Reviews – Page 69

Minty Fresh

photo credit: Aaron Bassett. Not MY desktop.
I hate Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, so much so that I’m putting up with Vista. Recently, I got my hands on the 8.04.1 maintenance release ISO via the PC Quest subscription I won at Dynamix last year. Apparently, it’s supposed to have fixed a lot of bugs. I installed it, saw that none of the things I was pissed about were fixed, and promptly uninstalled it. Then, I got my hands on Linux Mint release 5 (codenamed ‘Elyssa’; it’s based on Hardy Heron, BTW) ISO through a friend of mine who subscribes to PC World – and installed that. I’ve installed Mint on school computers earlier too, and I liked its overall feel and openSuse GNOME menu rip-off. Agreed, it didn’t solve the accessibility features problem, but it’s more stable than Hardy – which is all I wanted. Plus it comes with much better artwork than Ubuntu’s various-shades-of-shit-colour wallpapers (I really wonder if people who call that shade of brown have gone bonkers). Elegance truly came from Freedom.

More Smashing Stuff

I thought Smash Lab had reached a high point when they brought along a jet plane to create a hurricane. I was wrong. In Wednesday’s episode, the challenge they took up was to bomb-proof an aeroplane. So what did they decide to do to test / implement it? Well, first, they blew up an unpressurized Boeing 747 rigged with C4 ‘just to see what an explosion is like’. Then, they got hold of some super-duper ultra-absorbent bubble wrap. Then they pressurized two DC-9’s to a pressure equivalent to that at 16000 feet altitude, rigged it with C4 again – and coated one plane with bubble wrap, and the other left as-it-is to ‘see the difference caused’. Then they blew it up. The bubble wrap failed, but they did prove that Discovery Channel has a LOT more money to blow up – literally – than wimps like National Geographic. Oh, and since they had to make a 1-hour long episode, they also gleefully blew up a few aluminium trashcans and smashed a few airplane glass panes using explosives (as a consquence of which they also smashed glass panes of cars in a nearby parking lot).

PS – It also helps that Deanne Bell is pretty hot.