Andrew Wilkinson

Today is my last day at work. Tomorrow I pack my bags and make the 90 minute trip up the East Coast Mainline to my parents house. Unfortunately Ellen won't be with me, she'll be making the considerably longer trip from Stanstead to Dublin. As we're not spending the actual day together we decided to have an early Christmas yesterday. We tried to make it as much like the real day as possible, although with less Doctor Who.

For my present Ellen brought me a subscription to New Scientist magazine. For the last five years I've had a subscription to the NME but I found it less and less interesting and cared less and less about the bands in it so I canceled. It's nice to have a high-brow replacement so I'll look cool^* reading it on the train home from work.

Our flat looks a little bare and we have looked at, and discussed buying, some art to go on our walls. Unfortunately real art is far to expensive so for her present I got two photos from our holidays blown up onto 14"x18" canvas by The Digital Room. I think they've come out really well, and Ellen seemed very happy with them. I haven't taken a photo of them hanging in our flat, but the photos I used were of Geraniums and Dun Laoghaire Harbour Lighthouses.

I think it's nice to spread the presents out, now I get to get excited again on Thursday :-)

* Is it even possible to look cool while reading a science magazine? I hope so!

It's almost Christmas, so why not make your KDE desktop all snowy?

The first step is to emerge/apt-get/yum (delete as appropriate) xsnow.

Next up you'll want to make it run when you log into your machine. Create a file in /home/%u/.kde/Autostart (where %u is your username) called xsnow-run. Add the following code to this file:

#!/bin/bash

xsnow

You can add parameters to control how xsnow runs, personally I prefer -notrees. Make the file executable by typing chmod u+x /home/%u/.kde/Autostart/xsnow-run. If, when you run xsnow, nothing appears go to the KDE control centre, then Desktop, then Behaviour and make sure 'Allow programs in desktop window' is selected.

If your computer spends some time at the login screen (and you use KDM) you might want to make that Christmassy too. In the directory /usr/kde/3.5/share/config/kdm edit the file kdmrc and add the line 'SetVRoot=true' under 'UseBackground=true'.
Next add the following lines to the file Xsetup:

xsnow &
echo $! > /var/run/xsnow.pid

Again, add any parameters to xsnow that you want. Finally, add the following lines to the file Xstartup:

if [ -f /var/run/xsnow.pid]; then
   kill `cat /var/run/xsnow.pid`
   rm -f /var/run/xsnow.pid
fi

Be careful though, editing your login manager's file could break your computer!

Hurrah! Now your computer is very Christmassy! Why not top it off with a festive wallpaper?