Forgery League

To summarize the summer:

We released the first full-length Flickershow CD, entitled Drawing A Blank. Ten songs; I played bass, sang harmony, did arrangements and other odds and ends. We’re quite proud of it, and the CD release party was a blast. There’s a link to buy it online from our website, and it’s also available through that music store Apple runs. Things have been a bit quiet since the CD release, since Julian’s just got married (check out their awesome first dance on the YouTube) but there will be gigging in the new year, and with luck some out-of-town gigs in the spring.

All other music ventures have been on hold, meanwhile. I’m starting to plot my return to action, but it’s been nice to take a break for a few months and mess around with other things like writing and drawing (including the cover art for our CD) and catching up on comics.

Read more...

I’ve been contemplating getting a netbook for a while - a small, cheap, rugged machine I can sling in a backpack and use for writing. This week I got an HP Mini 110 as a surprise gift. It’s certainly nice and compact, and has a lot going for it. And thanks to the wonder of Dropbox I can keep my writing files synced between my various machines with practically no fuss.

A few first impressions:

Decent sized keyboard, but weird key placement: there are in fact two backslash/pipe keys, both placed for maximum annoyance where my fingers expect the Enter and left Shift keys to be; more on this below. Included battery is a bit clunky but packs several hours’ worth of power. The camera (see right) is possibly worse than my cheapass phone, but I’m not too bothered about that.

The model I have came with Windows XP, which I have no use for on a daily basis - Windows and I simply do not get along. However, it may be of some use for, say, previewing websites, and in any case this machine has more than enough drive space to keep it around. So I’ve loaded on the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (version 9.10, codenamed “Karmic Koala”). The installer conveniently partitioned the drive and set up dual booting. It’s snappy, no-frills and wakes from suspend mode in an instant, and features a simple launcher app that provides access to your programs. However, there are numerous quirks and pitfalls, even with this most user-friendly of Linuxes. I’m no Unix expert, so it was a good day or so of Googling and gritting of teeth to get everything in order.

Read more...