor, of course. I’m quite sure I’m the first of all my friends to have ICS. Also, it looks very slick. It is also heavily hyped, so I had to try it out.

CM9 welcome screen, still fresh and empty

The user interface is about as responsive as with 2.3, which is not perfect, but good enough. It’s actually quite fast, but the animations are not smooth, damaging the polished feel of the UX.

There is also the fact that the app development API has got many additions since Android 3.0, so it’s easier and more portable to write apps for ICS than for 2.3 that was installed by default.

CM9 app drawer.

How

There is a thread on the XDA-developers forum with news and releases. I downloaded the zip and installed it from ClockWorkMod recovery. A complete data wipe is needed, so make sure that your Google account is fully integrated and synced before trying the installation, or backup everything.

As the first post warns, if you don’t know how to install it, you probably shouldn’t. So I won’t post complete instructions here, but feel free to ask in the comments.

What now

The camera still doesn’t work. If this is something important to you, don’t use CM9 on your phone. For me, it’s an inconvenience, but the development possibilities are more important for me.

What you may or may not notice on the previous picture is that the icons are quite small on SGA’s 3.5-inch screen. The same is true for text in menus, fortunately there is an option to enlarge it in Settings > Accessibility.

ICS accessibility config, with the Large Text option checked

In general, it shows in a couple of places that my phone is somewhat too small and the screen resolution too low. Icons are too small, while text in some applications is too large. Other than that, web browsing and email is usable, and I don’t really need anything else from a phone. It also makes calls and messages, I tested it myself.

Solar backpacks

Voltaic Systems solar backpack

I want one and will probably buy one sometime this year. Part of the reason being the new smartphone lasts less than a day when mobile internet is active, but for the most part these things are just awesome. At $200 they cost about twice as much a comparable backpacs without the solar cells, which still falls into the range of a heavy backpack user like me. The more powerful models can also recharge your laptop battery, making them ideal for laptop-lugging outgoers.

Providers: Voltaic Systems, Eclipse Solar Gear

Building automation

This is more of a long-term goal, as I don’t plan to have a house of my own any time soon, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing. Having your lights, heating, ventilation and AC automated, as well as controllable from anywhere, is not only very convenient, but often energy saving as well. The EnOcean alliance seems to be leading here, especially with self-powered devices, while other providers like ZigBee focusing more on wired and grid-powered sensors and switches.

Shoe power

These aren’t yet commercially available, but there are several people who managed to make a power-generating shoe. Using piezoelectricity, the forces of human walking can be harvesting to power a small device, or at least recharge you phone while walking. You can’t really buy one yet, here is a tutorial to make it. Also, IBM included “people power”, of which piezoelectric shoes are a subset, in their five-year predictions (while I was in the middle of the seminar) as an example of technology which will prosper soon. Since I walk about 2.5 kilometers to school and back at least two times per week, I’d be interested in such shoes, provided they won’t be prohibitively expensive.

Batteryless remotes

Batteryless remote by Arveni for Philips

This doesn’t really interest me, as I neither watch TV nor have a car, but the force of pressing the button is often enough to send a signal from the remote to the receiver (TV, car, whatever else there’s a remote for). Because of this, batteries can be completely removed, removing the terrible annoyances when they run out. Philips has a working prototype for a TV remote, while Volvo presented a favorable case study  for their S80 in 2000. Once again, I haven’t yet seen one of these in real life, but as the costs of power sources drop, they might be coming without us knowing at all.

My seminar

If you’re interested, I have included both the article and a short presentation, both in PDF form.

• Article
• Presentation

The fog may be annoying, but the lights are shiny

Somethings for us science geeks as well

A small girl in front of a big tree

Currently, there are two things you can do with the menu once you rip it out of the application: put it in a plasma panel, or embed it the window decoration. Arch users can get both of them from the AUR. Because I still like the menu to be visually connected to the application, I am now using the second option, with the Oxygen-appmenu window decorations.

Application menus embedded in the window decoration

Currently, this only works for Qt applications. The equivalent patch to Gtk is still included only in Ubuntu and would require recompiling Gtk, something I am not fond of doing. In any case, I have found that at least on the laptop the only non-Qt app I use is Firefox, which includes a similar button as its menu. It doesn’t look as well, but it does the job and keep things consistent. An extension for LibreOffice is avaliable in the AUR as well, but the only text processor I need is Kile.

My current addiction is Sins of a Solar Empire. It’s a space-based real time strategy, with its characteristic property being its slowness. The game is very detailed with epic battles, so even with the slow pace it keeps you busy, but it’s quite possible to wage two or more battles at one.

The game is rather old, and it wasn’t one of the big-budget productions, so it’s relatively cheap, but both the graphics and the gameplay are really well done.

So, yesterday I finally managed to install CyanogenMod. It’s not yet officially released for my Galaxy Ace, but there is a good unofficial build on the xda-developers forum. The process is really easy, but due to it being unofficial the instructions are somewhat hard to find, and that’s why it took me a long time.

As an operating system, it’s not much different than original Android. However, the appearance is heavily modified, with theming support for colors and icons, a better App list, and some really cool wallpapers. A small but important improvement is the lack of pre-installed apps that come with the phone. Additionally, CM add a plethora of configuration options, so you can really make your phone look unique.

Taking screenshots is easier, too