More on The Kindle

I take back everything nice I said about the Kindle.  Don’t buy one.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

Read more at Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others. Apparently Amazon can delete books right off your Kindle without your permission. And yes, they did refund the purchase price of the book, but that is little recompense for their intrusion. The irony of it all is that the revoked book is George Orwell’s 1984.

I decided after using if for a while I liked it and could get used it using it. But I have also come to the realization that paper is a really ingenious technology. Suppose you want to spread out several reference works on your desk while you are studying? You can’t do that with a Kindle.

Paper is good.

Scripting Gnome

I wanted to automate some things on my Gnome desktop and being rather fond of Python, I thought that I would start there and see what I could do. My first task was to change the Gnome Panel from one screen to another automatically. I have a dual monitor setup and I want to automate the panel moving from one to the other.

I did a little research and came up with this little script that does the job. It simply toggles the panel between screen 0 and 1. I had no idea it would be this simple.

import gconf

path = ‘/apps/panel/toplevels/panel_0/monitor’

gc = gconf.client_get_default()
cs = gconf.ChangeSet()
cs.set_int( path, not gc.get_int(path) )
gc.commit_change_set(cs,True)