So, anyone using Flickr? Post me a link to your photostream if so.

What happens when a company of earnest natural medicine greenies get featured on The Guardian's "You ask, they answer" column?

Hilarity, that's what.

My favorite question:

Good

• True Blood and Being Human, in spite of having vampires in them
• The new Star Trek film
• Underworld, live at The Oblivion Ball
• Violater, by Depeche Mode
• Dig! Lasarus, Dig! by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• Race For The Galaxy
• Ginger Tom and dirty vodka martinis (surprisingly)
• Twitter

Mediocre

• The latest Depeche Mode album, baring a couple of pretty good tracks
• Dollhouse

Sucks

• Cylon origins and the finale of BSG season four
• Wolverine: Origins, unless, like me you lower your expectations to "big, dumb action film". Worked for Blade, and it worked for me, here, as well. Splosions!
• The Big Bang Theory
• Ordering things from the US. Damn, their banks suck.

Jury is still out

• Los Campesinos!
• The new Franz Ferdinand album
• Running

Still Good

• Firefly
• GTA: San Andreas
• Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain

I wanted faster photo editing tools, so I decided to upgrade from hardy to intrepid, on the grounds that if intrepid proved too brain damaged (it's the Windows ME of Ubuntu releases, thanks to the shite state of both KDE4 and Gnome) I could always upgrade again to Jaunty. So when my bluetooth keyboard failed to work, I did.

The Average: most things are the same. Firefox 3.5 is still months away, shells are shells, emacs is emacs. Kmail now running the KDE4 version, and has a few more nice search and organisation features, but is basically the same (so IMAP isn't faster, but that's because IMAP is shit).

The Good: sudo cmd | less asks for your password properly, rather than being stomped by less and requiring stty sane to be run to fix the console. Nice.

Bluetooth is much improved for pairing keyboards and mice. My keyboard problem was solved by deleting the old pairing from the GUI and re-pairing, which, while still being a little timing sensitive, for the most part Just Worked. A massive improvement over the old system of groveling over conf files and command line tools.

The mysterious USB 2.0/bluetooth lock up I used to get seems to have gone. Haven't actually tested a USB2 speed device, yet, but I haven't had to yank the ehci_hcd module, yet, either.

The Annoying: The upgrade to KDE4 resets a lot of GUI layout stuff and changes the default theme to a new one. Fixable by installing and running systemsettings, but that's the country cousin of the more powerful kcontrol, so it's not as powerful. And kcontrol seems to be missing. Oh well, only running a couple of apps. KDE4 stuff also seems to enjoy barfing a load of I CAN HAZ MEFDID CALL noise all over .xession-errors and any console you run it from, too. Goody.

OO.org decided to forget my recent document list for giggles, too. And for some reason, the flash player that YouTube uses decided to dial it's volume down to nothing, sending me on a wild goose chase trying to disable pulseaudio. As it happens, pulseaudio has been remarkably well behaved — xbmc and audacity now work properly with it. I haven't tried Skype, yet, but by now, if Skype doesn't work it's really their fault and not the pulseaudio people.

The Bad: the 2.6.28-11 kernel stops talking to the hard drive after about an hour on my AMD 780 based motherboard. This requires dropping to the command line after a hard reboot to run a full fsck on reboot. That's a show stopper for fresh installs; I get away with a running system by booting into the kernel from intrepid.

But that kernel seems to have decided to disable my L2 cache, which renders things like desktop switching sluggish. So much for jaunty being faster :-/. In fact, it probably is, and it's making up for it.

Also, fglrx is flaky as ever. Full screen GL windows have a bad habit of not cleaning up after themselves, and X/console switching can leave X graphics corrupted. And it still doesn't do EXA, so no accelerated 2D blits. Judging by the work still to be done on the intel driver it looks like this stuff will suck for the next year or so in the ATI camp.

I'd advise folks to wait a few weeks before upgrading.

Joel Spolsky mentioned the existence of hard drive docks in a post about solid state drives, recently, so I went looking on Ascent and discovered both Vantec and Welland make them as well. Works with 2.5" and 3.5" SATA drives and plugs into USB and eSATA, so it looks good for drive backups if I can find a solid case for transporting the drives.

Keith Ng has an interesting polemic against Earth Hour over at Public Address. Some of his numbers are a bit off: the nine year life span blubs cost $15 8 years ago when I bought them; the ones you get today cost $4 each and seem to have a mean time to failure in the order of about 18 months. But basically he's right. You'd make more of a difference replacing an incandescent blub with a CFB, fixing the seals on an old refrigerator, taking shorter showers, or not boiling the kettle and walking away five times before making a cup of tea (um... yeah).

Still, I can't help thinking that harshing on Earth Hour as being an empty gesture for the smug and sanctimonious is basically the same rhetoric used by people against the S92a black out protest, which turned out to be a constructive component of a larger protest movement that was ultimately successful. (Besides, I've been using CFBs for a decade and cycle everywhere, making me smug and sanctimonious 24x7x365, so I can hardly begrudge anyone else an hour's worth once a year.)

However, I was disappointed in the defense of Labour's ban on incandescent blubs, simply because it's such a ham fisted approach. We should always be concerned when politicians talk about banning things because an embargo is a big hammer, and it sounds suspiciously like they're treating all problems to be nails. The fact is, if your problem is that incandescent blubs are cheaper individually than CFB's, but the price signals that indicate that CFB's are a better long term deal are opaque, then you could accomplish much the same results by placing a fixed tax on incandescents that raise their price to parity with CFB's, funnel the tax revenue into widening the Electricity Commission's subsidisation program, then folks with niche lighting requirements could still buy their security lights, heat lamps, Christmas tree lights and so on, and less people would feel like they're being pushed around by the Nanny State.

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You know, once you've actually friended everyone you know on Facebook, there's not much left to actually do.

Events are useful, I'll grant you, but the spam prevention method of only allowing you to send invites to 100 friends at a time kind of cripples it. In principle, you, or someone else you have invited to send their own invitations, can add more people, but the gui for doing that doesn't just present you with a list of people you haven't already invited, so you have to figure that out yourself from four different lists of people who have been. Hopeless. A classic case of a feature that was hacked on for a while, declare finished at some arbitrary stage and has be subsequently ignored.

Photos are ok, but they're not exactly Flickr. Status is ok, but it's not as good as Twitter. Links are almost completely useless compared to delicious, as are notes next to blogs. And the only useful application I found was the twitter->status gateway. The rest ranged from mildly annoying to tools for spammers. I suspect FB must be deriving some kind of income stream from the things, as I can't see any other reason they'd stop you from filtering them out of your news feed when so many of their users find them to be such a nuisance.

So I switched email notification back on for a couple of things and closed the tab.