More from: Launcher

SpaceX This Sunday, 6/28!

P , by

SpaceX is on another launch this Sunday, where they expect to successfully land their recoverable launcher.

“…on our next launch—the eighth Falcon 9 and Dragon cargo mission to the space station, currently scheduled for this Sunday. Even given everything we’ve learned, the odds of succeeding on our third attempt to land on a drone ship (a new one named “Of Course I Still Love You”) are uncertain, but tune in here this Sunday as we try to get one step closer toward a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.”

Should be exciting to watch.

Gnome 3 Taskbars

P , by

The last year has been one of aggravation for us, as we have been using Ubuntu for our teaching lab and of course the Unity thing was shoved down our throats. Now we have a sideways Launcher  we have to hunt down and take pot shots at while it tries to evade our clicks by slipping off the side of our screen to hide, in case we might just get lucky and actually hit the icon we need. Honestly if we just had a way to turn off the stupid “auto hide” feature and set it to “always on top” so the windows would stay away from it then it would be usable. Microsoft has had this capability since what, Windoze 95? It was available in Linux until last year.

So we installed the alternate gnome desktop which of course turns out to be Gnome 3 instead of Gnome 2, and it seems to be welded to the top and bottom of our screen, with no space for our launchers, and right clicking on it to change things has no affect (now you must ALT-right click).

Sigh — even in technology we are getting the wrong kind of “change”. Seriously, We Like Change. We enjoy trying and creating new technology. It’s a blast to have the super new gadgets even if they are occasionally quirky.  But there is such a thing as having your head up your, ah, suffering from cranial-rectal inversion. I think someone put crack in these guy’s cigars.

Finally we came across this post today with an idea of how to control the properties of the Gnome 3 task bar:

gnome-panel settings

Fallback-mode uses the gnome-panel ported to Gnome3 from Gnome2. As usual, you can adjust its color, position, size, background, add some launchers, clock or tasklist.

The only new thing you should know about gnome-panel is: to access its properties dialog Alt+RightClick on it. In VirtualBox you need LeftAlt + RightCtrl + RightClick.

This is from http://fedorasolved.org/Members/bookwar/gnome-3-tips. The idea that now we must hold down ALT while we right click is — less than obvious — but it worked. I suppose that just means “friends shouldn’t let friends drink while designing user interfaces”. Also, even though individual icons in the menu do not have the “Add to Panel” you can click and drag them to the task bar.

Now if we could just find a way to get the Compiz Zoom to work reliably we would potentially still be able to get work done. Yes, I know we reported on a work around last month, but it only works some times, and we don’t know why.