Welcome From The Chief Editor

As I mentioned last month, I have been spending virtually every free moment I can trying to complete my remodeling project. When I go to sleep at night, my head is filled with measurements. NOTHING is square, straight or true in this older house I make my home. Every single piece has to be custom cut and fit. There are funky angles at every turn. As a result, putting up the walls is taking at least three times as long to do than it should.

No matter how many times I measure, nothing comes out fitting as closely as I would like. All I can say is that I'm thankful for trim to cover up the gaps between the ceiling and walls. Aside from the prohibitively time consuming and arduous task of making a paper template for each and every piece, there is no easy or practical way to account for the small variances that make precise cuts virtually impossible.

To complicate matters and slow things down even more, my son is terrified of any power saws. So, dad has taken to making as many cuts as possible using hand saws. It slows things down a bit, but it's better than him standing there bawling, scared to death from the power saws. I can't say I blame him, either. The power saws are loud, and it isn't a very pleasant sound. But he absolutely LOVES being upstairs, helping … well, helping as much as a two year old can help.

A little closer to PCLinuxOS, forum user The Chief inquired about a utility to automatically switch between the touchpad and mouse, depending on whether a mouse was plugged in or not. He had settled on Touchpad Toggle, a program I had written a few years back and that is in the PCLinuxOS repository. Although it didn't do what he wanted the way he wanted, he settled on it anyways. So, I revisited the Touchpad Toggle program to see if I could modify it to automatically switch between the touchpad and mouse. Working on it late at night after completing my work on the upstairs, I did manage to rewrite it so that it does exactly what The Chief wanted. You can see the resulting new script here and here. I've named it Touchpad Toggle Auto. I've since further modified it (second link) so that a desktop notification appears whenever the switch between the mouse and touchpad is made, depending on whether or not a mouse is plugged in. When a mouse is plugged in, the touchpad is disabled. If no mouse is plugged in, the touchpad is enabled.

In other business, Texstar is hard at work on KDE 5, which will eventually replace the popular KDE 4. It will join the other releases of Mate, Xfce, LXDE, and e17/18/19/20 (the latter is so confusing).

With the "retiring" of the 32 bit version of PCLinuxOS, I (and other users) need to get busy and replace the 32 bit installations (which is all of them here) with the 64 bit version of PCLinuxOS. I'm definitely going to be saddened to have to retire perfectly good, working computers when I am finally forced to make the switch. PCLinuxOS is the only Linux and the only OS in use in this house, save a few VirtualBox installations here and there (WinXP, Win2K, and an old version of Linux Mint).

Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, serenity and prosperity.