Monthly Archives: August 2008

Gentoo

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I’ve had a shit box laying around (800 mhz) for a little while that I haven’t bothered to use. I usually use it for a temporary server or to mess around with. Since I’ve started to get back into playing Americas Army, I’ve wanted to be able to IRC and MSN while I’m dead easily. Sp O decided to setup Gentoo on this box and mess around.

After a day or so of waiting for stuff to compile (<3 emerge, hasn't failed me yet) I have a working box, with xfce4 and that. So far I'm really like gentoo, everything has been easy to setup, and once you become patient and wait for things to compile it's really nice.

It's good having only the applications you need, and not any other junk

CHDK

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I’ve had my Canon S3 IS camera for awhile now, and it’s a brilliant camera with lots of nifty little things, and buttons and this and that. It turns out beautiful images, esp macros. I really like it, and I’m 100% happy with it.

Harrison has showed me CHKD which has made me even more happier with my camera. CHDK is a firmware enhancement that was turn my camera into something even more better. I can now play games on my camera, and run scripts that make beautiful HDR images so much easier. I used a script to take 25 photos on the teddy you see to your right, and patched it together using photomatix. It even tells me the percentage of battery I had, something which was an annoyance on the old firmware.

I really like the new firmware, however I’m sure they can find more fun things to do with the cameras.

The installation is really simple, find a card reader, plop the two files onto the card, re insert card, go into play mode, press the mode button, press firmware update, put your hands on your head, spin around three times yelling “IMAFAG” and flap your arms like a chicken.

It’s that simple.

TheSkorm.net Up for Sale

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TheSkorm.net is up for sale for 4 times the amount that Cubestat has estimated, mainly because $1252 is enough to make me change to a different domain name. Cubestat estimated my domain name to $313.17 USD, which I think is an awful lot of money, and I can’t really see anyone buying this domain for more than $20.

I tried it on a few other sites and domains I own, and one of them got $900 USD, which is fairly nice, for such a basic site, with nothing to fancy.

The site is fun to play around with and test out domain names, however it’s estimates are fairly out their IMOH. It’s nice to think that your site is worth that much. Supposably if I were to put ads on here, I would get 0.40$ USD a day, however I know that won’t happen.

Anyway, start saving up to buy this domain if you want it :P .

National Broadband Network

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“As a key element of its plan for the future, the Australian Government has committed to provide up to $4.7 billion and to consider necessary regulatory changes to facilitate the roll-out of a new open access, high-speed, fibre-based broadband network, providing downlink speeds of at least 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australian homes and businesses.”

I’m all for Australia have a good Broadband network, but I have two problems at the moment. Who will own this network and what about international links.

At the moment I can see Telstra being paid by the government to setup this network, and give them the rights to charge huge amounts of cash for other companies to use it. It’s currently $80 for 25GB on 1.5MBit, which for me seems way to much money, considering the internet isn’t owned or run by them. They are making profit out of others work, correct? (and for your information it costs $150 a gigabyte after you go over your limit)

It’s all great giving every household 12mbit down links, until you realize that, every household with 12mbit will wanna access and download from places off shore. Currently we struggle to provide internet over these links as is, and giving people more bandwidth to use that you don’t have is just bad practice.

There have been many cases where one fiber break offshore have caused our whole national network to run at 5kbs, with epic lag. This problem needs to be fixed up.

That is all.

I wear a bad Cap

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I friends Thomson SpeedTouch 536 died a horrible death a few weeks ago, and I helped setup the replacement modem. I was given the old modem, and later on a gave it a look. I noticed 4 bulging caps, and thought that I’d give a shot a replacing them.

Today I went to Dick Smith and bought four 470uF 25V caps. I quickly desoldered the four caps and soldered the four new caps onto the board. Guess what? It worked. The modem booted up fine, without going into it’s endless loop of red flashing lights.

The total restore cost me $2.20, and now I have 4 backup modems.

Marriage in our law system

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Most people don’t understand that marriage is a religious ceremony. Religion should not be apart or change the laws that govern our country, although somehow people who are marriage can obtain government benefits in tax.

I don’t believe marriage should change anything to do with the law, tax or health benefits. People should treated separately and their should be benefits or loss for being a couple.

Why Linux isn't all around us

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Linux has been used in mainly places, used on many server and has tones of advantages, the main one is it’s free. Linux has a fatal flaw though.

It was designed for tech savvy 15 year old boys with no life (trust me, I was one of them). It was never designed to be a user friendly operating system. Linux didn’t just wake up one day and say lets use this on my mums computer. Slowly projects are popping up trying to solvet his flaw and making Linux a popular alternative to OS X and Windows, however it still has some work to do.

Being that the programming for the main programs on linux is decentralized making something that’s going to come together and be good is hard. A lot of forks in code bases occur, where coolprogram become gCoolprogram (or Gnome Program) and kCoolprogram.

With the forking becomes more forking, and even remerging of code, things get sloppy and/or broken. Every single program has a different GUI and look and feel, every Distro has a different command set. Linux was just never made with a home user in mind, it’s targeted at power users. People that don’t call their computer a “hard drive”.

Ps, this is an awesome picture, Peace, Love and Linux.

My GPG Key – Write this down

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Start GPG

From this post onwards I will be GPG signing my posts to ensure there is no tweaking, the flickr image to the left contains my flickr key both in image format and in text format, and at the end of this post, I will include the gpg public key aswell. GPG is a brilliant way to ensure your shit is actually yours and nobody has tampered with it.

Everything between the start and stop blocks will be signed, not including the html.
My public key is…

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)
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=/raH
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Stop GPG
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin)

iEYEARECAAYFAkin4S8ACgkQ2Tnf7yyC15vXEACg3NoZM0Y3hrwfFZ9edG20rijp
iCcAn2BaUjvTA5PADBKI1t2up125aORi
=p7AV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Future Space – The Line

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Ok, this really fucked me up, and is the reason why I haven’t blogged this for two days. I wanted to share a youtube video, but typically I post from flickr. See my problem. Anyway what I wanted to share with yous is a comedy I found on youtube, that kicks nerds in the guts and points and laughs at them. It’s based around a group of nerds lining up for the next episode of “Future Space” and is really cleverly crafted.

The youtube link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3TN9urUuDc for those interested in watching. It’s a really good show.