Humbly submitted, for your consideration

So the game I mentioned in yesterday's KDE upgrade post was Bit-Blot's Aquaria – the stand out success (for me) of last year's Humble Indie Bundle. It's a gorgeous underwater exploration and adventure game, with intuitive, learn-as-you-go controls and a commitment to immersive detail on par with Ultima VII. There's a rich backstory, a cool magic system, companions, even cooking.

The Humble Bundle itself is a pack of awesome, DRM-free, multi-platform games with pay-what-you-will pricing. The proceeds are divided (at your discretion) among charities (EFF and Child's Play,) the games' makers, and Humble. The current bundle looks very fun, but there are only 6 days left to grab it, so act fast if you're interested.

This year's big draw seems to be Braid, a clever little time-manipulation side scroller about dysfunctional relationships. Only problem -- it didn't want to run on openSUSE for me. Run from the command line, it complained:

Game Startup Error: Unable to set up graphics.
Reason: Missing required OpenGL extension.

To help fix this problem make sure you are running the newest version of your video drivers.
Lastly, you could try running this game with the -windowed command-line option.

The ubuntu folks, who always seem to crack these problems first, tracked the issue down to missing S3 texture compression support – disabled in the open source drivers because it's patented (further details if you're interesed). Their simple solution (where patent law allows) is to install driconf and re-enable S3, as described here.

Since driconf isn't in the standard openSUSE repositories, you can grab it from the build service. Mine didn't work out of the box, though – it was looking in the wrong place for the python module. So, I edited /usr/bin/driconf and added the line:

sys.path.append("/usr/lib64/driconf/")

which is where I found the file driconf.py. Then, if I were in a country where patent law allowed, I could run driconf, go to the Image Quality tab, and enable S3TC, and Braid would run like a charm. If I were not in a country where patent law allowed, I'd suggest giving Osmos a try, an addictive physics-based osmosis game. Haven't checked out the others yet, but will when I have some down-time.

KDE 4.5 on openSUSE

I run openSUSE as my primary operating system – have done so since I worked at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which was a Novell shop. Right around Thanksgiving, I somehow ended up backed into the corner of needing to upgrade to KDE 4.5. I don't actually remember the order everything played out, but there was some poor video and resource performance, a game I couldn't get working for the nieces and nephews (okay, and for me on the plane), and knetworkmanager broke -- and my end solution was to plow all those problems under with a big upgrade and start fresh with whatever new issues cropped up.

Thankfully, the process of upgrading KDE to 4.5 is fairly pain-free in openSUSE, as long as you read the fine print. And the fine print is: The knetworkmanager applet won't work under KDE 4.5, so you'll need to switch to the knetworkmanager plasmoid; except, once you've broken the knetworkmanager applet, it's too late to switch conveniently -- you've lost all connectivity. Also, the plasmoid has it's own issues.

• So, STEP 1 – you'll want to follow these instructions to make the upgrade, bearing in mind that instruction #5 really needs to happen before #4.


• And, STEP 2 – to get wireless networking working in the plasmoid, you'll want to add the command:

  qdbus org.kde.kded /kded loadModule networkmanagement

  to your Autostart folder, as described in this post. I just dropped it into an executable text file called knm.sh, and that seems to have done the trick.

Forewarned is forearmed. Godspeed!

UPDATE -- I actually used YaST Software Management, rather than zypper as in the first link, but the outcome should be the same.

UPDATE 2 == At some point, I also deleted everything in these directories, because someone on the internet told me to, so if you're still having trouble, give that a go:
/var/tmp/kdecache-$USER
/tmp/kde-$USER
/tmp/ksocket-$USER

Dog days of winter

Yesterday was Hank's first real snow day – he's seen snow before, but never accumulation – so we took the opportunity and swapped most of his designated walking time for play time. We ran around like crazy puppies, attacking each other, gamboling and rolling in the snow, bounding and sliding across the deck, and sprinting around every corner. He tasted it (black dog with a snowy nose is a picture I wish I'd taken for you), and re-cataloged all his favorite smells – even made his first yellow snow with some prompting.

By his evening walk, when it was cold enough to freeze my beard, he still had the strength of 10 lab/beagle-mixes (Google tells me this is equivalent to 2 great danes or 32.7 chihuahuas) and even managed to pull loose a couple times when I was off my guard. When we finally called it a night, he curled up on the couch in a way that suggested ski lodge, hot chocolate, warm fire...

But where's my chocolate?

As a relative newcomer to Perl, I was pleased to see Slashdot's link today to the Perl Advent Calendar (although I was disappointed to find it doesn't work in Opera.) I was even more pleased that it reminded me one of my favorite seasonal web design and development blogs, 24 Ways to Impress Your Friends would be spinning back up today. Over the next 24 days, various web luminaries will contribute elegant new techniques for layout, accessibility, development, you name it.

Look back through their archives and you'll find there's something for everybody. Today's entry – an introduction to Google's Static Map API – as it turns out, is not for me, at least not for my leisure. But I'm sure it is for somebody else. Actually the author indicates it is for the 2% of web users who do not have Javascript enabled (minus those using screen readers, I guess.) But I will definitely check back throughout the season.

Finally, my inner pedant points out that neither of these are actually Advent calendars, since Advent starts on the first Sunday of Advent (November 28th this year) rather than December 1st. Metric Advent?

Redeemer's new webpage

So, brag-hat on for a moment here – we just went live with Phase 1 of the new website for Redeemer Lutheran Church here in Stevens Point, WI (just getting the SEO out of the way early there) and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, even though all its little flaws are glaringly apparent to me.

It helps that we met our modest goal, rapid launch with all the essentials. Also, we're immediately turning around into Phase 2 – more robust, built on WordPress as a CRM – so I can instantly incorporate all those little fixes I'd otherwise have stayed up until 2AM tonight cranking out. And I like the overall look of it... I'm a fan of design, but not terribly skilled at it, and I exceeded my expectations for myself here. Still a long way to go, but it feels clean, inviting and modern to me, which was exactly what I was aiming for.

That said, suggestions, bug reports and design tweaks extremely welcome!

Furniture as time machine

In other news, time tourists go to a lot of trouble to enjoy some pretty mundane attractions, but then, why should they differ from any other history buffs?

Doing some time traveling of my own tonight — cut myself on some Ikea mounting hardware, and every keystroke is a sense memory of fingertip blood draws in the hospital as a child. I must have been in for asthma, and they may have only done it twice, but in my memory it was a month of daily finger pricks.

Jackpot

File under "More of the same..."

Hosed my system today updating some software, so I thought I'd go for the full-upgrade. One hour later, no external hard drive to be found anywhere, although Annie assures me we packed it. In the meantime, I turn up my wayward grammar and usage dictionary, as well as some Star Wars action figures and a cell phone charger we lost last year. Eventually find the hard drive...

under the passenger seat of our car...

where it slid when we drove it up here early last month. Bad news is I'm still missing the power supply (yes I checked the glove box), but the good news is that OpenSuse 11.3's upgrade option seems to have successfully solved my issues and is running smoothly. I'm tempted to try to dig up my high school yearbook on the off chance that I'll stumble across the power supply in the process.