26 October 2015

The Truth About Family

There’s two kinds of family. There’s the kind that you’re forced into at birth, and there’s the kind that forms out of close relationships.

Some people think that “real family” somehow are more important than anyone else. They believe that the family you’re bonded to through DNA–your blood relatives–should be held in the highest regard, forsaking everyone for them.

Sometimes blood relatives have a strange sense of entitlement.  They think that because DNA connects you, that somehow they’re automatically more privileged.  They deserve more from you, and should be given more slack.  That they automatically have a place in your inner circle.

But here’s the truth, at least the way I see it.

The family that has formed around you are sometimes more important.  They don’t have the same sense of entitlement: in order to get into your inner circle, they had to prove themselves.  They fought for you.  Bled for you.

So who is more important?  Hmm.

Category: Rant | Comments Off on The Truth About Family
5 October 2015

Fixing Pidgin’s Missing System Tray in Linux+Cinnamon

I love using Pidgin for… well, pretty much all my IM’ing needs.  And I’ve come to depend on the little icon in the system tray to show me what’s going on.

For a long time, though, the icon has only sporadically worked.  To “fix” it, I killed & restarted it a bunch of times until the icon finally showed (or until I finally gave up).

Well, here’s the real fix, from an old post I found:

As root (or via sudo):

root@laptop:~$ cd /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor/
root@laptop:/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor$ mv 16x16/ _OLD_16x16
root@laptop:/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor$ ln -s 22x22 16x16
root@laptop:/usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/tray/hicolor$

Boom.

UPDATE [October 6th, 2015]: Halt the presses.  This doesn’t seem to work all the time, at least not on an alternative machine… I should have known not to publish based on a single success.

Category: Living With Linux | Comments Off on Fixing Pidgin’s Missing System Tray in Linux+Cinnamon