Michael Wheeler

Currently the number one use for Wine in Linux is for gamers. I don’t game very often, but it’s fun to play some games here and there, and this time I felt like getting pwnd in Counterstrike Source. It is amazing how far wine as some since 2002. The new steam installs and runs in Wine like a windows app would, and both Portal and CSS worked out of the box. TF2 needed a little tinkering to fix out audio caches, but after that it worked fine. Considering that wine has to take all the DirectX calls and turn them into OpenGL, I am quite impressed with the frame rates, and the best part was I was still running compiz-fusion! Unlike Windows, this allowed me to switch between the game and other apps without tones of redraws.

The only issue I did have was that sounds from Wine took ~2 seconds before I could hear them, making first person shooters fairly hard. Knowing that Wine didn’t have Pulse Audio support I looked around, and sure enough someone had released a patch. Not only did someone release a patch, but it had been added to portage, and just required unmasking.  Apply the use flag and I had sound working at a decent quality.

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.