December 13, 2010 at 1:38 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: lst, narrative, theology, X Factor
It seems like everyone in the world is talking about the X Factor results show (at least on my Facebook feed!) BBC News are talking about the millions that Simon Cowell is earning from being paid to make a show that gains him revenue from advertisers so desperate to attach their brands to the new act that he’s going to launch, selling millions of CDs and downloads. You literally couldn’t pay enough money to a TV station to get them to promote a debut single to the extent that Cowell and co have every year – and he gets paid for the pleasure of it! “Mat Osman of Britpop band Suede: ‘It just seems to be the greatest con of all time.’”
The article goes on to say that the X Factor is not as varied as the old Top of the Pops shows of ancient history (although better than American Idol, for example). The difference in my mind is down to the story of X Factor. It’s all about overcoming adversity and harsh criticism; emerging from humble roots, a complete nobody achieving their wildest dream; comebacks, comedy and celebrity. In fact, it’s like Simon Cowell has re-created Christmas in his own, ultra-commercialised image!
Even those of us who don’t buy into the year’s biggest karaoke competition are helping buoy the story – whether it’s Biffy, Rage or Cage, it’s all about who can win the epic struggle for the Christmas number one. Even though most of us over the age if 14 don’t care who’s number one for 51 weeks of the year, suddenly we’ll sign up to Facebook campaigns and even buy four-and-a-half minutes of silence just to prove that our story is superior to Cowell’s.
What does the X Factor prove? That people really do love live music on TV? That the British television-watching public are so gullible that they won’t notice a three-month advert for SyCo’s next single interspersed with even more adverts? That you can make (a lot of) money out of people’s choices if you let them choose things they don’t need but care about, while selling them things they don’t realise they need and probably can’t afford? That we’re so desperate for a story to believe in that we’ll sit down and faithfully listen every Sunday evening (oh, not just that, Saturday too!) to the message?
December 1, 2010 at 9:40 pm · Filed under Uncategorized · Tags: computers, how-to, Linux, OpenOffice, tip, Ubuntu
The Elementary theme I have on Ubuntu is beautiful. I now have the right scrollbars on Chromium and I wondered when I’d get OpenOffice fixed. A little google-fu and the inbuilt translator of Chromium dug up a post on Argentinan site Soft-Libre.
The solution is really simple, but messes up the theme. DanRabbit is correct in saying that the problem is with OpenOffice, not with his theme, but by tweaking the theme it’s easy to fix. In keeping with the minimalist design ethic, DanRabbit has removed the buttons on the scroll bar. That’s what breaks OpenOffice – it just doesn’t know how to draw the scroll bars without the “steppers”.
To edit the theme you need to open the gtkrc file. If you have installed from a repository, press alt-F and paste in the command
gksudo gedit /usr/share/themes/elementary/gtk-2.0/gtkrc
If you installed it by hand, find the right file – it’s likely to be in a folder something like
~/.themes/elementary/gtk-2.0/
Open the file in gedit (or your preferred text editor!)
You’re looking for two lines that say
GtkScrollbar ::has-backward-stepper = 0
GtkScrollbar ::has-forward-stepper = 0
Change the 0′s to 1′s, save and close gedit.
Either log out and back in again, reboot or re-apply the theme – I did it by opening the Appearance dialogue, choosing a different theme, then setting it back to Elementary.
From now on, all of your applications will have the little buttons on the scrollbars, but it will work properly in OpenOffice – hoorah! An easy fix – the only question is why DanRabbit regards the purity of his design over the functionality of having such a key application as OpenOffice work properly.
Update
Earlycj5 pinged this post to show how you can keep the stock elementary look on most programs but still have OpenOffice work almost properly (apparently this should also work with Symphony and LibreOffice, but I’ve not tried it).
After changing the values following the instructions above, go up about half a dozen lines and add
GtkRange ::stepper-size = 0
Re-apply your theme as I said above and things should be almost normal. However, the scroll bar now overlaps the steppers (arrow icons at the top and bottom of the scroll bar) which means in OpenOffice you get this funny look – as you can see nautilus underneath looks fine. Unfortunately I don’t know the answer to Earlycj5′s question of how to make the arrows white so they don’t show up in OpenOffice – a little google-ing makes me think this is another limitation of the Murrine theme engine.
