Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

@perspectoff

I'm not sure who you were responding to but you are correct about forks. Forks are a long FOSS tradition. Not all forks are because of developer conflicts. Internally, many projects "fork" for a variety of reasons. Using their VCS they "branch" their development tree and use the branch to tickle an itch or test a theory. IF things work out the branch is merged back into the main trunk. If not, the branch is abandon.

Projects work the same way. Those developers who continue with KOffice will tickle their itch and the Calligra developers will do the same. Since both projects are Open Source and under the GPL any improvements made in one can be easily incorporated into the other. In the end, it is the community which determines which fork is the best one. The better one will survive and the poorer one will fade away. The community is always the beneficiary of a fork, unless one of the forks is for proprietary purposes, the way Apple forked Konqueror to create Safari, or Microsoft forked BSD's IP/TCP stack.

[woodsmoke]

A Christmas card made with KWord and GIMP

So what did you use KWord for this week?

To make a Christmas card maybe?

Well, speaking rehetorically.....

I wanted to make a Christmas card that was really a 8 page "booklet" with a Christmas story in it.

So... I wrote the story... in Kword... and since the thing had to go into a reasonably large envelope but it was quite long the text ended up being 9pt.

Since the cover of the card/book was going to be made from a scrapbook page which is 12 x 12 inches, cut to size so it would fold and go into the envelope. I then cut an inside sheet of contrasting paper and glued it inside and then cut the sheets which would be folded to make the inside pages.

I then dragged the little right margin thing on KWord to make the text about 4 inches wide and then dragged the top and bottom margins to where it would fit on the paper. But.............

There is ALWAYS a "but".... lol

I had not bought enough paper so.... to get the story to print on the number of sheets that I DID buy, I WAS going to just print on one side one sheet and waste paper..... sooooooo

I then put the text into columns.... and created a "gutter" that is the word that USED to be used for "space" (unstated) between the columns.... about three quarters of an inch wide...and then..... reoriented it to landscape and not portrait...

Now, I was able to print the two columns on the few sheets that I had.

I then cut out those pages in a kind of roundy/randomy margin so the pages looked kinda "folksy" and pasted them on other, differently colored, sheets so that I then had a book that had an outside cover of the scrapbook page, and inside liner and then differently colored pages with the story cutouts glued on them.

I needed a picture so I scanned a picture that a student had made for one of my books, it was appropriate, using GIMP and put it into another KWord document and put some textm "Merry Christmas" in green fancy text below it. I then glued that onto the last page.

Then I got one of my grandmother's sewing needles and some green thread and sewed the pages together, just a few stitches nothing fancy.

So, I used KWord and GIMP to make a very nice Christmas card/book that was all by me.

Now, I'm not bragging here, I'm just saying that we sometimes take for granted the tools that we have right in front of us.

So..............maybe you could do something similar, or DIFFERENT !!! for someone and make a Christmas thing that they might like for a long time.

woodsmoke

[Ole Juul]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

@woodsmoke:

That's just great! Love to see it.

I've done a lot of publishing using a simple printer or the drug store photocopier. A little imagination goes a long way with graphic arts. Yes, I think that many people don't know the power they have in owning a computer and a printer. I have made several nice issues of a local paper using a wide carriage colour printer and OOo. I have also made very nice little books on dot matrix printers - just to show that it can be done. Come to think of it, I have some wide carriage dot matrix printers that I'm in love with, I could probably put out a nice paper on one of those. I'd be in the lunie bin before the first 100 copies though - that dot matrix sound - Aaaaaagggghhhh!

[woodsmoke]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

Now THAT is a good newspaper, a newspaper of "record" that is a nice read, well laid out...you got all the good fixin's there!

As to dot matrix. the very first book I published was done on a C-64 and a dot matrix, it was a family history, the printer went bonkers when he measured my "gutters" ...lol But the buyer bought 600 copies!

One of the later ones was done on a C-64 from a file that I mailed to Chicago and contracted with a service to print it on an apple laserwriter from my GEOS file! The buyer was blown away by the quality of the mockup so he printed 20,000 copies! lol

About the tenth book was from a laser print I made on the superintendant's laserwriter that the GEOS had a driver for...what thing in those days...

Ahhhh those were the days....

But you really do a great job, that is just nice.

One thing I love to do when we're travelling is to pick up local newspapers and read them....people at the New York Times should maybe do that and see what the backbone of U.S. papers is all about!

It is...umm bookmarked!!

lol

woodsmoke

[Ole Juul]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

Now THAT is a good newspaper, a newspaper of "record" that is a nice read

Thanks! (blush) There are only about 80 full time residents here. It has often been classified as a ghost town in fact. Although I am not always very active with the New Coalmont Courier, I consider it important to keep a "record" as you say. If I don't do it, nobody will. BTW, I also have a Coalmont Community static site and you can see my house on the picture. It's the original general store from 1911. There's a couple more picture here. Yep, as I'm writing this I'm sitting right behind the wall where the green car is parked.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

Hi Ole Jule, that is way cool. And I like the little guy with the rifle in the second story window! lol

As to ghost towns... one withing maybe 30 miles of here has, as of last count, 5 people in it.

Another has fifty odd and had....it's own phone......yes....it's own, single, telephone, which was free to use, on the towns's main street.

The phone doesn't work now because of cell phones but when the phone company came to replace it one of the locals was there with a replacement to put in it's place, so the phone guy laughed and left it, at least that is the story.

I won't name the denomination, but a few miles from where I taught my whole career is the last of a certain church in the U.S. it has, I think as of a few years ago, maybe 12 people init.

The moving hand writes and once writ....it has ink on it's fingers! lol

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

.....
Yep, as I'm writing this I'm sitting right behind the wall where the green car is parked.

The green car and the building are visible from Google's Maps Street View, web version, but not the installed package version.

BTW, which government carpet bombed the hills and valleys surrounding Coalmont? They look like the fields in VietNam after a B52 bombing run. Isn't the erosion getting severe?
That little creek that runs by the town on the South side... are there any fish in it? If so, how big?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

.....
Yep, as I'm writing this I'm sitting right behind the wall where the green car is parked.

The green car and the building are visible from Google's Maps Street View, web version, but not the installed package version.

BTW, which government carpet bombed the hills and valleys surrounding Coalmont? They look like the fields in VietNam after a B52 bombing run. Isn't the erosion getting severe?
That little creek that runs by the town on the South side... are there any fish in it? If so, how big?

Google's Maps is lots of fun, and very useful too. Although I didn't originally find this building on "the maps", I did find it through pictures on the web. That's what prompted me to see if I could buy it. As it turns out, the owner was very willing to sell it. It's been and adventure - not the least because of moving from a very cultured neighbourhod in a reasonably sophisticated city to well, how do I phrase this, umm, ... hillbillyland. I love people. I love my neighbours, but ... the net is my saviour. Still, I got an interesting house and I have room for my stuff now. Anybody want to rummage through a box of full length 8 bit monochrome cards?

As to the hills. This whole province has been pretty much logged. There are very few real forests any more. It's an ecological disaster. It isn't obvious from a distance, but they do replant. Unfortunately a row of 10 year old saplings along the sides of the highway do not a forest make, but it is still not quite as bad as it looks from space. Still, it is difficult to judge erosion. Coalmont was flooded in 1995, before I got here. It's a floodplain. I note that it didn't get all the way over to my house, but the variation is only a matter of a meter (at most two) in the whole town site. This makes me wonder if we are not liable to a flash flood coming down the valley. With the climate changes and unseasonable thaws etc, I'd actually bet on it.

The creek is the Tulameen river. It gets pretty high at times, but in recent years the low point is dangerously low in the dry season. Times have changed. Water is the new gold. I have a well, but it's still a concern when it gets low. There are whitefish which are not good to eat, but mostly it's rainbow trout. I did get a fishing license since I just need to go down the road to find a good spot. The thing about fishing though, is that you need to be on it. Only some times are good so you have to go often. I have friends who bring me fresh fish fish in the summer though. All the creeks and rivers are full of rainbow, so come on up and visit! It's an excellent hunting area too. The real draw for some people is still the gold. This is probably one of the best places to pan, and you get lots of platinum too, which is very rare for placer. The earliest miners used to throw it out - until they found out what it was! It's a real nuisance in the pan because it is difficult to separate, but a magnet works. I've got friends who do real hand mining so I see the stuff, it's real, but you have to work very hard for it. BTW, GG, you'll be interested in this if you don't already know; platinum is not ferromagnetic and cannot be magnetised, but it will still be attracted to a magnet. Apparently there are thee kinds of magnetic behaviour. I didn't believe it myself until I saw it and did a bit of reading on magnetic materials.

How's that for OT?

[GreyGeek]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

Platinum is actually paramagnetic. It can become slightly magnetized when close to a magnet but the magnetization disappears when the magnet is removed. IF it is strongly attracted to or sticks to the magnet then it is not pure Platinum, but has Iron, Nickle, Cobalt or sum such metal alloyed with it.

Platinum is being used in super magnets and special alloy magnets.

When I was in graduate school a fellow doing research on Oxides of Platinum was killed while trying to weigh what amounted to about 100mg of compound of Xenon & Platinum in a Mettler Balance. I don't remember the exact formula for the substance. The blast broke the glass door and sent a shard into his neck, cutting his carotid. He bled to death before they could get him to the hospital. (Try putting pressure on a cut carotid to stem the bleeding ... you're cutting off Oxygen to half the brain).

[woodsmoke]

word count wordcount in koffice

After years of using various companies iterations of "wordprocessors" I really do think that it is a situation of "we don't/CAN'T (because they will sue us) do "thus and so" ...the way "they" do...

Wordcount is found in File/Statistics.

which, is, really, kind of logical.

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

....
but ... the net is my saviour.
....

Noticing your local, what is your Internet connection and what speed does it give you?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

Noticing your local, what is your Internet connection and what speed does it give you?

They call it "High Speed Wireless". Just after I moved here, we were lucky that a larger community 8 miles up the road was slated for a wireless installation. I had offered the company to put a repeater on my roof in return for a free drop. They liked the idea, but it turns out that we got excellent coverage from the same tower, which is on a mountain separating the two communities, so it was not needed. Shucks.

We are offered what they call 1.5 Mbps. I just noticed on their website that they've changed it to "up to". Internet speed tests show pretty close to that and the uplink is even a bit higher on occasion. A little telnet exploration will show that it is mostly (all?) MikroTik based equipment. I think that is the most used wireless technology for rural installations. It seems fine but there are problems.

First of all we live in NAT land. There are at least 3 routers between me and my public IP. Of course that adds a level of security, but I have a feeling that it is also the source of our troubles. The jitter is huge here. There are really annoying lags all the time, especially certain busy times of day. It's interesting that I almost always get over 1Mbps http speeds but a sustained FTP is generally between 70 and 120 Kbps. I have no idea why that is. Is it the FTP servers (Debian Ubuntu etc) or is it filtering?

Despite the name, "broadband" it isn't.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

.....
They call it "High Speed Wireless". Just after I moved here, we were lucky that a larger community 8 miles up the road was slated for a wireless installation. I had offered the company to put a repeater on my roof in return for a free drop. They liked the idea, but it turns out that we got excellent coverage from the same tower, which is on a mountain separating the two communities, so it was not needed. Shucks.
.....

I'm pretty sure that the wireless chip in your laptop can't receive a signal, or send one, from FOUR miles away.

How is your signal getting from that "mid-way" tower to your PC?

[Ole Juul]

Re: Using Kubuntu because of Koffice.

I'm pretty sure that the wireless chip in your laptop can't receive a signal, or send one, from FOUR miles away.

How is your signal getting from that "mid-way" tower to your PC?

Yep, wireless to my router is just local. The WAN connection happens through a radio on the outside of my house. I paid about $250 for mine 4 years ago but I see they've come down in price. I couldn't find my model on the net right away, but here is a similar one. Here is more.

This is the setup used in most rural areas like ours. The phone lines are too long to sustain DSL and it is not worth it for the Telco to install it at the local level. Of course there will be some people who don't have phone line access who will benefit from this. The usual setup is 2.4GHz, but if there are a few tree branches in the way, then sometimes 900MHz is better. They are talking about 5.3 and 5.8, but I think the reality is that they are not that keen on people using more bandwith anyway. We should have had fiber wired in with the phone service, but in Canada we have laws that don't allow competition so the Telcos will, of course, put the breaks on the internet as much as they can get away with. Hopefuly one day we will go to a competitive model similar to Europe so we can get our outdated network up to the 21st century.

[woodsmoke]

Koffice and a play rewrite and a new skit.

Just finished a complete rewrite of a play that was in production many years ago and that I am going to republish and a new one act "skit". Both comedies.

Koffice just keeps on producing and producing....

I'm thinking that the Koffice people need a new mascot!!!

A BLUE....Koffice BUNNY with one flop ear and instead of a battery maybe a bit "K" in one foot .....

and BANGING the LINUX DRUM!!!!!

wood BANGING THE DRUM RAPIDLY... smoke