Stuart Jarvis

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours – well, actually, I’ll show you mine anyway

My Plasma Desktop at work

Thomas Hannigan suggested on kde-promo the rather good idea of making a flickr group to showcase some of the ways you can build your own ideal workspace using KDE’s Plasma Desktop. This can act as a store of various ways people have built working environments different to the ones you normally see (that could be handy for us in our own promotional activities) and also, being on flickr, can help expose KDE software to an audience that might not be aware of us.

So, if you’ve done something a bit different with your workspace, please upload the picture to the group. You can be super helpful by applying a Creative Commons license to it so that we can re-use it easily any time should we want to do so. CC-by-sa or something even more permissive would be ideal.

Update

I just noticed on the thread relating to this on kde-promo: there is also a screenshot thread on the KDE Forums which is a great additional (or alternative if you don’t have a flickr account) place to post your screenshot.

Tags: help needed, Plasma Desktop, promotion, screenshots

One of the things coming out of the Booth, Web and Marketing Sprint was the idea of getting our web resources in to shape and the Promo team has started doing that by collating a set of tasks that we need to get working on. This means that it has never been easier to see the kind of stuff we’re up to and work out whether you can help us. Just pick out something you think you can do, talk to us on kde-promo for advice and to let us know what you’re doing (to avoid duplication), help your favourite free software community and get a warm fuzzy feeling inside*

If you feel like a budding KDE news or features writer then you can check out our new brief guidelines on what is suitable content for the Dot and get writing. There are plenty of possibilities.

* Not guaranteed, but you will give us a warm fuzzy feeling inside by lightening our workload

Tags: help needed, promotion

It’s been lost a bit in a flurry of activity on the Dot, but our KDE Edu team has set up a short survey to gather your feedback on their applications and get a better idea of who their users are and what they want. So, if you use Marble, KStars, KHangman or any of the other great apps they produce please take five minutes to fill in the survey.

Tags: education, help needed, surveys

(Planet readers: this is completely unrelated to KDE, so you might want to skip it).

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK. There are many differing opinions over the wisdom and even legality of various military adventures by the UK and its allies over recent years, but I don’t believe that should stop us recognising the sacrifices made by military personnel at the front lines.

If you’re in the UK or are in the fortunate position of having been helped rather than hurt in the past by UK military action then please consider making a donation. Or see if there is a similar organisation in your country supporting your veterans.

Tags: Charity, help needed, offtopic

Hello PlanetKDE (and thanks to Jonathan Riddell for adding me).

Firstly, a quick about me bit. Well quickish, I do meander a bit sometimes.

I first encountered KDE in 2004. Wow, that seems a long time ago now, but I know that still makes me a relative newb compared to some of you. I didn’t know it was KDE, only that is was a world away from CDE, that I’d encountered while studying Physics at a university near Birmingham in England and that I liked it better than whatever was on Red Hat.

Places I’ve lived (from Marble). Wales was wet

For reasons that now escape me, I made like Einstein and became a patent examiner at the Patent Office*, but after three years and no inspired breakthrough in physics I left and now I’m working here in Southampton on the south coast of the UK on a project with these guys from Sweden. I spend most of my working life looking at or thinking about mud.

I finally got around to contributing something (other than a bug report) to the community I’d been freeloading off for four years at the end of 2008, making some comments on KDE-promo and writing a couple of articles for the Dot. Then it went quiet for a bit before I popped up again a few months ago and started getting a bit more active. I’m lucky enough to be going to the KDE promo sprint so I’ll actually get to meet some of the great promo peeps in person. I have high expectations since they all seem pretty awesome

* Interesting place to work while getting into free software. I did spot certain inconsistencies between what I did for a job and what I believed in and they were some of the reasons for me leaving that world. Probably I’ll come back to that in a future post.

Now, the call for help

Ok, enough about me – I’m surprised you’re still reading really, or did you just skip to the interesting bit? I’m currently researching an article on KDE on Windows and I’d like some help. I’d like to hear from anyone reading this who encountered KDE applications for the first time on Windows and is therefore here because of the KDE on Windows project. Bonus points if you got in to KDE development or any other kind of contributing as a result, but I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who simply got in to using KDE software after using an app on Windows. Just drop me a comment here and use your genuine email address when filling in the comment form and I’ll get in touch (your email isn’t published). Or you can contact me directly at stua…@gmail.com

Tags: help needed, offtopic