digital home of MacSlow

Read and watch this. No further comment

This is a great day, because today I got the license-fee for Windows Vista back from Lenovo Germany. Initially I feared it would be a lot of phoning back and forth, but in the end I got a template-letter as PDF from a Lenovo-employee. The letter states what actions one needs to take to return the unused license and reclaim the fee. You are required to turn in the licence/certificate label (usually on the bottom of the notebook), return the install-media (im my case there wasn’t any, just the recovery-partition, which I deleted… I send them screenshot-printout of the fully ext3-formatted hd displayed in gparted), a copy of the bill of the purchased notebook and your account-details. That’s it. All in all it took about one week from sending the letter to the fee arriving on my account-balance.

So if you bought a machine from Lenovo here in Germany and intend to give back the unused Windows-license… it’s a piece of cake to do so these days.

This made my day

For some time now gtk+ offers redirecting widgets, so the rendering happens offscreen only. That is a mandatory feature for doing some interesting things with UI-elements. With the source-distribution of gtk+ you get a huge collection of coding-examples. There is also an example for offscreen widget-rendering. Unfortunately this is a very basic and boring example. It does not really demonstrate the additional possibilities now available in gtk+ very well. Since I need to make use of this new feature in gtk+ in the near future, I had to create my own example, which is much closer to the application-need I have.

Here’s a little show-off screencast for your viewing-pleasure…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.1 MBytes)

P.S.: Yes, usually I type much faster.