Category: Computers

  • f-spot hits me like Linux’s G-spot…

    f-spot is a new program for organizing photos in Linux and is currently in early development. It looks really nice! It seems to rival most picture organizing software out there for any platform. The thing that really got my attention, however, was that the developers are asking people to send in RAW photo files so…

  • DMCA To be hit with a battering ram

    Video game fans may recall the dissapointment when, last year, uS courts forced Bnetd servers to shut down. Bnetd, short for Battle Net daemon, was created by some hackers who had become very upset with Blizzard’s Battle.net. There was rampant cheating and latancy problems. They did what any hacker would do when confronted with a…

  • Googling Myself

    I haven’t Googled myself in a while, so I decided to see what would come up with my first and last name. What a paper trail I’ve left since the last time I was here. Item number 2 on page 1 was a link to my book at Lulu.com, the self-publishing company. Items 3 and…

  • Copyleft

    I recently found something interesting – a record label which releases all of its music under the Creative Commons license. In particular you are allowed to copy the music as long as you don’t make money off of it. One of their strategies? If you rip a CD for a friend and they really like…

  • Fedora Core 4

    I finally got Fedora Core 4 running after nearly 12 hours of installation. Boy, that was a little rough on my patience. The first change I noticed is that the default “time left” bar is candy cane striped now instead of solid blue. I decided to boot first into Gnome and see what this new…

  • I wish I had faster computers….

    I started upgrading my laptop from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 today. After 9 hours it STILL wasn’t done. This is because I was installing it on a P3 600 Mhz computer. Hopefully I’ll get to play with it a little tomorrow. If not, I’ve got all the time after the wedding to…

  • Finally, Part 1

    After two days of downloading, finally got Fedora Core 4 downloaded. Currently burning the discs, but I won’t get to play until I get back from work. It’s going to be an ancy day.

  • Fedora Core 4 – Stentz is out!

    At approximately 11 am EST today Fedora Core 4 was officially released to the mirrores and bittorrents. I couldn’t wait to get home to download it and install it on my two Linux machines. I’m currently downloading it – unfortunately it currently says I have 65 hours left, but hopefully that speeds up soon. Happy…

  • Crazy things….

    This is not one coherent post, but a post about crazy things that have recently occurred. Crazy thing number 1: New York City Mayer, Mike Bloomberg, has announced that from now on the building code in NYC will state that for every toilet in a men’s room there must be two toilets in the women’s…

  • Getting Wireless (internal card) working on Linux

    Recently I had ocassion to require wireless access on my Linux box. This is notoriously difficult in Linux as of now, although most other hardware devices are found and work right out of the box. I’d gotten it working on my laptop before, but this time it was necessary to get it working on my…

  • Bash Shell Scripting

    One of the best things about Linux is the ability to write shell scripts. These are most often used as utility programs to do repetitive tasks for you. I just wrote my first one on Sunday and here it is followed by commentary. #!/bin/bash echo “starting xchat…” xchat& echo “starting Gaim…” gaim& echo “starting Thunderbird…”…

  • My Fluxbox desktop on Fedora Core 3 Part 3

    Here I have decided to run the “top” command in the top transparent Eterm window. This is a great command to have running on the desktop. Basically it’s equivalent to hitting control-alt-delete in Windows and then clicking on “processes”. It tells you what you are running on your system, how much RAM/CPU cycles it’s taking…

  • My Fluxbox desktop on Fedora Core 3 Part 2

    Finally I have figured out something else I have wanted to do for MONTHS! If you look on the top-right corner you will see what looks like an embedded terminal in my desktop. The biggest reason why I’ve wanted to do this is simply because it looks really neat to have a terminal “built into”…

  • My Fluxbox desktop on Fedora Core 3

    I wanted to share my Fluxbox desktop on my main Linux computer both for the geeky motive of showing off my desktop like jocks show off their cars and also to help others achieve the same configurations that I have. Fluxbox, like Blackbox and other *box window managers, are very, very customizable. Here is the…

  • Whatever you do, don’t dumb down Linux…

    As we saw in yesterday’s post, one of the things the author of the article suggested was that Linux needed to get simpler in order to gain a wider audience. But I say, hell no! Do not dumb down Linux! One of the most powerful things about Linux is that we still have access to…