Today’s edition of geeky accessories comes from the Paddington markets in Sydney, thanks to a work trip this last week. Plastic tangram camels:
They are by Antlitz Design, and he has several different tangram designs made of similar material – the classic square, and one that might be a swan. Antlitz don’t seem to have their own online store but you can see some of them for sale at Modamuse.
These plastic tangram earrings are not really the direction they are heading in design, though, according to the stall holder I spoke to. Their new stuff doesn’t strike me as being so mathematically inspired, so if you like the tangrams, you should probably try and snap some up soon.
There are lots of nice vaguely geeky accessories to be found at markets on a weekend. I think Scrabble letter cufflinks are awesome, and I saw some nice domino-based necklaces, but this guy’s earrings and necklaces were the best for me. Mainly because he is embracing geekiness all the way through. Not only is his website a TiddlyWiki, but he uses 3d printing to create his items.
His string of ‘pearls’ was also quite tempting. There was another necklace that looks like a bike chain but is apparently better known as a hex stud chain.
Pretty neat. The pieces are slightly powdery, but I’m sure that brushes off soon enough. His store is called Flow Design and you can buy stuff online, or go to the Rose St market in Fitzroy, Melbourne, and you can probably find him there, as I did. Not only will you look stylish, but you will have a good geek story to report as well. :)
Some Wikimedia-related news of note in my own life that are unrelated to each other:
Firstly, a few weeks ago I gave a talk at the National Library of Australia’s Innovative Ideas Forum, called Is Wikipedia a one-off? Is mass collaboration all it’s cracked up to be? You can read my talk here, or listen to the audio here. It was a pretty kick-arse event. The other speakers were all great, so you should definitely listen to all their talks too.
Secondly, last week I resigned from the Wikimedia Australia committee. So if you have a mental tag for me like “the Wikipedia chick”, you will now need to refresh it.
So I have a new computer. I have some new pictures I want to upload, so I cracked open Digikam for the first time. It was a pleasure to use on Xubuntu 8.04, so of course it would only be better than ever on Ubuntu 9.10. Right? Not quite.
On trying to import some new photos, you get to be acquainted with Bug 210462, “digikam crash select new download”. (KDE Bugs seems to use the title as a tag field rather than a terse English description…) Yeah, that bug already has some 150 duplicates. And the bug I filed? Well, it’s marked as a duplicate of one of the duplicates.
And that’s just all the people who bothered to install the debug packages, and actually follow reporting the bug all the way through. Sheesh. I wonder how many people in total have reported variants of this bug.
The Digikam Download page helpfully says,
Warning Ubuntu Karmic contains Digikam 1.0.0beta 5 which crashes while importing pictures.
You can install a more recent version (1.0.0) from backports.
Aha, I thought. Time to break out the ol’ add-apt-repository on their PPA.
That was hurdle #2. Although add-apt-repository worked fine, the apt-get update complained:
W: Failed to fetch http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-backporters/ppa/ubuntu/dists/karmic/main/binary-i386/Packages.gz 404 Not Found
OK fine. Then I’ll just download the backporters .deb for Digikam, per instructions. dpkg claims to be upset, but it can be placated:
sudo dpkg -i /home/brianna/Desktop/digikam_1.0.0-1ubuntu1~karmic1_i386.deb
sudo apt-get install liblqr-1-0
sudo apt-get -f install
Finally I have Digikam 1.0.0 (no beta). And it all works seamlessly as I recall. But what an unpleasant jolt back into reality.
Oh, and in the time it took me to write this up, my precious bug report has already been marked as DUPLICATE. They must be well practised now.
What do you do when something goes wrong in the world? Like, say, a volcano goes off and shuts down most air travel in Europe? Well, you file a bug, obvs. :)
