The Perfect Marvel Mission

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Lately I’ve been trying to catch up on the different Marvel films, that I’ve missed over the last many years. 3 years ago the big hype on the internet was The Avengers and you were hard put to visit reddit, imgur, Twitter and even Facebook without people writing about it, posting GIFs and other things from the film. I mean, who don’t remember this fantastic scene?

This Friday, I finally took myself the time to sit down with my wife and watch The Avengers, being only 3 years later than all the hype. It was good, not the best film I’ve ever seen, but I was entertained none the less. This came after I watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier a few weeks back and before that I had watched Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, The Incredible Hulk and Guardians of the Galaxy (not necessarily in that order) and also some of Marvel’s Daredevil on Netflix (Only the first 3 episodes as I found it a tad gritty for my likings, but I haven’t yet ruled out that I might get to watching all of it at some point).

What I got from watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier before I watched The Avengers, was that apparently Earth (namely New York, which always equals the entire Earth in films) had been destroyed by an alien attack. The problem was that I hadn’t seen that happen and had no idea exactly what had transpired. The same issue arose when I was watching Iron Man 3. This meant that I was rather confused and then decided to set myself a mission. A mission I’ve dubbed ‘The Perfect Marvel Mission’.

I know that I’m in no way the first person to do this, that would just be silly to think, but now I want to get into the right chronology before Captain America: Civil War arrives next year and Guardians of the Galaxy 2 arrives in 2017. To do this I want to watch all the films in the correct order (I’m going to skip the shows, as I consider myself only a moderate fan and films which are 2 and half hour in length is easier to digest).

Doing a Google search for ‘Marvel movie order’ returns a plethora of results (approximately 20 million of them) where you can read essays about the subject and people have some very strong opinions about it. I tried reading some forum posts about it and it ended up in a giant discussion on when to correctly place Ant Man (before or after Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2). It was too much and the reasons for both arguments seemed, to me, to be valid. In the end I simply chose the first search result on CNET. They had this very easy image that I thought I would follow:

This means that my new mission in ‘life’ is to get on watching loads of Marvel superhero films! Never mind that I still have to watch Avengers: Age of Ultron, I also have to re-watch all the other films I’ve already seen (I’m not going to skip The Incredible Hulk! I like Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk). I wonder if I’ll ever find the time to actually do it

I guess it’s about time to get back to writing about technical stuff again and I might have something in the pipeline as I’ve started developing an Android app, that might be useful to write about. Not only that, I’m also back to working on using my Raspberry Pi Home Server and I might have something to say about that. Finally I’ve also fiddled with making a nice World of Warcraft add-on, that can make statistics about XP gained, time to level and other information when being boosted in an instance by a high level character. Just because I could.

Stay tuned or don’t, that is entirely up to you.

Removing the pointless Plank icon from Plank dock

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I like docks in my operating systems. They are a fun and handy way of having easy access to your most used applications and they can actually look good. Back in 2011 I gave it my first go at writing something about docks in Ubuntu, but I only ever got to writing about AWN and it died there.

In Ubuntu MATE I’ve decided to use the Panel layout called ‘Eleven’, that gives you a Plank dock to have your applications in. It looks really nice as you can see here:

plank

It’s nifty and does what I want from a dock. It keeps my applications right at hand. I mean, what else would I want it to do? However there is one problem. As you can see my mouse is hovering over an icon that shows the tooltip ‘Plank’. Clicking the icon gives nothing of use. No settings, nothing. Just this:

about_plank

So I set out to remove it, as there is no real reason for it to be there. So to remove it I simply pulled the Plank icon away from the dock and ended up with this:

no_plank_icon

This was a lot easier than trying to fiddle around in settings files, killing the Plank process and so on.

Installing Ubuntu MATE 15.04 in UEFI dual boot with Windows 10

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This will be a sort of guide on the steps I had to take to install Ubuntu MATE 15.04 in UEFI dual boot with Windows 10. As I mentioned in my last post, I did not have an easy time of installing Ubuntu, due to issues with getting my computer to actually boot the live USB stick I made.

I know that I installed Windows 10 in UEFI mode, as I forced it to do so, but I never realised that to get an actual working dual boot I needed to install all my operating systems the same way. This explained to me why I had so much issues getting my old computer to boot into GRUB as I had Windows 8.1 installed in UEFI and then I installed Arch Linux in BIOS mode. I always thought it was somehow me who just couldn’t figure out Arch correctly (I guess in way that was the actual reason).

To start with I tried installing my Ubuntu MATE 15.04 ISO-file onto a 16GB Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 with LinuxLive USB Creator, but I couldn’t get my ASUS Z97-A/USB 3.1 motherboard to boot the USB. I then tried creating the USB again, this time with UNetbootin, but again I couldn’t boot the Ubuntu MATE 15.04 LiveCD. This made me think that something must be wrong with one of the UEFI settings in my BIOS and I proceeded to try all kinds of combinations of disabling ‘Secure Boot’, ‘Fast Boot’ and ‘CSM/Legacy Boot Mode’. Naturally none of this helped me either. I did however change the boot order to always boot from UEFI devices first in the following order: USB, SDD, Network, which is how I’d normally want it to be.

After looking around at Ask Ubuntu and Ubuntu Community Help I found out that I should try to make the USB in only UEFI mode and I was rather amazed at how easy it was:

  1. Insert USB
  2. Format USB to FAT32
  3. Mount Ubuntu MATE 15.04 LiveCD by double clicking the ISO
  4. Copy all files from LiveCD to USB
  5. Open ‘Disk Management’ and check if the partition on the USB is marked as active

That is it. No more making the drive bootable through external programs in Windows or from the terminal in Linux. Just copy and go! What a world we live in!

Now it was pretty simple to get Ubuntu installed. Simply reboot the computer and chose to boot from the USB, follow the prompts (remember to chose to either the ‘Install Next to Windows’ or the ‘Something Else’ option to not delete Windows), reboot after installation and be greeted by GRUB.

There you have it. A working Windows 10 and Ubuntu MATE 15.04 in dual boot, both on Secure Boot in UEFI mode.

Next up, customization of the MATE desktop environment and adding different PPA’s to get the applications I want.