last weekend zombiequeen and i decided to go to the aist to make a photo-safari. it was a very sunny, warm day, and there were loads of people there. they occupied all the big stones in the middle of the brook. at first i thought this is not good, there will be people on each picture we take, but fortunately we found some places without any people. and there we took our photos. get the visual impressions of this day here.

so another tech-blog-entry, sorry for the ones not interested in those postings, but i'm having great fun right now with "zak2" running in wine on my linux laptop. downloading the files, unzipping and extracting the compressed tar-archive to disk, resulting in using two gigabyte on the hard disk. next running wine and launching the "setup.exe", installing, done. launching "zak2.exe" and having fun. i still remember playing zak mc cracken part one back in the eighties, and i still remember that i had a broken... aeh... copy of the game. somehow the diskettes were corrupt and at a specific point i could not get on. so i tried to get information about the end at any price. keep in mind that this was the pre-www aeon, so no wikipedia, no google. but several magazines wrote about it. later, in the nineties i installed the scummvm, a scumm interpreter available on linux and played zak mc cracken - finally i got it all through. aaaand now, ten years later i will play the second (unofficial) part. i hope it will be as much fun as the first part. still i have to get used to the modern look of zak2 (old pixilated commodore C=64 sprite graphics vs. modern and shaded directX graphics), but i hope the programmers managed to get the same flair as the original version.

i discovered xubuntu to be a pretty nice distribution. i started to use it on a 4GB USB-flash drive and, since xubuntu uses several hundred MB less diskspace than ubuntu (don't even want to mention the imho slightly bloated kubuntu here) it was my preferred choice for the pen drive linux. additionally i set up my new laptop with xubuntu, doing a switch from debian to ubuntu (after using debian for over ten years). still i prefer my highly customized and pimped fluxbox window-manager on my laptop. at the same time i miss the menus from xfce4. so i wrote a little perl script, to make xfce4 menu entries appear in the fluxbox menu. it adds an extra sub menu to the fluxbox menu and even adds the icons from the xfce4 menu entries (if available). here's what the fluxbox menu looks like after including the system wide xfce4 menu: for further infos on how to use the script, go to this site.