Our laser printer is ten years old, and though it usually does a very adequate job there are some things it has difficulty with. Printing more than one copy of something from OpenOffice, for one.

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Case: I have some files from folder A open in application X. I create a new file and want to save it. Where does the application suggest I save it? And if I want to open another file, what folder should the application give me to open from?

A well-behaved application should offer folder A in both cases, because that’s where all the rest of my work apparently is. It’s a sensible default— opening in A and saving to B does occur, but not as often as opening in A and saving to A. Kate does this, and goes even further in predicting correctly which folder I want; just now I opened a file and closed it in the folder where I want to save what I’m currently typing, and it got it right. Also, if I have a file from A open in one tab and a file from B in another, it gives me A when I hit ^o (for Open) in the A-file and B when I hit ^o in the B-file.

Not so OpenOffice. It stubbornly offers the last folder used, even if I already have a file from another folder open. But then it seems to open every file in its own instance, so that makes a weird kind of sense. Its options are hard to find —they reside in at least two different places in the menus— and harder to understand, so if it can be changed I haven’t found how.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t working on several different projects at the moment that all involve more layout than I can manage with just a text editor, and I don’t trust KOffice yet for critical business stuff.

I think I’ve got the hang of desktop activities now. For a while I liked the idea in theory, and even had a couple, but never really used them because I didn’t use a lot of widgets— I’m of the empty-screen school. But I do a lot of things that do require stuff on the screen, and that’s what I’ve discovered activities are in fact for.

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I typed ‘blog’ instead of ‘kate’ by mistake and krunner opened the Kate session called ‘blog’.

I didn’t know it could do that!

Also, I’m getting used to it rolling out an extensive menu of educated guesses, and even choose from that occasionally— like the Kate session called ‘blog’, until now.

Yesterday I installed OpenSuse 11.1. Not without glitches: the installer failed in two different places, presumably because of a scratch on the DVD, and when we’d burned a new DVD I had the same problem Boudewijn had with grub. Fortunately he knew from his own experience how to solve it, so now I have a pretty penguin-themed startup menu that I never actually use because I only ever want OpenSuSE, not Kubuntu 8 (or 7 for that matter) or <spit!> Vista (haven’t even tried if that works yet. When the installation failed, all the computer wanted to start was Vista, but I discouraged that as soon as I could and wouldn’t mind if it didn’t work, because the one Windows program I need runs perfectly under Wine, woohoo).

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More .msv files, a pair this time, so I grumblingly started Vista and set out to convert them. Failure! The free version of Switch works for only X days, for a smallish value of X. They didn’t tell me that, only that it wasn’t full-featured (and it did have the one feature I wanted). Fortunately, my other half was at home and found Digital Voice Editor for me, which converts .msv to .mp3 under Wine though it complains volubly about not being able to play sound and having trouble with my operating system. Twenty times as fast —literally! less than a minute— as Switch too. Fortunately, Express Scribe under Wine doesn’t seem to to have expired. Otherwise I’d have to do it with Amarok which can’t slow fast-talking Malaysians down.

In other news, it turns out that for working freelance in the Netherlands one needs to be registered, and for registering as a freelancer one has to be a firm; so next Wednesday I’ll go to Apeldoorn and incorporate myself. I spent three hours this morning figuring out how to go about it, struggling through kilometers of red tape, and finally registering with the tax office. How the bleep do I know how many clients I’m going to have, when I’m just starting out? Do they really require me to have three or more clients in 2008 when I started in November and didn’t even know there was work waiting for me before October? How do I estimate what I’ll earn and which is worse, overestimating or underestimating?

At least, when I’m a firm, I’ll be able to buy tax-deductible headphones and a corporate bicycle.

Someone sent me a .msv file to transcribe and edit. To start with, it wasn’t easy for them to send it— it took me hours of troubleshooting my KMail installation, and the mail server, and the spam handler, until I finally gave up and told them to send it to my gmail address. Only to find that in all probability they’d misunderstood Secunda on the phone and tried, three times, to send the file to my address with a letter missing. (The gmail message had the old message headers embedded in tiny letters, or I’d never have known.)

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At last! It’s 4.1.2. And I like it a lot, in spite of all the grumbling after the cut; but the grumbling is mostly because I like it. If I hated it, I wouldn’t grumble, but stop trying to get used to it and go back to 3.5 instanter. And if I was indifferent, the little irritations wouldn’t irritate so much.

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It’s Release 3.4.0 Level “b”. And I’m not satisfied.

I keep an empty desktop: if it’s not covered by windows (as usual) the only things on it, apart from the panel, are two folders “inbox” and “objects” that contain files I’m working on. They live in the upper right corner of the desktop. At least, they’re supposed to live in the upper right corner of the desktop. My new KDE puts them in the upper left corner, along with the trash can (more about the trash can later). I put them back where I wanted them and unchecked “Automatically line up icons” in the Configure Desktop dialog, but it mysteriously checked itself again, and the folders went back to the left. Also (seems like another symptom of KDE forgetting what I want), I selected a different background for the splash screen on startup and though Control Panel duly shows it I still get the default blue-bend thing on startup, but I can live with that.

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I don’t remember what exactly caused this error message, but it’s one of the silliest I’ve ever seen:

From the tiny knife and fork icon, it’s probably from a restaurant site, and from the Dutch-language “close” button I infer it was a Dutch restaurant site because all of my KDE is in English. Probably when I was looking for the Greek restaurant in Haarlem I wrote about a while ago.