Michael Wheeler

TheSkorm – IMG_3438

Had some old hardware laying around at home, so I thought I would make my own iMac, or more namely, iBigMac. Started with a Dell 15″ LCD, an a7v8x-x with a AMD 450mhz CPU, and a nVidia Geforce graphics card and an unknown amount of RAM. It wasn’t much of a build. Make some holes in the LCD plastic, screw everything down and the hardware part was done.

I planned on using a USB stick to boot it, but he motherboard doesn’t support it so it’s network booting using PXE to my server, which is pretty cool. It’s BIOS is really quick, and since everything is loaded in RAM it’s quite speedy. It’s perfect for quickly looking at a website, and requires a lot less power. 100% recycled parts.

Oh, the red tape is to hold the motherboard on the screen at the top half. None of the holes lined up.

ssh kickz – blueDonkey

I like SSH and I like HTTPS, but some times I want SSH to run on port 443 (HTTPS port) so I can use it to get over corporate firewalls and/or school firewalls, depending on the time of year, which used to mean getting https, taking it up a steep hill and sacrificing it to the gods, while SSH was taking a spa in it’s $1.2 Billion luxury apartment.

Although today SSH and HTTPS have become friends with the help of sslh, which allows you to take the best of both worlds and run SSH and HTTPS on the same port with a little bit of haxing.

sslh can be downloaded from http://www.rutschle.net/tech/sslh.shtml and there is also a perl one, which isn’t all that good, that can be downloaded from http://search.cpan.org/~book/Net-Proxy-0.07/script/sslh .

The setup was pretty easy, however I did have a problem that took me longer than it should have to fix. I used my modem to change port 443 on the outside world to port 22 on the inside world and forgot to remove that rule, which ended up confusing the shit out of me.

Problems aside I now have SSL and HTTPS runing side by side without a problem and for a final note, yes this has been the most exciting thing that has happened to me in the last week, not including the job of installing and configuring 27 Cisco 8 port 3560 switches.

MSN Butterfly Ladies – Canadian Veggie

I don’t mind MSN, I like to use non Microsoft clients, as they have no ads, and they’re generally easier to use. I typically used Pidgin, but Pidgin has started crashing on MSN, so I thought it’s time to ditch the closed source protocol and start actively using XMPP. The best part is, I use GMail, so I already have a XMPP account and server.

I’m currently using Gajim and I’ve placed it on the Compiz Fusion widget layer, which makes it even more nicer.

I’ve also installed a VOIP softphone, however I don’t think it’ll run all that well through my throttled internet.

Screenshot – TheSkorm

After a few troubles getting Gentoo I finally done it. It took me about 9 kernel recompiles, 5 fresh starts. Nevertheless the reward is awesome. I know have lots of HDD space to play with, and really fast machine.

That’s right, no more OS X or Windows, the software I run on my Macbook, is 100% running on free software. Everything (with the exception of flash) has been compiled for my system.

I’ve created a few scripts, such as switching the fan speed from high to automatic and back again, because I want my lap cool, but I also want to save battery and not make too much noise.

Everything is working really nicely, except for the intel driver forcing me into 1024×768, instead of 1280×800, unfortunately the new intel drivers break for me so I’m stuck -_-.

I’ve been taking some time lapse sun sets, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll get a good one. Today I set the timer to short, so it was very jumpy. We’ll see.

impdclient – TheSkorm

Striped of resources and money, we tend to look at DIY and recycling to fund projects. In this case, I wanted a computer that could surf the net, pidgin, email, youtube and play music. I hoard junk like some old granny and her records, so I had some stuff laying around to make up a fairly old PC. What I ended up with was, 800mhz, 512mb RAM, 32GB hard drive, Geforce 2 MX 400 (32mb), RaLink RT2500 wifi card, cd burner (which has now failed after the install). I haven’t spent a cent on this box, it’s just pieces from PCs that would have been thrown out.

You’re thinking, 800mhz, that’s Windows ME old, there’s no way you could possibly do all that on such an old box. Well I can, and I’m doing it right now. Sure it isn’t a speedy box, but with Gentoo on it, it accomplishes all this with easy, I can surf, check my mail, IM, irc, and listen to music at the same time with absolutely no problem.

This is with the help of Gentoo. The way Gentoo is made, it’s made for speed and performance. No two Gentoo installs are the same, everything is compiled (with the help of emerge) for your PC and you choose exactly what you want installed. The smallest Gentoo install only includes the bear minimums, for the machine to boot.

Sure it’s a lot of compiling, but emerge does it all with a breeze, and you just set a few things to compile and goto bed. With the use of CCACHE you can speed up recompiles easily and if you’re lucky enough you can get distcc to use other computers to help with the load (I couldn’t do this).

The Gentoo install was pretty easy and the thing that usually takes me weeks only took me 30 minutes including compile. Wifi, the Wifi card installed a breeze and it only took me a bit of reading before I worked out howto hook it up with my WPA PSK enabled home network.

I’m using xfce4 as it’s lightweight and powerful, and is really nice to use. It’s like gnome without the fat. Xfce4 took the longest to compile but it was worth it.

If you ever have the time to setup a full blown Gentoo setup, I really suggest it, it’s a really good desktop Linux distro. I wouldn’t really use it for servers (I’m a FreeBSD fag) but I’ll be using Gentoo a few times in the future.

Now I wanted to share some of my favourite Linux apps:
- MPD (Music player daemon), I finally got around to installing this nicely and it’s great to use with gmpc. I also found impdclient (shown in picture), so I can use my iPod Touch to control the music on my nix box.

-gkrellm, As ugly as it looks, it’s really nice to have to see stats.

-xchat, has really picked up it’s game the last time I used it, and looks like a really nice client now. Still needs some stuff smoothed out

-Thunderbird, Very nice email client.

-Transmission, Perfect for torrents. (sharing linux distros)

-Gimp, great for image editing

A few more obvious ones that I use a lot are, Firefox and pidgin.