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Politics: Illicit Acquisition of Game of Thrones in Australia and the Death of CISPA
A bit of a news roundup for this week’s political post. Apparently, illicit acquisition of the Game of Thrones is making things awkward for the United States Ambassador to Australia. He’s asking Australians to please stop getting the show off the Internet. After all, the US is quick to put (or threaten to put) other…
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How Best to Rip and Manage Your Own (legally purchased) DVDs to create your own Netflix Instant
I had two reasons for starting this project: 1) my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth. These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs. I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of…
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Review: Chakra Linux
I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that – perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I…
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Replacing the File/Print Server
A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace…
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Testing Email Clients
Ever since late Fedora 12 or, for sure, Fedora 13, Evolution has been annoying me. I don’t know if it’s linked or coincidental, but it appears to have started getting buggy after I noticed it was using couchdb, a database that a lot of database people in the Linux world are getting all excited about.…
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Review: Arch Linux
I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now. They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up. You only add the things you need. So you don’t have any cruft on your system based…
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A Word About Our Sponsors
Unlike some other web admins, I respect your ability to choose to have ads blocked. The ad providers brought them upon themselves by making ads really freakin’ annoying into the mid-2000s. I just want to say that I don’t run any of those kinds of ads on this site. I have an ad for Servint,…
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About Me
I am a creator and technology geek and the two often overlap. My interests include programming, writing, photography, creating comics, building computers, and video production. I prefer free operating systems like Linux and BSD. I prefer interpreted languages like Python and Perl. I’m learning new programming languages by solving problems in Advent of Code. I…
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The Neuros OSD
The Neuros OSD is a device created by Neuros Technology. This is a device I am REALLY excited about buying. I first heard about it in the latest issue of Linux Format Magazine, which gave it a rating of 9/10. What’s so awesome about this device? It runs Linux! “So what?” You may say, “So…
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Blender 2.46 Released! (Yesterday)
Blender 2.46 was released yesterday and it has a whole bunch of new features- mostly created to facilitate production of Big Buck Bunny. What I’m looking forward to the most is hair/fur rendering, any tools that make armatures easier to skin (the bane of my animation hobby!), a cloth simulator, and the improved sequencer which…
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History Meme
[emesa@mario ~]$ uname -a Linux mario.mushroomkingdom 2.6.24.5-85.fc8 #1 SMP Sat Apr 19 12:39:34 EDT 2008 i686 athlon i386 GNU/Linux [emesa@mario ~]$ history | awk ‘{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head 176 ls 172 eog 81 ./makeSpiral.pl 80 cd 61 ./makefibonaccicollage.pl 58 mplayer 51 ./makePolar.pl 36 mv 28 flickr_views.py 24…
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Operating Systems and Sociology
Penguin Pete has started a very interesting view of what drives people to use certain operating systems. You may find part one a little heavy, especially if you don’t know the history behind it. Basically, Pete has been slammed quite a few times for his blasphemous viewpoint that Ubuntu is a watered down version of…
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Upgrading to Mythdora 5.0
Written Friday, 2 May 2008 Today I decided to upgrade my Mythdora to the latest verison, 5.0. I downloaded the CD media and booted into the install. I had to do a text install to be able to watch it on my TV. Then I just needed to yum install the kmod-nvidia drivers. (Although, first…
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Another example of when the command line trums the GUI
Whenever you’re working with the file directory structure or with text in general, you can’t do any better than using the command line. For example, I was recently copying a bunch of files off of some old CDs because I was noticing that they were starting to develop bit-rot. (I couldn’t access all the files…
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Cycles
As you know, life tends to consist of cycles. You feel up and then you feel down then up again. You get hungry and eat to get full and then get hungry again. And so on…. Apparently the same is true in the computing realm as well. I was searching through my blog today to…