Geek Stuff category archive

The new Linux laptop to replace the one that died has shipped.

A week before the projected date.

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El Reg lays down the law. A nugget:

Rule 1: (In the Python manner) Naaaaaaaaah hobbits!

Rule 2: An enlargement and clarification of rule 1. We mean not only no Frodo, no Bilbo, no Merry, no Pippin, no Marmadoc Brandybuck, nor Adalgrim Took, nor Lobelia (Bracegirdle) Sackville-Baggins; we also mean no Gandalf, no Gollum, no Preciousss, no Treebeard, no Sauron, no Glóin son of Gróin nor yet Glóin son of Thorin, even if your network does support mixed case, UTF-8 and spaces in its names. The ban also implies no Eöl, no Rohirrim, no Melkor, no Mordor, no Sindarin, no Eleventy-first birthdays and definitely, absolutely, certainly no Tom bloody Bombadil.

Curiously, however, ‘Tolkein’ is quite a good name for a server.

I name all my computers after sea creatures, such as Mackeral, Orca, Marlin, Tuna (the webserver), and Sardine (the netbook, of course).

Phillygrrl was teasing me most politely the other night about my refusal to twit. Frankly, a lot of it is a tendency I have to resist hype. I have never been, am not, and probably shall never be an “early adopter.”

Will Bunch takes on the hype about Twitter and Iran:

So why all the focus here in America on the social networking story? Well, it is “news,” literally, since Twitter is only a couple of years old. What journalists don’t want to acknowledge openly is that they’re reporting so much about Twitter because it’s easy — anyone can log in from anywhere and read what people are saying. But reporting on the ground from Tehran — spending all that money and somehow getting past the government censors — that’s hard work. On top of all that, Twitter is a way for a lot of Americans to feel they are somehow “taking part” in what seems like, for now, a cathartic global event — even if the truth is that at the end of the day it will be Iranians, and not us, who decide whether this rebellion actually succeeds.

The larger reality is that Twitter is a medium, but it’s not the message. If change really does come to Iran, it will not be cause of 140 characters but because of the character of millions, who are literally risking death to march for the things they believe in. It was like that in Massachusetts in 1775, when the news traveled at the speed of horse, and it is like that in Tehran in 2009. Same as it ever was.

When their vans don’t fit, it’s back to people power:

A pedicab-like vehicle with an 8-foot-high camera is rolling around the walkways at the University of Pennsylvania to collect 360-degree views of the campus for the “Street View” feature of Google Maps.

Follow the link for a picture of their high-tech trike.

The laptop that has been my primary computer for over five years finally gave up the ghost.

The screen died. I can get a whole nother computer for less than a new display.

I jacked a monitor into it and am backing every thing up across the network to my file server (the important stuff gets backed up regularly anyway–I’m concentrating on the hidden configuration files in my home directory).

The timing is a little frustrating, since I spent several hours this weekend fine-tuning Fluxbox. But I can’t complain. The box has taken everything I’ve thrown at it and, as my old mechanic used to say, doesn’t owe me a dime.

Oh, well.

Jeffrey demonstrates how to load Windows 7 as a virtual machine on a Ubuntu box. Watch it here

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Debian and Fluxbox.

Todd at Geek New Central shows off his studios.

His home studio is here. His travel podcasting rig is here.

Wow.

Microsoft pushes an add-on to Firefox without asking permission.

Susabelle describes it.

Any Firefox user receiving a Microsoft update to either XP or Vista (and possibly Windows 7 but I cannot confirm this) in the last two weeks will have gotten this forced push, right into Firefox, and wouldn’t even have known it. If you go to Tools > Add ons, you should see an entry for Microsoft .net Framework Assistant 1.0. You will notice that you can disable it, but that the “uninstall” option is grayed out, meaning it is stuck there unless you do some fancy footwork to remove it.

This particular add-on is not something you want to have installed, in my opinion. Upon installation, it provides a ClickOnce capability that pretty much lets Microsoft do what it wants when it comes to your browser, as well as opening you up to all kinds of other nasties out there, since we all know the .net Framework is riddled with bugs that are not always fixed as quickly as they should be. The biggest security flaw with the ClickOnce install is that it allows easy installation of malicious software from websites, without your permission and knowledge.

Follow the link for more information and to find out how to remove this thing.

Aside: If regular readers wonder why I contemn Microsoft so much, this pretty much illustrates why.

Meet the GIMP, like Clarissa, explains it all.

By the way, the GIMP is cross-platform. You can get it for Window$ also, as well as for other platforms.

Thanks to the Outlaws for introducing me to it.

El Reg:

Speaking to Radio 4’s Front Row programme, (Hugh ) Laurie described himself as “bothered by the social cost of every tweet”, explaining: “As I look around my friends’ tweets I see banality on all sides. I don’t understand the purpose of it.

He added: “I think if people were able to take these 140 characters and develop a poetic Western form – a haiku of our own in which all human existence could be compressed into those 140 characters – that would be a satisfying thing, but that’s not what I see when I read them.”

Geekazine elucidates.

Over at the Coyote’s Byte.

My folder for the alt.html newsgroup currently has 404 unread posts.

Cooled by mineral oil:

Glorioso, a senior at North Carroll High School, is already playing games on his custom computer, which he built entirely out of spare parts he had lying around the house. The only cost he incurred was $94 for a 4.5-gallon bottle of mineral oil to fill the tank.

The oil, which circulates through the system, is a critical component, Glorioso said. The 17-year-old Westminster resident said he came up with the idea when trying to find a way to keep a computer from overheating, which happened frequently when he and his friends played PC games.

Well, maybe not so much. On the Media reports:

When 10,000 Moldovans filled the streets in protest last week, it was characterized as the ‘Twitter revolution.’ But now that the dust has cleared, what role did Twitter really play? And was it a revolution? Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, tells the tale of the tweets.

Follow the link to read the transcript or listen here:

The winning entry in the “We’re Linux” video contest:

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Scientific Blogging explains botnets. If you have a computer–and I suspect that, if you are reading this, you probably do, this is worth a read. A nugget:

Skippy lays it out.