I spend all day sat in front of a Ubuntu workstation, then I come home and try and spend all night doing the same. Frankly, I find Ubuntu’s default brown and orange desktop theme a bit wearing on the eyes.

Unlike some, I shant rant about it or lobby the Ubuntu maintainers and contributors to adopt a more pleasing default theme. You see, with few downloads we can cusomtise it. Who’d have though it, ain’t technology great?
I have pinched various theme elements and mixed them together to create two blue themes for Ubuntu. I use one at work and one at home, so I know where I am.

I have descirbed the setups in the wiki page below, they are just my personal preferences, you may hate them.

• Ubuntu In Blue

I have been meaning to setup a weblog client for a while now. I have tested a couple of weblogs clients and have settled on BloGTK.

It has a simple user interface but comprehensive features, although I did need to define a few Custom Tags before the editor supported all the formatting options I wanted.

Setting up BloGTK is very simple for Ubuntu and Debain users.

aptitude install blogtk

Once installed, the following settings will connect to a Wordpress blog.e

• Server URL: http://blog.example.org/xmlrpc.php
• Account: Your Username
• Password: Your Password
• Blogging System: Moveable Type

Now I can blog directly from my desktop, I am hoping it will encourage me to post more often

When I setup the mail server at work I picked Zimbra, it’s great. Today Zimbra just got a bit better when I found Zindus.

Zindus is open-source software and runs on all Thunderbird platforms including Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Zindus can sync your contacts between Zimbra and Thunderbird. It syncs everything from Address Books to your GAL (Global Address List). It currently supports ZCS 3.x to 5.x.

Adding the Lightning and Zindus add-ons to Thunderbird create a very complete desktop client to Zimbra for any platform. Can’t wait to share to good news with my Outlook users

For the longest time I have been meaning to setup a shared calendar for my wife I and to use. You see, like most men I have no idea when and where I am supposed to be. This is because my wifes keep all this information in her filofax and that lives in her handbag, somewhere I never venture

So I have spent this evening setting up PHP iCalendar on Lighttpd, and I am very happy with the results.

I have opted to use the publish.php add-on provided with PHP iCalendar, rather than add the WebDAV module to Lighty. For our modest requirements it works very well. We now have full read/write access to our calendar by using the Lightning extension for Thunderbird and read only access via the PHP iCalendar web interface. Viewing the calendar via the web interface requires a login first and the calendar publishing is protected by Lighty authentication using htdigest.

Lastly, because our calendar is a nice open standard I have options as to how I might sync it with my mobile phone. More on that when I figure it out

I have put some rough notes on how I set up PHP iCalendar on my wiki.

• http://wiki.flexion.org/PHPiCalendar.html

My website has had a change of clothes today, ain’t it purdy? I am now using the Mandingo theme. It is available in 7 colour schemes, has a number of configurable options and is compatible with Wordpress 2.3