Blizzard arrived yesterday (Thursday) and below are a few photo’s of what the lounge looked like after the un-boxing and assembling it.
Category Archives: Linux
iTunes Server on Linux
I have a Mac Mini that sits in my lounge and is hooked up to my LCD TV and hifi. I use it with front row to watch “stuff” and listen to music. I’ve been wanting to work out a way to access all the music on my other Linux machine for a while now. Continue reading
Recording Your Entire Life
I was reading a post, “Recording Your Entire Life” and all the comments about it on Slashdot, then went on to reading the linked article at Scientific American (A Digital Life).
I was immediately reminded of a movie called “The Final Cut” with Robin Williams. The movie is a little creeping.. basically the idea is that people could have a “Zoe Implant” put into there unborn children that would record everything they see and hear. When the person dies, the implant is removed and loaded into a fancy editing station where a cutter then edits it into a highlights package that is played for the family and friends of the person who died.
Too many files open…
I’m not exactly sure what my computer was up to while I was at work today. But when I arrived home today I couldn’t get the screensaver to bring up the login screen, but the machine was responding to pings…
So I CTRL+ALT+F1 to get a console and try login, and I get the error on the right…
“Cannot execute /bin/bash: Too many files open.” which basically means I couldn’t login at all… so I rebooted and everything seems to be ok now.. weird.
Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10)
So 1000 and something packages and about 900mb later I have a completely uptodate version of Ubuntu my upgrade to the new 6.10 version of Ubuntu finished late Saturday night and I sat tweaking things until early Sunday morning.
I had hoped things would go smoothly, but they didn’t. I had to fix plenty of odd dependency problems by hand but eventually it installed everything and I had a working installation of Ubuntu again.
Upgrading to Edgy Eft (Ubuntu 6.10)
Right now rain my main linux machine at home is busy downloading the packages to complete the upgrade to Ubuntu 6.10 – Edgy Eft. It was pretty easy todo just dropped to the command line (well gnome-terminal) and ran ‘sudo update-manager -c -d’ typed in my root password and let it start downloading. I know this is going to take awhile, according to the little time estimate about 5 hours on my 384k ADSL line.
So while I’m waiting for it to finish downloading I’m busy reading up about some of the cool new stuff in Edgy Eft and trying to decide what I’m going to tweak first. I think I’ll start with getting AIGLX + Compiz working, also want to see what kind of a difference upstart makes to startup times and then I think I’ll kinda wing-it and see what looks cool. Looks like I’ll be spending plenty of time on the Ubuntu Forums.
Release Notes for Ubuntu Edgy Eft, so you can see what’s new and cool.
Fonts
Been messing around with doing a little design work this morning… and discovered Pengiun Fonts.
If you’re looking for “free” fonts that look cool and instructions on installing them on your linux distro of choice this is the place to go look. Oh and if you’re using Ubuntu and want to install the fonts easily just open Nautilus goto the location fonts:/// and drag the font in…
My (not so) new toys…
I’ve got a problem that I really like buying computers, and while I don’t always have an exact use for them when I buy them I normally find something for them to do.
A few weeks back (about 2) I went round to a company called Bridgeport Technical Services. These guys sell refurbished computers. The nice thing is the machines are rather cheap and they don’t come with any Operating System so they perfect for installing Linux on to.
So I bought two machines, although I really wanted to buy alot more.
Open Source CAD
I’m always desinging something, I admittedly never build anything… or not once I’ve worked out it’s do-able but I enjoy designing weird stuff. Almost all of my designs are scribbles on paper and I never actually make any kind of plans for them. Paper’s cool because it’s simple, you don’t need much to draw something and it’s quick. It does have it’s down sides, things aren’t that straight it’s hard to get the scale right without rulers and possibly the worst part is that when you decide to move something or want to see if perhaps putting a hole through the case would look ok or moving the bathroom next to the kitchen to see if it’s better you need to re-draw everythng because you can’t just move stuff around and theres no undo button.
Which brings us to CAD software, I’m not looking for anything fancy, my needs are simple. I want something thats easy to use and that I can draw any kind of technical drawing. Ideally I want to be able to in the same program do the floor plan for my million dollar mansion or the design for my new tv cabinet or the case for the ultimate HTPC. The problem is that I have a minimum requirement that the program works on Linux and it would be nice if it also ran on MacOSX and Windows and that it shouldn’t cost anything.
And so the search starts for an open source CAD program.
Continue reading
Open Source Desktop Publishing Software
Having once run my own small business I know all about doing things yourself to save money. One of the things that we did alot of was brochures, manuals and other printed documents. When you’re a small company you can’t always afford all the fancy expensive software so alot of our documents were generated in OpenOffice.org Writer or Microsoft Word now theres nothing wrong with either of these but they not exactly the “best” in desktop publishing applications.
That was all 2 years ago and alot has changed since then. I no longer have my own business so I don’t need to do any desktop publishing and the opensource world has now caught up and there are alot of awesome applications available for free. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on making and designing things I still am constantly tinkering with things although now it’s more a “just for fun” thing.
Below is a list and short description of some opensource applications that I’ve played with. This isn’t everything available and these are not necessarily the only applications available but these are the ones I know about.