Adventures in Linux
With my new job demanding a marginal command of the *nix platforms, I have finally decided to take the plunge and give myself a full-fledged linux server. I know, I know…I’m the last one to finally take this step! But I have avoided it with my iBook (OS X = FreeBSD!) and running a server under Windows. Untill now, my only experience with a machine of mine that only has linux on it was when I tried to dual boot my computer about 5 years back and accidently wiped my Windows partition as well.
Anyway, I got an old machine off a friend of mine that he wasn’t using and I have decided to make it into a linux web server. ( I really need to learn apache!). The specs? So glad you asked…
P II 333 MHz
64 MB RAM
??? GB HD
1 Old ass CD Burner
…thats about it.
So, now, I’m currently in my basement working on this machine and I decided to fire up the iBook and blog this experience. Ok, back into the fray…
Does anyone know of a really good, end-all reference, linux book?
Everything can be “pimped”!
Do you love MTV’s Pimp My Ride? Can you just not get enough of fat guys cramming LCD screens all over some really excited girl’s, or a really lame dude’s car while Xzibit stands in the background popin’ his collar? Well then you are a complete tool…but you will probably love the photos on this site:
I mean really…have you ever seen a more bad-ass stapler?!
IOgear KVM
I recently quit Best Buy, today in fact. That push of the ending of my discount drove me to get some things that we get really good deals on. First up: A KVM switch. I got the IOgear MiniView™ Micro Audio KVM Switch (4 port). For those that don’t have a clue what a KVM switch is, let me take a moment and explain. It stands for Keyboard Video Mouse, and in this case it has Audio as well. What it does is allow the user to use one monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers, and have them work for up to as many ports as you have on your switch, in this case, I have 4 ports. Here is the little picture explaining this on their site:
This thing is really great. Instead of having to use the Windows XP Remote Desktop Connection to access my server, all I have to do now is press [Ctrl] [Shift] and [Alt] and then press the number of the system I want to switch to. I have not noticed any lag or problems with my video or mouse feed on either setup, and even played a little Jedi Knight II: Outcast and it worked just fine.
Now I just need a desktop Mac to go on one of my empty KVM ports…
A minor change
If you haven’t noticed, there have been some minor changes to the look and feel of Hell Yeah Bitch! .com. I’m trying to make it a bit more appealing and stylish, now that I techinically am a professional web-designer (with about 1,000,000 other people). Anyway, let me know what you think and what else I could do. I’m not looking for a huge design change (seems like I just did that), I’m just looking for some nice tweaks.
Comparing Apple’s to Dell’s
I love this guy. First he breaks down the numbers to prove that Mac users are smarter than PC users, and now he goes through the motions to prove that Macs aren’t more expensive than PCs, unlike what most people (espically die-hard PC users) think.
It makes sense though, if you think about it. Yeah, you can get an E-Machine PC at Best Buy for $400, but its a peice of crap that can’t run anything. If you spec out a PC that is equal to a Mac (which is what this guy did), 9 times out of 10 its going to be close to the same price or cheaper.
Worth a read…or at least its worth sending it that guy you know that keeps telling everyone how expensive Macs are.
You Have Bad Taste In Music
Much like the site i’m referring to, theres not much to this story. YouHaveBadTasteInMusic.com is just a small collection of examples of bad music via video clips (and a place to buy a t-shirt, of course). So all in all, nothing is really there, but just sending the link to your friend that hasn’t let go of the Backstreet Boys, or that certain someone that just loves every single crappy pop-punk band that gets churned out now-a-days, might just have enough of a desired effect.
George Lucus: Microsoft’s Bitch
You know I’ve always found George Lucus to be like a kid in Middle or High School that helped you out huge in a group or with your homework one (or two) time(s) but ever since then he has been a huge douche-bag. You might know a kid or person like this. Every time you see the guy, you give him a smile and act like he is cool to his face but when he leaves you think to yourself: “God I freakin’ hate that guy, he does the dumbest crap all the time!”
This is George Lucus. He makes a couple of cool films (Star Wars: A New Hope, Empire…, half of Return of the Jedi, the first half, and he was in on the Indiana Jones flicks) But ever since then, he has been a complete retard. The “Special Editions” that change the Star Wars flicks (for the 1st time), then the horrible Star Wars Episodes I and II (Hello Jar Jar!). Now he makes MORE changes to Star Wars in the new DVD releases and on top of all of that: He lets Microsoft add a peice of software to the 4th disc that overwrites the firmware of the X-Box without any confirmation by the user. There goes that douche-bag again. (I say this because you know that ole’ George is big-time involved in evey aspect of Star Wars, so he knows about this.)
I pop in my 4th disc of my freshly purchased Star Wars DVDs to play the demo of Star Wars Battlegrounds and what happens? I look up to see it “Updating From X-Box Live”. I found this odd and quickly turned off my modded X-Box because I know that I don’t have my X-Box plugged into my network right now. Good thing I did that, because I really didn’t want to go re-mod my X-Box…espically I didn’t do it myself the first time. What a douche-bag.
From xbox-scene.com:
Star Wars Trilogy DVD Auto-Updating Dash and XBE booting from video DVD
>> The ‘StarWars Trilogy DVD’ (video/movie DVD) has an ‘Extra Special Features Disc’. If you try to launch this on your Xbox it will automaticly update your dashboard … NO confirmation will be asked. The bonus disc has extra features including a documentary on the star wars saga, footage from the making of all three films and a preview demo of the new ‘StarWars Battlefront’ Xbox game (that’s why there’s a default.xbe, dashupdate.xbe and update.xbe on the disc).
This information can be important for some people with older bioses (booting xboxdash.xbe), people using exploits or simply those who don’t want their dash upgraded.
Can be interesting to analyse this disc a bit too as it’s no ‘normal’ Xbox DVD … it’s a video DVD(9?) with an default.xbe booting on an unmodded Xbox. Certainly interesting for further research by the exploit people.
Some info about the disc posted by PedrosPad on forums.xbox-scene.com:
[QUOTE]
The entire “Star wars Battlefront game demo” is contained within the single 171MB default.xbe on the Extras DVD in the DVD-Video box set (no other files are needed).
Evox identifies the disk as a Video, not a Game – interestingly.
You can copy this to your HDD, Evox launches it, and it runs fine.
When the huge default.xbe is launched, it actually unpacks the game proper from itself into separate files on one of the cache drives (X:, Y:, or Z:).
PS. The unpacked files, including their 2MB default.xbe don’t work if copied out of the cache, to drive F: say.
[/QUOTE]
metabitching
People bitch about the supidest things in this world we now live in, and I’m sick of it. Now, I don’t mean people shouldn’t bitch about different things that piss them off, thats cool and if done correctly it can be effective. However, lately it seems to me that people have been bitching about things more often and less effectively than ever before in the past few years.
So I think its time to do a little organized metabitching! What does that mean? Well simply, metabitching is “to bitch about bitching”.
Would you like a few examples? Of course you would! Here are two that spring to mind today. I took the liberity of labeling each part “Initial Bitching” or “Meta-Bitching”.
Initial Bitching: #1
All the people that bitch about how violent / sexual / gay (Yes, people, no myself, have told me that they think that there is too much homosexual activity or people on TV) TV is lately. They bitch, and moan and complain about how every show has a gay character now, and how that TV being so sexual is the harbinger of our society’s colapse.
Metabitching:
Don’t watch TV then, you schumcks! You don’t like South Park, who the hell is forcing you to watch it? You think that Will and Grace is going to make your 13 year old boy that likes to play the flute and has a perfectly decorated room gay? Then, even though that is a stupid, misguided thought, be a parent and don’t let your kid watch it. Its not like he isn’t already gay anyway. (Even if he is…SO WHAT, let you kid be gay. Who cares?)
Initial Bitching #2:
I can’t believe that George W. Bush won the election! We didn’t even vote him in to office…he lost the popular vote you know. That means he shouldn’t be president. He sucks.
Metabitching:
Ok, you wanna hate Bush? Fine. I’m not bitching about politics here. I’m metabitching about people that complain about the popular vote not winning the election. You knew coming into each election there is a electorial college! Why are you surprised by this? Most, if not all, of you thought it was fine until it didn’t go your way, but then when it hurt your vote, then you got all bitchy. I’m not saying which way I voted to avoid another lame internet politics discussion…but I knew about the electorial college and if thats the way it works then fine. You wanna change it? Be my guest…just don’t bitch when it doesn’t go your way and be happy if it does. If you hate it, you hate it…either way. The South Park “red-necks” said it the best: “If you don’t like it, you can get the hhhhheeeeeellllll out!”
Wasn’t that fun? Please be my guest and leave your own metabitchings in the comments section. If its good, I’ll feature it, and if its really good I would love to have you help me write for this site. (As you can tell, its not always easy coming up with content)
Windows RSS readers
After finding a great RSS reader for my iBook (NewsFire) I decided to jump in with both feet in to this RSS thing, in which I am already severly far behind the world in. So I started on my search for an RSS reader for my Windows box.
For those that don’t know…and I have been getting a few complaints that my site can be a bit too technial without explaining anything…RSS is a way for websites to publish their content to other places that their actual website. In fact, if you the link to my RSS feed, you can publish my content, updated automatically anywhere you wish. If you get an RSS reader, then you have a program that goes out and grabs any feeds you want and delivers them to you in a easy to read format all in one place. (for extra knowledge on the subject of RSS check out this Wikipedia article.)
Ok , back to the search for a windows RSS reader! I found this great article on O’Reilly’s WindowsDevCenter.com: Top Three Windows RSS Readers. In there, the authors gives three great suggestions, a lot of them had too much going on and they have a very Office 2003 feel to it. Which raises a small problem…I hate that. I’m a mac guy that just has a Windows PC for the occasional game, etc. That doesn’t mean that I like it, or the way it looks. So where does a guy like me turn? Good ole’ SourceForge.net! Thats where.
FeedReader was my final choice. The UI is very basic, all it does is grab the posts…and it doesn’t looking like something Bill Gates threw up! Oh yeah, its open source too. You gotta love SourceForge! If you haven’t gotten into RSS readers, or you are looking to switch, FeedReader is worth a look. Especially if you are a mac guy using windows (under protest of course).
T-Shirt SPAM
Thats right, the subject lines of SPAM are showing up on T-Shirts. All those lame, or nasty, or just funny subject lines that show up in your In Box everyday are being made into t-shirt you can have made for you right on the web.
…we at spamshirt have come up with a plan: recycling useless spam into sparkling new t-shirts! environmentally conscious, and a new lease of life for all that spam that floods your in-box.
HOW IT WORKS
it’s easy. simply go to the products section, choose your shirt style (boys or girls) select shirt colour, choose some spam from our extensive list (or enter your own*) make an order and bob’s your auntie’s live-in lover, you’ll have a unique, personalised spamshirt delivered to you in days.
*spamshirt uses only 100% spam, and we insist you do the same. That means no editing, no changes in punctuation, spelling etc. See information for more details and other spamshirt rules.
This is a great idea. A little expensive for just another t-shirt…but still worth checking out .