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.)

Changes

I think I’m liking WordPress’s new changes.

But they are taking a bit of getting used to.

Spring Desktop

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

The Battle Is Won.

My article is now my own. The offending account has been suspended. I am appeased.

Thanks to Jonathan at Plagiarism Today for his help. The detailed information and DMCA templates on his site proved very useful. I owe him big time.

I’ll be sleeping well tonight.

Diesel Sweeties Released under Creative Commons

To celebrate Diesel Sweetie’s 8th Anniversary, Richard Stevens will “be releasing his entire webcomic archive in ten volumes.” Released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license, the volumes will be available on volume per week for ten weeks, with a special art book released at the end of the ten weeks. Although the official date for this ingenious project’s beginning is tomorrow, March 12, Stevens has released the first volume of his work a day early.

I admire Richard Stevens for his willingness to distribute his artwork freely. This act of kindness serves as comfort to me during my current “copyright infringement crisis.” Creative Commons works wonders; it is my wish that everyone complies to the license and uses his works in ways that will both provide laughter to many and increase Stevens’s fame.

Props to you, Stevens.

Links:

Initial Announcement

First Volume Release

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.