I’m a technerd. I admit it. I don’t have many of the trappings of overt technerdity as one might expect, but rather, I’m more of a ninja technerd type–I prowl and stalk the gadgets until I can no longer resist their siren call…and then I haunt the sales so I can get ‘em cheap. I count on the cost of expensive toys as an effective prophylactic against my need to acquire immediately.
But when it comes to open source…well, let’s just say the condom broke on that one, because OPEN SOURCE IS FREE, BABY! Which is why I’m running a Linux rig all day, all night, and twice on the weekends.

So I finished NaNoWriMo and produced 50,000 words of utter craptasticness that will someday be edited into something fit for human consumption. But to celebrate, I gave myself the gift of Nerd. I finally got Compiz-Fusion up and running on my rig and boy is it sweet like honey and chocolate and oral sex with a coffee chaser. Now for those of you who speak Geek, I’m a recent convert to Ubuntu from Gentoo Linux (oh, so, customizable, but when my laptop had hard-drive death, I did not have three whole days to customizably build it from the screws up…and well, Gutsy Gibbon had just come out and even though Gentoo is a kickass distro when it comes to powerful custom rigs, Gutsy was new and pretty and the Ubuntu forums are a very well-stocked place in the tweaking department and…).

So anyway…enough with the geekspeak…on to the screen shots!

I have the ability to “zoom out” to view all four of my virtual desktops and rearrange my apps between them. I keep email and net stuff on one desktop, Writer’s Cafe on another, graphics stuff on the third, and media on the fourth, so that my desktop at 100% zoom is not cluttered, giving me a lovely working space in which to play.

This is a shot of the desktop cube. Linux has the capability to make your desktop larger than your monitor screen–mine is 2 screens wide and 2 screens high, giving me 4 virtual desktops to spread out all my apps. I switch between the desktops using this awesome cube. The cube exists in a skydome, with graphical caps on the top and bottom surfaces. Freakin’ sweet.

My app switcher isn’t just alt-tabbing–I page through the apps on a desktop in this nifty little ring thingy that cycles them around each other. It’s like having a little circus that features geeks. Well…not real circus geeks, because my laptop apps don’t bite the heads off live chickens. Although I bet I could find a widget that features virtual chickens, with and without heads. I bet I could.

If I don’t feel like paging through my three-ring circus of apps, I can window-switch ‘em if I want using different keys. My apps page through like 3d cards. Much like Windows Vista’s 3d eyecandy rendering. However, of the few people I know who have actually been forced to upgrade upgraded to Vista have turned off their eyecandy because it’s a friggin’ resource hog.

After a month as intense as NaNo,  I take a bit of a well-deserved break due to temporary burn-out, and what better way to rest my brain than tweaking my workspace.  Eye candy, yes.  Brain candy, too.  And all free.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.