Tuesday, August 22, 2006

eXpensive Gadgets and Accessories - Soldier Shoots his Printer - Hardware - News

eXpensive Gadgets and Accessories - Soldier Shoots his Printer - Hardware - News

Haha if only i could shoot a few of my least loved items so easily.

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Starting up in 2012 - Network World

Starting up in 2012 - Network World

One of the funniest things ive read in a long time.

So need any more motivation to think about switching ?

www.gentoo.org

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Elias Fotinis OverDisk :: Visualize Folder Size Allocation

Elias Fotinis OverDisk :: Visualize Folder Size Allocation

Having been a long term user of 'i.disk' i found this while attempting to show idisk to a freind.

Its got my vote for sure. Though its only a beta ive yet to have any problems, its not only faster and smaller than i.disk its also more intutive and provides a lot more detail than i.disks bar graph based views.

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Saturday, August 19, 2006

Sabayon Linux 3.0 RC2 Public Release

www.lxnaydesign.net :: View topic - SabayonLinux x86/x86-64 3.0 RC2

Im not a fan of private internal betas but i can make exeptions, and i make one here, the team behind sabayon didnt hide it from us long. My earlier posts enthusiasm about testing it out was somewhaty dampened by the fact it was in a private beta, but the covers have come off and sabayon is now available to try. And try it i shall.

Ill have the results and my opinions in the next couple of days.

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Sunday, August 13, 2006

Slashdot FAQ - Comments and Moderation

Slashdot FAQ - Comments and Moderation

FINALY THEY PUT IN THE DAMN SHOW HIDE

This tag trick was in my second favourite submission to the slashdot redesign contest, and im glad to see it finaly get into my favourite (the new slashdot look).

Unfortunaly it doesnt seem to be on the front page with show hide for articles yet. (this was the feature i loved most)

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Index of /artist/andrew-jones/images/foxy_

Index of /artist/andrew-jones/images/foxy_

To metroid and samus fans.

Enjoy :)

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Techgage - Review: Sabayon Linux RC2

Techgage - Review: Sabayon Linux RC2:

Head here for a solid intro to RR4s new future.

Sabayon linux, Gentoo as youve never seen it before, a highly polished slick livecd.

Ill be taking this personaly for a test drive sometime this week hopefuly, and ill post my full responses then.

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Draino's Networking and Tech: Is Gentoo becoming more like Debian?

Draino's Networking and Tech: Is Gentoo becoming more like Debian?

In response to a freind of mines criticism of the release proccess i felt compelled to do some digging of my own, and ive realised that the gentoo "releases" were never terribly usefull to begin with. the shift of the standard install documentation to being stage 3 only, and the focus on the minimal cd method, fetching all the required parts from the web rather than getting them off the install cd both show the direction and territory gentoo intends to exist in.

This is my os, i compiled it, the sources are from the individual program cvs/svn reps, the package list was current from my very first boot and nothing is out of date, from the kernel to kde, all the sources are the latest, complete with all security and stability fixes.

Gentoo is meant to be always up to date, because its compiled from sources the user is given the latest system from the start. the pre built stages and "releases" are falling out of favour as gentoo based distros step in to provide "drop and go" prebuilt gentoo system instalations that are far better than the half yearly or so official gentoo releases.

Which leads to my next entry..... Sabayon linux ?

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Friday, August 11, 2006

Desktop Delights

My desktops slowly undergoing a slow overhaul now i have returned to the Series of tubes

I felt like i should share some of the progress as the updates so far have been quite impressive when compared to my previous efforsts at improving my desktop.

First off we have a little gem out of the microsoft research department, an experiment with the concept of the taskbar that im sure many of you are familiar with GroupBar (now with a neat installer) is a nifty little program that you can position anywhere, and functions like a drag and drop taskbar with dynamic grouping, as well as the ability to save groups of programs and their arrangment for later use. Called "snapshots" theyre among the many uses of the little helper, but for me the sheer ease of use of having a second taskbar thats conveniently placed down the side of my second monitor is amazing.

Next up is a program that is obviously stealing some of the mac thunder, while i long for an Expose this little app is a major helper. Launchy as its known pops up whenever i hit alt+space and quickly lets me find a program after typing a few of the leters of its name. Both unclutering my desktop, and saving me from the terror of start menu scrounging spending a minute looking for that disused program 'conveniently' hidden from view.

Following hot on the heels of Launchy, is another peice of amazing graphical eyecandy that Ive totaly fallen for. Console version 2 is one hell of a program, if, like me, you spend plenty of time in the command line, working with remote shells, *nix, ssh, and command line network programs and tools. Youll love this little app for its true alpha blended transparency, tabs, multiple shell suport (so you can have say cygwin, and the MS windows shell as well in the one window in separate tabs) and overall clean simple style. At present, only a few minor flaws mar its excelence, such as lack of a maximise button (wtf?) and some minorly problematic default shortcut keys.


Onto the oddly named Qumana which has been used to draft this very post.
While its features arent entirely perfect, its quick and fully equiped for single topic posts, featuring multiple blog support and direct html editing. the UI isnt anything amazing and has a number of quirks that should be attended to, (resizing fo the right side pannel in the edit window, bad UI quirk) its a very useful tool for all those delving into the blogsphere.

And what desktop is without a good game!

Crack Attack courtesy of Daniel Nelson is an openGL Tetris Attack clone for windows and Linux that is both visualy gratifying and an excelent timewaster, as well as having all the addictive and fun gameplay of its inspiration.

This wraps up my latest and certainly not last set of changes to my desktop. Next thing that needs doing is cleaning out some more old files to recover some space for some experimenting with VMware ive been thinking of for some time.


Powered by Qumana

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Monday, August 07, 2006

Vi vs Emacs vs ?

Whats in an editor...?

functionality, simplicity, flexibility? what is it that is most crucial...

I spent the morning looking for an editor, and i wound up simply enabling extra features of the same editor ive been using since i first touched linux. Nano, with syntax highlighting... It works, i know the few keys i need to, and its simple.

Vi is amazingly powerful and simple, its fast, it doesnt need meta keys and lets you keep your fingers moving as fast as you can. Emacs ... well what cant be said of emacs, it does everything, including Vi with its viper mode. it seems that the editor world is polarised, you have Vi, and you have Emacs, but what else is there?

Nano, JOE, Pico, and a host of others, as well as the graphicaly incumbent windows notepad and its relatives, but all these are minor players arent they, mere mortals no higher than the ankles of the 2 great ones.

Why must things be so binary, The right tool for the job as the Vi croud say, shouldnt there be others that do things better?

why is there no simple way to work out what your doing, why cant i just have a command, vim --python --folding

alas this sort of thing is always left up to someone else, the core userbase of these programs not caring for such features as they have either mastered the nature of their editor or been forced to become competent.

Long story short, I need a good editor, simple command keys, decent features, but without the nearly cryptic simplicity of Vi, or the dauntingness of the sheer size of Emacs OS and its nearly infinite capability. perhaps some time ill wind up making my own...

Nah, its to much effort, 'real' programers get it right first time with cat.

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Thursday, August 03, 2006

I have no internet... Or do i?

Well it has come to pass that the place where i sleep no longer has internet...

Unsurprisingly this has me quite disturbed. Where do i get my gaming, where can i sit and relax and just do as i please online with my own desktop... that now sits idle... though GLMatrix does look so pretty.

I am eHomeless bound to wander from ap to ap in search of signal leeching any and all internet connections i can find.

This post is brought to you by my unsuspecting neihbour whos proffesional IT training (hes got a rack mount dell server running win2k server, its amazing what a few open ports shows) hasnt extended so far as to setting any security keys on his wireless ap.

But it has extended so far as to be very profficient in setting up a firewall.

Im online to chat ... Just.

His firewall has port 5222 blocked. I am natively jabberless. But firewalls are wonderfull things and my port scan showed he left 22 open on his firewall outgoing.

Shell acounts to the rescue!

Logging into my university shell acount i quickly got a stable connection past the firewall on port 22 (one of the only open ports) from the unviersity i proceeded to SSH via the use of the corkscrew proxy tunnel for ssh (the university firewall allows almost all ports it seems provided they authenticate with the proxy :-)

So from university i can ssh out to another more open box running on a higher port number ( Unixclan, i have to buy you a beer sometime dude )

And now the fun begins, Im now logged into a box i can actualy use as i please with plenty of open access, at last...
So up goes irc logging into im.bitlbee.org and connecting to msn and google talk.

Phew, the input is laggy, ive only got ascii (hurray!) but its the internet !

I with no permanant internet connection to call my own... am online.

Nothing Stops the Dragon Breaking Free

and nothing helps him out right now like a stiff drink! ;-)

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Google Shell?

YubNub - YubNub.org

Advanced google searching for all your power user needs, this is looking to replace google as my default search pretty fast.

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Windows Port of Xscreensaver

Darren Stone - tron.lir.dk - software

Windows users always had plenty of neat screensaver addon
But never did they quite get the same level of coolness as the 
XScreensaver Collection that sprung up on linux and *BSD.

But now! your windows box too can share the glory of the original BSOD screensaver, the fun of GLMatrix, Gears, and Flip Flop.

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