Tag Archives: Tech

Macbook

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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.

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

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.

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-----

Why I love the Idea of ZFS

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Bonwick said, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn’t fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.” Later he clarified:
“Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 litre of space can perform at most 1051 operations per second on at most 1031 bits of information.[10] A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2128 blocks = 2137 bytes = 2140 bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2140 bits) / (1031 bits/kg) = 136 billion kg. To operate at the 1031 bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×1028 J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×1021 kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×106 J/kg * 1.4×1021 kg = 3.4×1027 J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.”

Taken from wikipedia.

Autocad pump assignment

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Autocad pump assignment
Originally uploaded by TheSkorm

The assignment is to pump water up the hight of 6 meters using manual labour or the wind. I’ve talked about this in a few blog posts, this is basically a test to see how well motion path animation is on AutoCAD, and how well flickr video is.

This also tests how well, flickr blogs it to my blog, let’s see how well it goes.

[Update]
Looks like it’s blogged alright, and it looks all pretty, which is nice.

Analytics

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I’ve been playing with Google Analytics for a little time now on my blog, and I find the overall use of this feature nice. It allows you to see what type of audience is reading your site, where their visiting, and from which site they came from. 

Ethics of it, I’m still unsure about, yeah sure a site owner can do what ever they like, but is tracking people going to far. A lot of assumptions can be made from the data too, which I really wouldn’t like to happen to me. Although it does help the writer target the text at a particular country, language and internet speed.
It can also help with targeting and placement of ads, it wether or not they are actually doing their job.
I suppose it can be a good tool, if it is used correctly. 

OpenID Fun

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I’ve been messing around with my OpenID, which blogger runs for me, on OpenID enabled sites like Propeller and Magnolia (both digg alternatives). Which has been quite fun. I also found Plaxo, which seems to sync all your contacts (OS, email server, email client, IM services) and it created a generic profile that allows you to have your youtube, last.fm, myspace, facebook, twitter, digg …. (The list goes on) stuff all in one places. It basically puts every Web 2.0 app in one place and includes calendar and address book syncing with several services. It seems really new so it’ll be nice to see how it turns out.

When pasting some items on Pastebin.ca, which I do quite often, I noticed an OpenID flavored login box, I further explored their site and noticed that they also do a image and file hosting service too, which I’m going to use for the moment. Skitch is a handy app to have, to take screenshots and upload to the net, allowing you to highlight certain aspects of the screenshot easily. A one click image upload feature is really handy, and I have enjoyed Skitch so far. I suggest you check these out.

I’m generally pleased with Bloggers OpenID simplicity.