BREAKING NEWS: Spam is a new form of entertainment!

While sifting through my feeds and email today, I discovered some very intriguing spam items:

Apparently, I’m not alone. I did a little research to see if I was the only one who noticed this. Here’s another guy’s spam folder with even better headlines:

I never thought I’d do this, but I must applaud the spammers for coming up with new ways to catch our attention. Of course, I’m not easy enough to give in to something like this, but I’d much rather click one of these than an email that assures me I can “make her scream all night long.”

Try it out for yourself.

(Oh, and since I run Ubuntu instead of Windows, I’m immune to the viruses that the spam links to. So the jokes on them.)

Spring Desktop

I spring cleaned my computer, and redesigned it for the new spring season. This is why I love Linux’s customization!

Miis for Linux

Quite a few months ago, I created my first Mii for the Nintendo Wii. Even though I spent hours tweaking all of the features of my character and yet came up with not-so-satisfying results, I enjoyed the feeling of being able to create an extremely exaggerated cartoon version of myself. I wondered if there was any program for Linux that allowed you to do similar things. After a bit of searching, I discovered MeMaker, a new program that enables users to create caricatures of themselves.

When I first played around with MeMaker, I was disappointed with its lack of features and its somewhat confusing interface. Now, months later, MeMaker has more options set and better interface. MeMaker’s features are divided into “styles,” with each style representing a different artwork style. The current feature set held my attention for a quite a while, and I’m sure that as more people contribute artwork, I’ll be spending a lot more time creating random avatars for no reason at all.

While the upcoming version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), will have MeMaker packages included in the repositories for easy installation, Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) doesn’t have a .deb package that I know of, meaning that you’ll have to install it from source. Don’t worry, the process isn’t very complicated at all:

First, install the required bzr and python-lxml packages.

sudo apt-get install bzr python-lxml


Next, create and navigate to a directory where you can grab the source code.

bzr co http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~encompass/memaker/trunk memaker


Next, run MeMaker! There’s nothing to install, so you’ll have to browse to the directory each time you want to run the program (unless you create a shortcut).

cd memaker/src/
python memaker.py


Have fun modeling! Here are some of my quick impromptu creations.

If you have any questions, or see any mistakes in my instructions, leave me a comment and I’ll do my best to get things straightened out.