Ok, I’ve been playing with and cleaning up my widgets and plugins after I upgraded this WordPress install to 2.6. And without realizing it at first, I broke one of my pages when I removed the SimpleTag plugin. I figured, 2.6 has great tagging now, what do I need it for?

Well, my Tag Cloud page was using a call to that plugin to generate a list of all the tags I have used…  469 to date.

So rather than reinstall the plugin just to have that cloud, I did some playing around and here’s what I came up with.

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Easter is just a couple days from now, so you may not get these done in time for Sunday, but with the way these can turn out you may want to keep them around all year long.

With a normal egg, a hot-glue gun, and some various paints, you can have your own ‘Dragon Egg’. DadCanDo.com has a PDF instruction file you can download, but the process is pretty basic. Put holes in the ends of the egg and blow out the insides… clean an dry. But before painting, “draw” on the veining using hot glue.

The site also has a page on how to make the stands as well as some other slick looking projects that I am only starting to dive in to.

Dragon’s Egg [dadcando.com]

I hope everything is working fine, so that when you enter localhost in the address bar of your browser you are taken to the splash screen, from there you click on your language option and go to the XAMPP for Linux control panel. If you click on the Security option on the menu you will see a bunch of stuff with red UNSECURE tags on the end of them.
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The Ubuntu forums has a great thread for setting up your XAMPP environment in Ubuntu, but it can be a hassle to read through the entire thread at to get to what you need to get up and running.

This is going to be Part 1, Getting XAMPP installed and running. In the next part or two, I’ll touch on tweeking some things to make it easier to work with.

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Ok, I’ve slowly been working on getting more stuff working with Ubuntu on my main system. Tonight, it’s the LG lightscribe DVD burner.

Just before dumping WinXP, I found the LightScribe official site, and had noticed they had Linux versions of a few things. So tonight I got back and end up on the Linux download page and find they have a Debian version of the system software package. I click to download… open it… and the package just kicks in.

When it’s done, I go back and grab the Simple Labeler, The -deb file again. I used the template labeler on WinXP, so we’ll see how different this is. Nothing was installed to my Applications menu. I browse to the opt folder, there’s a new lightscribeApplications folder, and in there SimpleLabeler. Start it up, and grab a CD to test it out with.

Simple Labeler does.. simple labels. A graphical ring around the hub area with a top and/or bottom area of text. After typing some jibberish in, selecting the paw prints graphic, it does a preview and I click the print button. Then after a couple minutes of media detecting… the tray pops out and it asks me to insert a compatible disk, label side down. Hmmm? ok. I pull the disk out, put it back in, close the tray and click OK. It starts chugging along… two minutes later it pops it out again… and whoa, it worked!

Next step, a quick Google search finds this page on the Ubuntu Forums - it explains a lot of what I just did, but has the added bonus of a link to a program called LaCiE LightScribe Labeler for Linux, or 4L - someone made a Deb package you can grab. It installed to my /usr folder. I haven’t tested it yet, but the look is very similar to the Template Labeler off the LightScribe site… except after looking at it for a few minutes, you can not add text to the label.

Basically, 4L seems to take an image and print that image only, as either a title band (narrow, a bit inside from the center hub), a content band (from hub out to the same layer as the title band), or full disk. If you want text, you have to put it in your image first. So… the search for something else will continue, but this will do for now.

Actually, the LightScribe site has some great graphics you can download (here and here), and I had already figured I could use them as templates for my own images if needed. So maybe for what little work I actually do with the labeling, this could work for now.