Remember when I said I'd created an mp3 to play while doing HIIT exercises? Turns out that was a DEFINITE good idea. It's much much easier than looking at your watch frantically while trying to run full speed. I created my mp3 in audacity, a free, open source audio editor/recorder. I "mixed" two songs by Aponaut together (I say mixed with quotes because I am by no standards a DJ), and then just imported an easy-to-listen-to beep sound that I found on FindSounds. You can get the file here for free, since Aponaut made their music freely available on the net a long time ago.

I also installed LXDE just to give it a try. I was inspired by gcarrier's post in relation to lxnm. I really like how the whole DE is modular, in that you can mix-and-match programs to your liking. It's also pretty cool that these guys created a good amount of their own software to better suit the needs of the DE. I'm not the biggest fan of pcmanfm, though. I'm much more interested in Thunar. However, this takes away the ability to have a desktop background + icons. I would use nitrogen (or feh) + idesk for this solution.

And this thought led me to try out idesk for the first time. Let me tell you first and foremost that I LOVE aur. I found a nice easy gui tool that creates the icon for you (idesk-extras). Nifty difty. I'm thinking about installing idesk on my step mother's computer just to see if this eases her annoyances.