Lovable Tomorrow

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Niamh returns!

Niamh is alive again! Banzai! But now I must go through the dark wizardry of configuring her to play DVDs, MIDIs, and various other things like that. Umu~ How painful. T_T I'm overjoyed that Niamh isn't freezing anymore, though, and the password problem was sorted out too. Oh! But my dictionaries are screwed up now. I used to use Kiten all the time, but now my JP input method isn't working properly with Kiten. I have to go into the character map and manually select each and every kana character when I want to look up a word. Bleh. As if that weren't enough, when I was configuring my Firefox addons, I accidentally installed a German-Japanese dictionary for Rikaichan in addition to the English-Japanese one, and can't figure out how to remove it. There's no way to select which dictionary it loads or disable a dictionary either, so I'm having to learn German now. It seems that my clumsiness is resulting in my bettering myself somehow? How odd.

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Thursday, October 30, 2008

It never ends...

Here is a breakdown of what has happened to my PC, "Niamh". (She is a computer, but I refer to her by feminine pronouns out of habit.) She was assembled in a shop (rather than by me), and the technicians there installed Ubuntu as well. They set the default account's name as something I didn't want. You can't change account names, so I created a new one with the correct name. But they had put the data from my old hard drive into the default user's home directory...and there was so much stuff there that I didn't feel like going through it, so I just left it as it was. I had plenty of disk space anyway. Some time after that, a software update was installed incorrectly and Samba (the password system) went completely fubar. I could login to the default account, but not the one with the correct name. I have a philosophy of doing whatever works when it comes to computers, so I just started using the default account. This is the part that's pretty confusing if you're not familiar with Linux, but this basically created a confusing mess when it came to file ownership. That is, the files I had created under the new account belonged to the new account, but I continued to edit them from the old account, through a bit of chmod wizardry. Like I said, whatever works. Everything worked fine until Niamh was affected by a bug that causes her to, at apparently random intervals, stop accepting commands from or acknowledging any USB devices connected to her. Nothing fixes this but a restart. My mouse and keyboard are USB devices... But for some reason, it doesn't seem to happen if I pause and stop using the mouse and keyboard every so often. I think the whole thing is a plot by Niamh to keep me from getting carpal tunnel. Once that was sorted out, I decided that I would set right what once went wrong and consolidate all my files into a single user account. I created a new account with the name "tama" to put everything into, and began work. I was part of the way done with this when I ran into a problem with sudo. (Non-Linux users: in the Unix command line, you preface commands that require admin privileges with "sudo". Pretty much anything important requires sudo.) Apparently I did something wrong while adding tama as a new user, since it didn't have permission to use sudo. This caused the sudo command to asplode. Now no users can use sudo. At all. For ANYTHING. This means that I can't open up the package manager, check for updates, or do anything else that requires a user password (except, natch, for logging in). My solution is reinstalling Ubuntu entirely, which should rectify the password situation and the sudo situation in one go. Before I do this, I have to back up all my files. All my files. But, fortune! I do have a single piece of good news: I had already consolidated my most important files before the whole sudo fiasco, so— joy and elation!— I was able to back those up onto a data DVD with incredible ease. Thus, my efforts were not wasted, at least. All this mess will probably make readers distrust Linux and huddle close to their copies of Windows, so I would like to make it clear that I don't think any of this was my operating system's fault. Most of it was caused by my own negligence and ignorance. (I love computers, but they really do not love me.) It's something that will probably become a memento of youthful stupidity when I'm more knowledgeable about computers. And it isn't that difficult to fix what's gone wrong; honestly, it's something I should have done an age ago anyway. Plus, I haven't actually lost anything but time. All my important files are 100% safe and accessible, so I should count my blessings. :/ I guess I'll just consider this a learning experience and move on. (And, yes, this is the reason why I keep procrastinating on my projects. Why can't there be more hours in a day...?)

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Monday, October 6, 2008

I thought idiots didn't get sick...;_;

And yet, some manner of illness has breached my hikikomori defences. This bad, bad news for my throat. I just want to go back to sleep, nyoron... (But man, I really did think that the "simple-minded energetic" type was supposed to be mostly healthy, so how did this happen?) I haven't posted here in a while, so I'll talk a little about my projects now. Project Augury. No, I haven't stopped work on this, and I do intend to release it eventually. It'll come out when it's done. Project Augury is basically what causes the other stories to make some semblance of sense, so I will definitely complete it eventually. When it's done. Star Gazers. Oh my, did anyone remember when I mentioned this? For those who forgot, it's a doujin ren'ai game (NOT AN EROGAME) I've been working on erratically for the past six months or so. Given the sheer amount of scenario I'll have to write + the OST + the CGs I'll have to draw + etc, etc...it'll take a while. Producing a high-quality doujin game on your own is not an easy (or quick) task. :/ Translations. I have a feature on my blog Xylophone Forest where I translate various songs (mostly anime songs) into English. This feature will continue, of course! I have a couple of songs I've been fiddling with lately, so the next one I post could be "Fight!" or "Eternal Blaze". I also ought to finish up that "Last regrets" translation...and maybe I should try my hand at translating audio dramas or something? Hmmm. Circare. My silly fantasy novel. E~to, I don't think anyone's particularly concerned about reading it, so it doesn't matter that it isn't even remotely near completion yet. Hooray! Now I'm going to go draw 4koma or something. Computers, soothe my soul~...

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Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Falafel and yams

Here are a few wallpapers I've made recently. For assorted reasons, I'm making them available here rather than through the standard theOtaku interface (mostly because most of them feature my own hand-drawn art; I've long since learned that no one really downloads fanart wallpapers). Paprinfor and Ryna (characters from that stupid fantasy novel I've been writing, pay it no heed) for Valentine's Day. Drawn in pencil, coloured on the computer. (I intentionally went outside the lines, used pastel colours, and tried to make it look crayon-like.) By the way, they're Grim Reapers, not ghosts. This is the pink version of the above. It's more Valentines-oriented, but clashes rather poorly. Here's one of my official Project Augury wallpapers- Ichigo, light-pink version. I think this sketch of Ichigo was one of my best pieces, so that's why I wanted to wall it. (Please ignore the feet. The feet suck.) Based on Yuki Kajiura's "A Stray Child", just like a previous Ichigo wallpaper. This one turned out much cooler. (I even showed it to my father, and he liked it.) In fact, this is probably one of my best wallpapers ever, despite my sucky drawing skills. I think the Urara "Lovable Tomorrow" wallpaper was the first wallpaper I made that didn't suck. (That's why my current colour scheme mimics it.) Regardless, I decided to gild the lily thistle by remaking it. I vectorised the original Urara for great justice (don't ask how), and improved on the background as well as the text wording, placement, and readability. Also, on a completely unrelated note, this made my day so, so happy.

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Sunday, February 10, 2008

To shreds, you say.

Well, I got my beloved laptop back yesterday, but today it is exhibiting the same problem that it had a month ago (i.e. the same problem that put it in the shop), only worse- not only does it not recognise the presence of the AC adaptor, now it can't tell that it has a battery either! I spend a night sleeping peacefully and dreaming of all the writing I'd be able to do the next day, only to find out in the morn that my laptop simply could not turn on anymore. I, naturally, was tremendously pissed, having gone without writing anything for so long and now realising that I still wouldn't be able to. I think I'm just going to copy my stories to this borrowed computer anyway, privacy be danged. It's regrettable, but better than waiting for Alcoris to be fixed (which, given the usual pace at that particular shop, will probably take a year or more). That'll have to wait till after I install some programs like The GNU Image Manipulation Program and OpenOffice.org on it, though, since I rely so much on those programs... EDIT: This is also a massive problem, since one of the files from the laptop that I forgot to back up was the background for the current layout of this very blog. (I came up with the colours and such for this scheme a while back.) When I had my laptop back for a few hours yesterday, I changed the colour scheme and uploaded the image, but myOtaku seems to have eliminated the background due to the recent maintenance. Now, it has the lovely and clashy dango background instead. Unfortunately, replicating the image will require usage of the aforementioned GIMP, which I can't really install at the moment. I also can't really track down the original on ImageShack, since I didn't think to include any tags. I did copy down the address for the image, but the text file containing that address...is on my laptop. So, blerg.

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