bad coffee

By basd on Dec 14, 2008 | In kde4

Why is it I can't make a decent cup of coffee??? I've got a state of the art cuisinart that does everything from grinding the beans to calculating the ratio of coffee to cups of water. Of course, I make identically bad coffee no matter which coffee maker I use.

I suspect it is old coffee beans. Okay, I admit that I spent a year drinking coffee made from beans I retrieved from my inlaws' refrigerator, because various family members will only make coffee from a brand new package of beans (and my inlaws don't drink coffee at all). So, it is cost effective to bring home all the stale coffee beans.

But still. So, after a year of this, I actually bought a genuinely brand new pound of coffee beans. And, I think I had like, two pots of somewhat decent coffee out of the cuisinart. Does coffee go stale that fast? Sheesh. I better start buying it 1/8 lb. at a time.

What does this have to do with computers? Umm ... computer geeks run on coffee???

Anyway, I discovered that not only can you run kde kicker, gnome-panel and cairo-dock on top of IceWM, if you use compiz fusion-icon to switch window managers, you can log into kde 3.5 and run all of these from a kde 3.5 session.

The benefit, more or less, was that I wanted to run a slideshow as the desktop background. Also, I noticed that I was getting "transparency" in KDE 3.5 on KWIN, but not in any other combination. So, it occurred to me that the excess X-system CPU flare-ups had something to do with the transparency implementation. (Also, this seems limited to specific hardware configurations.)

So, I achieved (more of) the feature set I want with this new configuration.

1. Slideshow running on background
2. Clock on desktop (superKaramba with Chrome Clock)
3. Music player (Songbird)
4. Clock screensaver (from KDE 3.5)
5. (oops, untested) screen power-off

More later, as I downloaded Kubuntu (took only 1/2 hr! Linux downloads used to take me 3 or 4 days!).