Transparency Support in Metacity for X.org Well, they call it transparency, but it's still not perfect. However, if you're running X.org 6.8 and GNOME, you might appreciate the patch for metacity that footnotes pointed to. Windows get transparent when moved, and you can toggle transparency from the window menu. Good start!

AV Hardware Porn Some audio/video hardware drool material for those into high end AV stuff. Via scoble.

How American Are You?! Dana threw me the How F**king American Are You? quiz. It's cute I think :)

AVG Free Beta Version AVG has a beta of their free antivirus software availablef or download. This copy expires 11/30/2004, but by then the full version will be out. The new version is of course compatible with XPSP2 (like the non-beta free version).

Obvious XP Tricks Forgetfoo points out a stupendously obvious little trick with the XP taskbar.

Quake 4 Preview Darren threw me a subtle pointer to this German forum where there are some Quake IV Screenshots. It's a scan of the preview in PC Zone, and it looks fantastic. A quick scan reveals it's built on the Doom 3 engine, will take up after Quake 2, has vehicles, fantastic looking models and oh my it does look cool. ETA 2005 though :(

Weather Reporting Firefox Extension Now weatherfox is just really damn cool! Weather reports for your browser, though you can set it to show in the status bar or as a pop up info window (based on the screenshots anyway), or put it at the top, your toolbar, or pretty much anywhere you want it. Extremely cool!

Call Of Duty Expansion Demo Released Well now this is exciting, the expansion pack for Call of Duty has had a demo released. It's 220 meg, but should be well worth it if this is anything like the original (which still has my vote for best single player FPS game ever).

New Gnome Online Magazine Sure it's a lot of fawning over the new GNOME 2.8 release, but the Gnome Journal is now online and ready to go. The first issue has GNOME 2.8 and Evolution reviews, as well as some other stuff. It's not all all fanboy stuff either, which is nice. Of course, with a name like "GNOME Journal" there's going to be a bit of bias :)

Regardless of this it's still a nifty site with some good info (IE: learning that Evolution 2.0 will automatically do junk mail filtering if Spamassassin is installed locally.

GNOME 2.8 Released Everyone get ready to party it up like it's six months after the 2.6 release! GNOME 2.8 Desktop & Developer Platform has been unleased to the wild. Mostly evolutionary changes are in this release, better handling of mime types and associating files with programs, speed and usability improvements, rendezvous support, auto-mounting/playing of USB memory sticks/CDs etc through HAL and DBUS, nicer applets, evolution/calendar integration..... and a whole wack of new stuff.

Here's the message to the GNOME announce list.

Random Pictures If you want to check some random pics from the net, anything from jokes, visual puzzles, funny things, offensive things, click here for a few to go through. Note that not all are work safe, some are probably offensive to you as well, so don't blame me :)

New ATI Driver (4.9) Those of you with nifty keen ATI video cards may want to check out the new drivers, which have a new control center and apparently, better performance for Doom 3, Far Cry, and UT2K4 (under certain conditions and for certain cards of course :)

Marital Bliss? Thinking of getting married? Don't Do It- 1001 Reasons Not to Marry Her was featured on the Howard Stern show and lists the many mental, physical, monitary, and statistical reasons not to get married.

Monkeying with Mail Just FYI, I'm going to be messing around a bit with the mail setup, trying to convince the imap and pop servers to not suck so bad :)

Update: Well, didn't break anything, but in theory might have sped the IMAP up a tiny bit, though I can't tell myself. I tried the tip of removing USERID as according to this and this page, but if anyone knows how to speed up a postfix+uw-imap I'd appreciate it. I was going to move to courier-imap, but moving a system with lots of users and already set up heirarchy of MBox folders to a mailder isn't all that good IMHO :) What'd be nice is a imap server that can deal with both mbox and maildir folders dynamically depending on what the user has set up, so my users can convert over slowly if they want.

Help or suggestions appreciated.

F-Spot Releases 0.0.2 Just a note that the F-Spot project, a photo management program for gnome, has released version 0.0.2. It's still very alpha, but they are taking contributions and encouraging testing and playing :)

Medal of Honor Pacific Assault Demo Wow, I have to day that Call of Duty was probably the best experience as a WW2 FPS. However, after downloading the demo to Medal of Honor Pacific Assault I'm thinking that my opinion might be changed. The demo is just great, looks awsome, good gameplay, and while half the time I didn't really know what was going on, lots of fun :)

New Mozilla.org Site With a little help from Steven Garrity of Acts of Violation, the new Mozilla.org website has gone live. It looks pretty nice, but still has some problems on IE 5.5 on the Mac. Of course, why anyone would be using IE 5 on a Mac is beyond me :) Great job, congrats to the Mozilla team!

Just in case you were interested, the website has actually been in public beta for a while to get the bugs out. Another case of Open Source working nicely!