The Tank Man

Twenty years back, on June 4th, 1989 Tiananmen Square in Beijing saw demonstrations (mainly by students and other intellectuals) in favor of freedom of speech and democracy that ended as a bloody evening after the military opened indiscriminate fire on the protesters. The next day one single man, identity unknown till today, dared to stand in front of the tanks entering the city.

This photo taken by Jeff Widener soon became an iconic one after the photographer managed to hide his film roll from the Chinese agents. The tanks tried to go around the Tank Man, but he refused to give way. Then the tanks seemed to stop their motors. The man climbed on the front tank, spoke something to the driver and came down.
Immediately after that some men were seen taking this man away from the scene. Some people think they were government agents and the Tank Man was executed after a few days while some believe he is still alive in mainland China.
(See the youtube video series The Tank Man).

Playing with Ubuntu

Last few months I have been playing a lot with Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex 8.10 on my Thinkpad T61. Here are few cool things that were very helpful to me.

Adding Global Menu to the panel
A nice feature of Apple OS x is that the panel displays the toolbar of the current application. Here is a tutorial that teaches you how to get this and some of the other Mac features on Ubuntu.
I don't appreciate the author's motivation for giving Ubuntu the exact same look (including the wallpaper) of Mac OS x but I liked the Global Menu Bar in particular.

AWN Dock
This is a neat dock for linux. Look at this youtube video.

Combining pdf files
Turns out to be really helpful. Open a terminal and type in:
>sudo apt-get install gs pdftk
Then
>gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=combinedpdf.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf
where in place of "combinedpdf.pdf" above put the output filename you want (with .pdf extension and no quote mark) and write the name of the pdf files to be combined in place of 1.pdf, 2.pdf etc (note the space in between the files).
[Ref: http://www.debianadmin.com/combine-multiple-pdfs-into-one-file-in-ubuntu-linux.html]

Xaos, the Interactive Fractal Zoomer
Even if you are not a Physics/Maths geek, you would enjoy it! Provides a very nice tutorial on fractals also.