About 5 or so months ago I signed up for Spotify.  For those of you who haven’t heard of Spotify it’s like the Netflix of music.  It’s an online music streaming service that has a massive catalog of music available to stream on demand.  If you pay for their premium service for $9.99 a month you can stream their entire catalog to any mobile device instantly.  You can also create custom playlists that automatically sync to every device you access the account with and you can also make any playlist or track available for offline play.  This means that songs are downloaded from their catalog and stored locally which is a big help for those who have a smart phone but don’t always have reliable bandwidth available through their cellular carrier.

What I like about Spotify:  Their catalog really is pretty large and far reaching and you can listen to any track from it instantly without commercial interruption (if you’re a paying member).  The PC/Mac client software you use has an easy to use “Similar Artists” feature which is handy for finding music that falls right in line with an artist you are already listening to.  Also from a musicians perspective there is something to be said here about their business model.  Every artists who has music on Spotify get paid a small bit of money every time their track is listening to.  I believe it’s something around 2 cents per play.  It’s also something that actually stands to deter people away from pirating music because $9.99 is a fair price to pay for access to such a massive catalog that you can play any track from instantly, without waiting for something to download.

What I don’t like about Spotify:  Their catalog doesn’t have everything (but that’s not necessarily their fault).  You will likely discover at least one CD from a favorite artist of yours that is conspicuously missing from the catalog that are not available for streaming due to contractual agreements made in the past that did not foresee such streaming services being a possibility down the road.  I also don’t like the lack of an ability to apply the “Shuffle All” option against all the playlists you might add, though the next best thing that you can do with create one mega-list of songs and just shuffle all that… but putting that list together would be tedious and a little redundant.  I also think it would be nice if they had some kind of radio station type feature, similar to Pandora, where you just say “Play me some new, random music in this genre.”  This is one thing I’ve always liked about Pandora or any radio station where perhaps the best way to discover new music is to blindly wander into it.

Wikipedia: List of common misconceptions

In order to figure out the cause and best solution for each of these problems, I’m going to have to take a lot of time to break the problem apart and engage with the Ubuntu Forums perhaps and maybe even have to experiment with thing (to quote Cave Johnson of Portal 2) “to throw science at the wall and see what sticks.”  Unfortunately both of these machines are productions machines, and lately (due to my music production software requirements) I’ve been running Windows a lot more often.  Windows is unaffected by the problems I’m having, which would be the case on the Server machine too if Windows were even present (it is not), and because Windows is still running I’m easily able to boot it, download a fresh copy of Ubuntu 11.04 and burn a fresh CD at 4x speed with my fingers crossed.

What I’m about to do is reinstall the entire operating system from the CD, replacing the old one and all the software that was installed with a fresh installation that’s far less prone to failure WITHOUT having to backup the user data and move it out of the way because I’ve already set it aside on it’s own partition.  That’s what this guide is going to be focusing on:  Manual Partitioning.

It didn’t take very long to get the hang of how things worked and for all of 2010 I continued to study tutorial videos, books, watched interviews with experienced engineers who talked about tricks they pull in the studio and I’ve come to feel pretty comfortable with understanding the fundamentals.  The basics involve common types of sound equipment and tools used in studio production; stuff like controlling dynamics with compression (as well as knowing when and how to use side-chain or parallel compression), EQ, building complex effects from scratch, tweaking synth presets to reshape the sound to something specific, use of things like arps, CV splitters, sequencers and so on.  Reason and the official tutorial videos on YouTube served as a great platform for learning.  A year after returning home and working on all this stuff something happened that I did not expect.

Early in 2011 a favorite band of mine (Younger Brother) decided to release a new album of theirs on a site called PledgeMusic.  The way it usually works is a band will create a fund drive to raise a certain amount of money to pay for the production of their next release (a portion of which goes to a charity) by selling things like limited edition lyric sheets, signed copies of the album, VIP passes to any show you could make it to, extremely limited lithograph prints signed by the photographer (in this case Storm Thorgerson, best known for his Pink Floyd cover art) and, not lastly, a few seats to participate in a studio workshop with the primary members of the band, Simon Posford and Benji Vaughan who may be better known for their own solo projects Shpongle and Prometheus, respectively.

The workshops were set to take place in London at an unspecified time in the future, and given the number of seats originally made available, the sessions were meant to occur over a string of days (which ended up being scattered widely over the next year).  Apparently they overbooked themselves and with a lot of touring coming for Simon and Benji, some sessions had to be postponed indefinably.  I slightly regretted telling them “the later the better” when asked when I’d be available to go on such a trip.  A whole year went by until they checked back with me and asked if I would be available in early March this year.  You bet I was. 

I left on a Thursday afternoon at about 2 p.m., arriving in Detroit and departing at about 7:40 p.m..  When I arrived in London it was about 8:15 a.m. local time and I snapped this picture just before we landed in some very thick fog:

Unfortunately I barely managed to get more than 20 or 30 minutes of cumulative sleep on the way.  By the time I transited the subway station from Heathrow to Blackhorse Road station and then walked about 8 blocks to the house I was staying in it was about 11 a.m. local time, and I was starting to feel some severe jet lag.  Every time I took a step it felt like the ground was bouncing under me.  I couldn’t remain awake any longer.

I stayed in a spare room provided by a couple named Jess and Luke, who among many others offer their rooms for rent at a website called airbnb.com.  Anybody can use the site to offer up (or find) a place to stay for tourists and it was perfect for me; far far better than the idea of staying in a hostle with a bunch of strangers sharing a dorm filled with bunk beds and one shower or something.

I woke up that evening at about 8 p.m. and really didn’t have much choice when it came to doing any site seeing because it was already dark.  After getting some frozen pizzas at a grocery store that seemed to be less than a block away as well as some Jim Beam whiskey for good measure, I sat down trying to decide if I wanted to go out late anyway just to try and see something, anything.  After a lot of indecision I decided to try and trek my way back south west and see if I could make it to the Westminister station and see Big Ben at night, before the tube stations closed.  I barely made it in time to snap a few pictures and turn right back around to head back to where I came from.

While standing there I ironically used my watch to check the time…

When I got back to the station I started at, the train I got off of just happened to arrive at the same time the last one was departing.  That was a close one.

With my sleep schedule royally messed up I couldn’t get back to bed, no matter how much Jim Beam or pizza I consumed.  I slept in until noon the next day.  I learned that the primary subway line I was planning to use that weekend was going to be shut down for maintenance the entire time.  The TFL website suggested I take a bus from the shut down station about half a mile to another train station, but that was because I searched for a route starting there, instead of where I was staying at.  Had I put in the actual address I would have discovered there was a train station not more than 3 minutes walk from where I was… A big waste of time to kick the day off but I eventually made it to the famous Portobello market, had breakfast at about 4:30 in the afternoon (a sirloin steak, which was unremarkable by this Kansas boys’ standards) picked up a few souveniors, and then made it to the London Eye.

And from up on top of this thing, I managed to snap some very cool pictures, like this one of the Waterloo train station…

I took several others but there really isn’t any room in here for them.  The end of the night involved me going to the wrong address trying to find a night club called The Fabric.  The city guide app I was using on my phone to get around had the wrong address cached, so I had to ask directions at a small pub.  In retrospect I wish I had just stayed at the pub.  Long story short, there was a fair number of very creepy people wandering the streets surrounding that club and by the time I found the place it was almost time to start trying to find my way back home for the night.  The subway route I attempted to take to get home  was partially down for construction and I had go back to where I started to take a very long way around to find my way back home.  Again, I wish I had known about the train stations that aren’t on the standard tube maps.  If you ever go to London, use this map.

The next day I woke up extra early because I had a bad dream that I had actually managed to sleep in until 3 PM, which would have meant I had completely missed the studio workshop.  I got up, had a traditional english breakfast with Luke and Jill where they made me some toast with marmite on it (which I thought was great) a boiled egg and some cereal, juice and coffee.  By 10:30 I was ready to start making my way from the quiet Walthamstow residence and into Ladbroke Grove, giving a beggar some spare change along the way before finally arriving at the Saga Centre and met by Benji Vaughan.

He showed us up to a room on the second floor which was quite small but equipped with all the necessities, including a sound proof booth with a mic inside.  We (another gentleman from Norway had, like me, purchased a seat and it was the two of us attending the session today) were given a quick overview of all the outboard equipment Benji had his iMac attached to.

Simon appeared a few minutes later and by that time we had already decided that what we were going to spend our time that day remixing a Younger Brother song (Crystalline) for a yet to be released album.  It was either that or try to write a song from scratch and according to Benji the last sessions that opted to go that route kinda went south, so it was nice to know that what we were going to be working on was something that actually needed to be made.

We started off by muting a lot of the original tracks to make space for some new ones.  The first thing Benji did was come up with a new drum beat using his new Maschine, which was kind of difficult to do without making it sound exactly the same as the original beat that we had muted.  To give it some variety a kind of hollow reverb was applied to the snare and the tone of the reverb itself would slide upward and reset every two measures; just one of many subtle touches that give an electronic atmosphere to the track.

Simon decided to pull out a bass guitar, which proved to be a bit of a crap instrument.  If you had your open string tuned correctly but then played the same string on the 12th fret or something it would become slightly flat.  But that was fixed later by using the Grammy winning software plugin Melodyne, which was one of the most incredible tools I’d ever seen.  We recalled first seeing a video for it years ago; I told them that when  I first saw it I thought it looked like a concept pitch to potential investors.  Turns out that today it’s quite real and quite awesome!

While recording the bass guitar the sound card crashed partially and recorded the bass as more like a robotic, extremely distorted mess.  We decided to KEEP this awful sound and try to turn it into something cool with Melodyne.  Then we sent that tuned, slightly cleaned up noise through some effects, and they had a LOT to choose from.  I couldn’t remember every one we played with but I did remember using Effectrix, Buffer Override, Buffeater, Automaton and an assortment of effects by Universial Audio.  A lesson learned while messing around with all this stuff was that it’s important to just mess around for the fuck of it.  We never knew entirely what to expect when playing around with these kinds of effects and it just went on to demonstrate how you can have happy accidents if you just stop thinking about the song itself and just have a go at it.

A lot of the sounds that end up in any given track of theirs start off outside the computer, such as from an analog synth like the classic OSCar in the lower right.  Benji played a little melody into Logic which would push MIDI data back out to the synth which then allowed him to go to the mixer and start a feedback loop between the console and his Eventide Harmonizer, which was set up to create a reverb or ping pong echo or something.  (Speaking of Eventide, the fellow from Norway reminded us that there’s a shot of an Eventide Harmonizer in the movie Contact and Simon went on to point out that Eventide gets a lot of their dollars by selling specialized sound processors to the US military; quite a weird company).  It’s a simple effect Simon demonstrates in this video.  You can get a lot of weird stuff to come out a setup like that by very carefully feeding sound back onto itself while looping through an effects processor of some kind.  One of a few ways in Reason that this can be achieved using the new Echo rack device and using a high percentage of feedback while playing with the frequency and resonance knobs (you can hear me do this to a bit of flute in the latest rough draft of Chill Grill; just click the play button below).

Simon often helped break dull moments by sharing videos he recorded on his iPhone.  What does Simon Posford like to record with his phone you ask?  Well in this case, his television screen when he was watching the original Batman and Robin series the previous night at home, which if you’ve not seen Batman in a good thirty years or more you don’t know what you’re missing.  That show is over the top hilarious from time to time.  He liked it so much he decided to hook his phone up to the mixer and sample an audio clip from the show into the remix.  Hard to say what will stay in the final mix but I wouldn’t be surprised if Robin exclaiming “Holy Hi-Fi!” manages to stay in.  They joked about telling Ru Campbell (the vocalist, who wasn’t present) that the remix wouldn’t contain any of his original vocals and that instead the song was now Batman based, saying he would be shocked if told that.

I also got to sneak peak a few very cool things, such as a new unreleased Shpongle track (it was quite good), what the “Shpongletron 2.0″ stage is going to look like, and the Younger Brother Vaccine sketchbook which fans have been waiting on for a long, long time.  It is very beautifully laid out and features information about all the audio equipment used in the making of the album, the making of the cover art (which involved throwing tennis balls at Ru to get him to flinch and cover his face), photos from the recording sessions, a picture from Simons backyard in the middle of winter, a picture of Benji and a gypsy working in the studio; it all looked great!  Benji is going to try and get an interactive digital version of the book published online for download.  They also told me what little they knew about Twisted Records newly signed artist In:terlaken, which was almost next to nothing at all.  They’ve never met him.  All they know is he’s a perky young buck from Switzerland whose father would of preferred seeing him grow up to become a watch maker.

Day turned into night and the light rain never ceased.  What was originally supposed to be a session that was to last 5 hours went on for 7 and a half hours.  Most of the time was spent experimenting with plugins, recording different sounds, composting, eating a sandwich Simon shared with me, smoking hand rolled cigarettes and otherwise trying our best to come up with ideas for stuff to put into the remix.  Coming at this with a background in Propellerhead Reason most of the hardware we were using weren’t particularly interesting to me, save for the synths themselves; they have a uniquely beautiful quality in their sound and it was nice to have something like that you could just reach over to and grab a knob and start tweaking.  But I think the thing I most appreciated seeing were the VST plugins.  Being a Reason user, I’d never touched or really had the ability to use VSTs before, but since my return I figured out how to do it with the help of Ableton Live and Rewire and look forward to experimenting with them more while actually using this as an opportunity to become more familiar with Ableton.

Like I said before, I think the best thing I got from the session besides exposure to a lot of cool VST plugins was the message that it’s best to walk into a studio with nothing in particular in mind and just start banging on stuff randomly and accept the fact that you’ll probably produce a lot of rubbish, because rubbish is still a lot better than nothing at all.  Also, it’s best to not to over think things or try to plan out a concept for a track in advance or else you’ll likely set yourself up for failure.  This coming from a couple dudes who insist they have no idea what they’re doing.  Cheers!

Latest tracks by David Steinlage

Today I’m happy to announce that I’ve replaced the open-source VNC-protocol-based software I was using with something better:  TeamViewer.  TeamViewer is one of the most popular remote desktop connection programs/services out there (with over 200,000,000 users world wide) and they offer a very cool service.  The way remote assistance sessions will work now is simply a matter of visiting the Virtual Dave page, clicking on the logo for your OS (Windows, Ubuntu or Mac OS; other Linux versions are available from TeamViewers’ website) and then running the file that you’ve downloaded.  You’re then presented with a TeamViewer window which will generate a fresh/random User ID number and Password, like this:

To give remote access to someone, you just tell them what those two randomly generated numbers are.  That’s it!  A super simple, super secure solution for remote tech support.  One thing to note is that TeamViewer QuickSupport does not install anything when you run it, so if you intend to use it again you’ll want to Save the file you’ve downloaded for future use.

I love open source software and maybe someday I’ll go back to using Gitso if it ever hits version 0.8 but at the moment it would seem TeamViewer is by far the best choice for my needs and I look forward to making use of it.

For those who aren’t tech savvy, the word “source code” refers to the so-to-speak “recipe” for the development/creation of a program.  It is literally the instructions that are more or less written by computer programmers.  This kind of information is proprietary and is often a trade secret, much like the coveted ingredients list for Coca Cola or my moms apple pie.  If one were able to obtain such information, say a competator or the creators of compuer viruses, one might use this information to one-up the software or, more importantly, exploit design flaws to circumvent the software.  In short this means it is quite likely there will be a new breed of viruses on the horizon that will be capable of outsmarting Norton, rendering it useless and crippled.

Symantec has been trying to downplay the severity of this breach by stressing the age of the code, stating that the origin is a version of their software that dates back to 2006, or so we’ve been told thus far.  This is an attempt to defuse the concern by implying that their latest software is far different at its core and that there won’t be very much that is useful to virus writers because they still don’t have their hands on the latest blueprints.  But the reality of the situation is far less peachy than they would like to paint it.  In the world of computer programming software and even entire operating systems will retain a fair chunk of old code from previous versions simply because, well, it’s already been written and if it “works” then there’s little need to rewrite it from scratch.  I’m not saying source code is never rewritten, revised or updated from time to time, but when it comes to large programs such as Norton Antivirus that’s made up of tens of thousands of lines of code it could easily be argued that there is likely a good percentage of old code that has been retained for years without ever being modified.  It would be like having a castle or fortress that is under continuous construction and maintenance.  You can’t afford to tear the whole thing down every year and rebuild it from scratch, so instead what you do is build around and upon the existing structure and make repairs to the parts that need repairing the most.  This means that likely most of the fundamental structure is retained and knowledge of the construction of such a structure could be used by an enemy to find a previously unnoticed vulnerability.

In the interest of full disclosure I will have to admit that Norton hasn’t been on my list of recommended software since the late 90s when it was practically the only anti-virus software available.  It’s early bird status was followed by years of successful marketing and advertising, which lead to its continuous wide spread recognition of the software/brand name, giving the impression to novice computer users that Norton really is the best thing out there.  ”How could it not be good when its so popular?” they might ask themselves.

I am here to tell you that the number one problem I fix for people in this line of work is virus removal and far too often I see systems that are running Norton that have become utterly trashed by multiple viruses while Norton gives inaccurate scan results, claiming the system is clean and virus free.  This is particularly irksome to me because when you consider the wide spread saturation of their software along with the monetary cost to the users for the renewal every year you would have to expect the company to use their position and resources to everyones benefit.  Despite its wide spread usage and price tag it fails to survey new viruses and develop new definitions for capturing and stopping them in an effective manner and so many users never seem to get their moneys worth.  I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt and accept the fact that there is no such thing as a “perfect” antivirus software, but you should expect to be given better treatment and results if you’re paying upwards of $70 a year for protection, especially when there are free alternatives out there that have been statistically shown to do a comparatively better job.  And to think these kinds of problems existed before some of their source code leaked.  Now that some source code has leaked and the potential for new viruses to be developed to exploit Norton itself are likely right around the corner I feel obligated to suggest that people avoid using it all together.  No amount of marketing or PR can change the consensus of most IT professionals who can see past all the BS and to me this incident is more than just one more nail in the coffin.

So what do I recommend instead of Norton?  I mentioned that there is “no such thing as a perfect antivirus” but there are alternatives that hold a higher reputation than Norton that cost a fraction of what Norton costs or even nothing at all.  In past blog entries I’ve mentioned Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes and Combofix and still recommend them, so here’s a little information about them.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free antivirus solution that Microsoft itself actually produces and it’s quite popular in the IT community right now for a couple of reasons.  I already mentioned that its free but it is also effective and not as resource intensive as other software.  There’s also a new stand-alone bootable version of it that’s going through public beta testing right now which is handy to have for particularly difficult viruses.  You can read more about it here.  Be aware that there has, in the past, been a rogue malware impostor simply called “Security Essentials 2010/2011/2012″ which people have confused with the real deal, falling victim to a trap.  You can download the real deal from here.

Along side MSE I also recommend users purchase the full copy of Malwarebytes for the one time payment of $25.  Some of the handy features it has is an active connection monitor which will automatically block your computer from attempting to connect to known malicious web servers.  It also features an active process monitor like a traditional antivirus and will help prevent a good number of rogue malware type software from infecting your system.  There is a free version of this available but its active monitoring features are disabled. I’ve been using it in the field for over 2 years now and it has worked incredibly well for helping clean systems that had already become infected.  You can read more about it here and download/purchase it from here.

Finally a tool I use quite often to help clean systems that have already become infected is a program called Combofix, which is free.  This isn’t so much a traditional antivirus that runs in the background as it is a stand-alone utility for scanning a system after it has become infected.  It is regularly updated so it’s best to not bother downloading and using it until you actually have to.  You can read more about it here and download it from here.

In conclusion I strongly advise my clients to not use Norton Antivirus because it’s one of the most over-hyped, over-priced products out there right now and with the news of parts of its source code being leaked it only stands to become an even less effective product that will do less to protect you than other cheaper alternatives out there.

Speaking of alternatives, there is always the option of picking an alternative operating system such as Linux.

Linux is a free open-source OS that comes in many flavors.  We are already seeing Android being adopted by smartphone and tablet users like crazy and it is just one example of a Linux based OS that is taking the world by storm.  But for desktop and laptop users there remains a need for a full fledged desktop OS and there are many out there to choose from.  My personal favorite is Ubuntu Linux which you can check out at ubuntu.com.  It’s not for everyone but I can easily say that it is a very ideal choice for the average user.  Keep an eye out for future posts; I intend to record a new introductory video for Ubuntu 12.04 when it is released this coming April.

A few notes about the most recent additions:

• Sleepy Daemons:  Added just before the new year, this track started as a non-percussive ambient, creepy thing.  Out of the blue I decided to add a lot of fast drums to it and things just popped to life.  Not sure where it will go next but I’m waiting for auditions for vocals to come in.
• Untitled Doodle/Ringtone:  I did everything in it but wouldn’t consider it finished just yet.  It features my first guitar performance recording and some cool effects processing.
• The Hare:  Again, 100% self-produced.  This one primarily features a new filter effects found in Reason 6 called The Alligator, an effect that’s more formally referred to as a “trance gate”.
• Delirium:  This started as a simple piano melody, which I put through the Alligator.  I then added a somewhat hiphop drum loop which I played with using a roll-echo effect to ramp the echo on and off.  This was eventually replaced with live drums, performed by r00m237.  Vocals came in by complete surprise thanks to a lady in California who goes by the name Deanna (thank you!).
• Document 22:  This features flute by Matt Unger and some guitars by Matt Christensen.

All my music is available for free under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license.  You are free to download, share, remix and use this music for non-commercial purposes.

• Kaspersky TDSSKiller
• Avast Anti-Rootkit

I don’t write blogs much these days but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about writing blogs the golden rule is to make them useful and valuable to people.  As a sort of philanthropic gesture I am now going to reveal a few tricks I use in the field when repairing systems that have already become infected with viruses or malware.  Perhaps these tips will save you some money during these dark economic times.  I can’t promise that these tips will work for you but for the DIY user who’s not afraid to get their hands dirty, it might prove to be very useful.  So lets get right to it:

Phase 1:  Safe Mode (with networking?)

Almost every version of Windows out there (from Windows 95 all the way up to the most recent Windows 7) have a hidden menu you can access at boot that gives you access to a diagnostic profile called Safe Mode.  Safe Mode is a sort of back door mode into Windows that loads the absolute (or nearly) bare minimum of device drivers and background services.  It’s sort of a bare bones environment that is suitable to start your repair from primarily because most viruses aren’t auto-started by the system in this mode, but it’s not perfect.  More on that in a moment.

To access Safe Mode you need to press the F8 key on your keyboard at a VERY specific time.  Typically when you turn your computer on you’ll see a screen that either has the logo of the manufacture of the PC or perhaps some generic startup relating to your BIOS.  At some point that all goes away, your screen will be black for about 3 seconds, and then Windows will proceed to boot with the little scroll bar loading away.  It’s during (or just before) that 3 second window of blackness that you need to start tapping the F8 key.  If done correctly, you’ll be presented with a menu that looks like this:

You’ll use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the highlighting selector bar.  Typically I will select Safe Mode With Networking, as this allows me to access the Internet and download utilities as well as give these utilities access to definition updates for itself later.

After you select Safe Mode With Networking and press Enter your screen will be bombarded with a slathering of strange and mysterious words…

Don’t worry, this is normal.  (Note: If instead of this screen above you get another menu asking what version of Windows you want to boot, just press Enter again).

Eventually you will get to the familiar blue colored user login screen and you might see an account called Administrator shown there that you’ve never seen before.  If you do, go ahead and select it to log in as “Administrator”.  Otherwise, select your own user name.

Once you’re logged in you have a few options you can take.  The safest way to get started is to actually bring a copy of your utility software with you on a thumb drive or CD to install it from, instead of downloading via a web browser.  The reason it’s not a good idea to try and download via a web browser is because a lot of viruses tend to wrap themselves around a browser’s EXE file so that when the browser starts, so does the virus.  This could potentially happen with a lot of other software so it’s best to try and resist the temptation to run any programs except for the cleaning utilities we’re about to install.

Phase 2:  Cleaning

There are only three pieces of software I typically use with great success in the field for removing viruses and malware.  They are:

• Malwarebytes
• Combofix
• Microsoft Security Essentials

All of the above are free with the exception of Malwarebytes, which functions with all its features on a 30 day trial when you first install it (note that you will see an error message appear when you tell it to start the trial while in Safe Mode; this is normal and you can ignore the error by clicking the OK button when it appears).  To keep the full version running you have to buy it for the low one-time payment of $25 and I strongly recommend it.  Apart from these three the only other tool I use is Google, which I’ll use to lookup exact phrases found within suspicious malware to see if I can find other people talking about that particular virus somewhere online and hopeful discover what unique thing they did to remove it.  Fair warning:  Your mileage may vary.

I typically start by installing Malwarebytes first (however I have had one experience where I wasn’t able to do this until after I ran Combofix so you might need to flip the order of these two tasks), applying the most recent update for it and then running a full scan, removing all infected objects it finds.  A typical scan can take around a half hour to do.  When it’s finished, you just need to click the “Show Results” button and then make sure the results listed all have check marks next to them and then click “Remove Selected” in the bottom left.  If an object doesn’t have a check mark when you first view the results it means Malwarebytes thinks it could be a false-positive result.  Use your best judgment and google to determine if either the file is malicious and/or if the file is a necessary part that can be removed without grief.  A reboot will likely be required when it is finished.  Be ready to hit F8 again when you do this so you can come back into Safe Mode and continue your work.

One thing I’ll often do while I’m waiting for a Malwarebytes scan to complete is take a look at the MS Config utility and see what items are enabled to auto-start when you boot into the system.  To access this, click Start, then click Run (or just click into the search box if you’re using Windows 7) and type in “msconfig” without the quotes into the box and click OK.  Then click the Startup tab at the top.

In this startup list are programs that are told to run right away when you first log into your system.  Almost all of these items are non-essential and to be on the safest side you could probably get away with unchecking all of these items, but that’s usually overkill and might rob you of some convenient feature you’d like to have.  Look carefully down the list for items that have empty path names, or very bizarre characters in their name… I have to admit that at this point experience with this stuff comes in to play.  If you don’t know what something is you could look it up by name with google on a separate computer before deciding to uncheck it  Alternatively, you could use the uncheck-all-the-things strategy and then go back later to add check marks back into the few items you know you need enabled.  You can also check out the Services tab which is to the left of the Startup tab, check the box that says “Hide all Microsoft items” and then use the same judgment to decide if there are third-party services running in the background that don’t need to be.  Google is your friend here for helping to determine if a service is useful or not.

Another thing I’ll do while waiting for a scan to complete is open the Add/Remove Program (Programs & Features) applet from the Control Panel to view all the software that’s been installed on the system.  I target toolbars of any kind first, next by software that is unfamiliar to the user.  Again, google is a useful reference here because you don’t want to remove something that’s known to not be malicious.

The next step is to run Combofix which you can find a tutorial about by clicking here.  It is pretty strait forward:  double-click on the combofix.exe file that you downloaded and follow the on screen instructions.  It’s own scan will also take about 30 minutes or so but it is very sensitive so once you kick it off, don’t touch the computer until its finished.   There is almost no interaction required with the software and it will automatically remove anything malicious it finds, producing a log with a lot of interesting jargon at the end that you can forward on to an expert for further analysis if you’d like.

After all this I’ll typically reboot the system and let it boot normally and then install Microsoft Security Essentials, running a full scan with it right after and checking to make sure the trial mode has been enabled on Malwarebytes.

If all of the above didn’t work, something I’ll try next is to reboot back into safe mode and use the control panel to create a new user account, then log off and log back in under that new account and repeat all the same steps above.  The reason this might help is because viruses tend to damage registry entries for accounts that existed when it found and infected the system.  Because we’re creating a new account in an environment that hopefully didn’t auto-launch the virus, we can then create a fresh account with it’s own default settings and preferences that hopefully won’t be manipulated by the virus.  This kind of problem could also be reversed using the System Restore utility but I’ve found that a lot of times (not always) I try to use this utility none of the restore points are any good.  I wouldn’t be surprised if previous restore points are destroyed by certain viruses making it even more difficult to undo the damage done.  In situations like that I’ve occasionally just created a new user account and migrated all the important user data (documents, etc.) from the old account to the new account, deleting the old one in the end because it’s irreversibly broken.

One last tip I’ve run across in a training video for a competitor of mine who will remain unnamed is to shut the system off by force instead of doing a soft reboot during this cleaning process.  In other words, hold the power button down for 5 seconds and then turn the computer back on after 20 seconds.  The reasoning behind this is that there are a few viruses out there that alter the shutdown script of events that take place during an ordinary shutdown and one of the events it injects into the script is to reinstall the virus during shutdown from a rogue location, as a Plan B so even if the live version of the virus is caught and removed it might be able to recreate the file from an encrypted copy of itself elsewhere.  If you decide to do this my only advice would be to backup the entire hard drive before doing so.  It’s technically dangerous… but probably not THAT dangerous… it’s best to remain on the safe side and not use shortcuts.

Finally a word about a couple of common viruses in particular I’ve run into in the last year:

A few of these viruses going around exhibit the symptom of making all your files and shortcut icons on the desktop vanish.  This is often done with a combination of changing the file attributes to enable the hidden flag, or by moving the files to a hidden location.  It is sometimes also conjoined with malware that tries to frighten you into thinking your hard drive is on the verge of failure, or at the least, claims to be antivirus software itself.  The goal of all such attempts is to get you to give up your credit card number.  Please don’t.

I’ve had great success removing the virus that causes these files to go missing but after it’s been removed it’s not always so easy to reverse the damage and restore the missing icons.  Fortunately there is one program out there that, for the most part, has been able to do this for me very simply and it’s simply called “Unhide”.  Use this program after going through all the above steps to be sure you’ve removed traces of the virus and hopefully it will get all of your stuff back for you.  You can download Unhide from here.

One other common symptom I’ve seen certain viruses exhibit is hijacking certain registry entries to alter file associations, specifically one which makes your computer forget what to run EXE files with, asking instead what program you’d like to open another program with.  I have found that in Windows 7 one trick of working around this is to right-click on a program shortcut and then click Run as Administrator.  This uses a separate registry association which hopefully has not been affected by the virus.  Using this Right-Click>Run as Administrator trick you should be able to run your scanning utilities like Malwarebytes and Combofix from within Safe Mode.

Phase 3: Prevention

Now that we know how much of a pain these kinds of viruses can cause we should talk a little about where they come from and the different ways they can end up on your computer.  I wrote a much longer blog about this topic which you can read here.  Basically it boils down to this:

• Make sure you install all available software updates for Windows itself as well as 3rd party software and plugins like Adobe Flash, Acrobat and Java (among others).  Updates are your friend and help to patch recently discovered security vulnerabilities.
• Pay attention to links people send you in emails.  It’s quite possible their email account has had its password stolen and is being used by a robot to send spam email with links to malicious websites out to everyone in their address book.  Warn your friends if you suspect their account has been compromised and suggest they change their email accounts password before following the steps above to attempt to remove a potential infection.
• Use good anti-virus software.  As recommended above, I prefer MSE and Malwarebytes.  Combofix is only to be used as an emergency utility; it doesn’t have a real-time monitoring feature.
• Consider using a software firewall to block unwanted inbound traffic and unexpected outbound traffic.  Zone Alarm Free is an excellent choice for this.
• Use an ad-blocking plugin to further reduce the chances of a virus sneaking in through a flash-based advertisement.  Ad-Block for Firefox is a great option.  You can also get it for Google Chrome from here.
• Along with these plugins, consider using a better browser.  Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome have both become superior to Internet Explorer, especially in terms of security.
• Avoid installing “toolbars” for your browser.  If you install one by accident, disable it in your browser or better yet uninstall it via your control panel.
• Avoid using P2P file-sharing software like Frostwire or MP3Rocket.  These methods of file sharing do not have any form of user moderation and anybody can wrap a virus inside a file then name it something innocent/sensational looking to trick people into downloading it and installing a virus.
• Consider adding a parental filter to your computer; you don’t need kids for this.  Having a web filter like K9 Web Protection can be helpful to block your computer from accidentally trying to connect with a known malicious server.
• Lastly, though this is too extreme for most people:  Consider switching to Linux on your desktop.  Linux is free, open-source and is even more secure than MacOS.  Seriously.

I hope this advice has been helpful.  Please leave comments or suggestions about other tips and tricks you use to help remove malicious software in the comments section below!

Apple includes a copy of their OS on discs you can boot from to run the included  Disk Utility. This checks the file system for integrity issues, file permission errors and corrects them for you. Unfortunately doing this did not solve this particular problem and the laptop remained stuck. Even booting into MacOS’s “Safe Mode” (by holding down SHIFT right after the startup chime is heard) didn’t work.

Most guides I’ve found on the Internet will tell you to send the system to an Apple Expert at this point. While there is a slim chance they might be able to revert the changes or correct the problem that’s causing a system to lockup while booting, an alternative approach is to do what is termed a “destructive recovery”, where the hard drive is erased and the OS reinstalled on a clean slate so to speak. Before you do that of course you’ll want to pull your own personal files/data off the drive. You can’t do this with the Disk Utility provided by the MacOS install discs, but there is another “utility” that’s totally free to download that you can do this with: Ubuntu Linux.

What You Need

1.  A blank CD
2.  Another computer to burn that CD with
3.  Ubuntu Linux ISO image file
4.  An external hard drive (preferably one that’s formatted to Windows NTFS; I will explain why in a moment)

Burning Ubuntu to a CD

First, visit the link to Ubuntu’s website.  Click the Get Ubuntu button and follow the steps to download the 32-bit version of Ubuntu.  You’ll be asked to download a large (about 700MB) ISO image file.  Once downloaded, you need to burn this file to a CD.  If you are burning this CD with another Mac you can follow this guide that will show you how to use the built in Disk Utility app to burn the Ubuntu ISO file you have to download from www.ubuntu.com.  And if you are burning with Windows, there is a “Show Me How” button you can click on at Ubuntu’s download page that will show you how to use a program called InfraRecorder to burn the ISO file.

Booting Ubuntu On Your Mac

Once the CD is burnt you will need to boot from it.  I have found the best way to do this on a Mac is to turn the system on and immediately after you hear the classic “chime” sound, hold down the Option key on your keyboard.   (Tip:  If you are using a Mac with a Windows keyboard hold down ALT instead.  Also, if you need to eject a disc from the system, hold down F12).  Eventually you will see this:

Double-click on the CD that says “Windows”.  We know it’s not actually Windows, but Mac doesn’t know any better… or Ubuntu isn’t presenting itself correctly.  Anyhooo…

If all goes well (and I can’t promise that it will but it did for me) you will see the Ubuntu boot screen appear (pictured above) with the purple background.  Please be patient as this is a slow process; loading an entire OS from a CD is not a quick and snappy ordeal.  Eventually Ubuntu will load up the Ubuntu installer screen.  At this point click “Try Ubuntu”.

It will proceed to load the rest of Ubuntu Linux right off the disc.  Eventually you will see something like this:

Accessing Your Data

First, we need to browse the hard drive inside the Mac.  You’ll do this using the Places menu.  When you click Places, you will see a list of several common folders like Home Folder, Pictures, etc.  Look past those in about the middle of the list and you should see an item called Macintosh HD.  We will mount it by clicking on it in the places menu.  (Note: It would also be a good idea to repeat this step to mount the external hard drive or media you intend to copy your data on to at this time, just to get mounting it out of the way).  The next thing you’ll see is the contents of the Macintosh HD volume.  Unfortunately there is a lot of data in this drive that you won’t be able to access/read right away due to file ownership and permissions.  But there’s a way around that.

You need to gain full administrative access to the hard drive so you don’t have to worry about file permissions getting in the way.  It is also recommended that you use an NTFS formated external hard drive for this because it will help avoid further file permission issues later down the road when you move your data back.  (If you use a Linux/Unix/Mac formatted external drive the files you copy are going to change owners from you to the Linux superuser account which means you’d have to change ownership of every file after copying them, so it’s just easier to scrape all those attributes off the files by sending them to an NTFS filesystem which does not store those descriptors).

Gaining Full Administrative Access To Your Files

To gain administrative access to the hard drive and browse the contents, click Applications>Accessories>Terminal in the upper left.  A new window will appear with a black background and white text.  From here type:

gksu nautilus

…and press the Enter key.  This will open the Nautilus file browser as the SuperUser (aka, “root” user).  It is exactly the same window you saw open when you mounted the drives from the Places menu, but keep in mind that this new file browsing window that has appeared is the ONLY window with root access.  Any others that were already open are still running at the standard user level, so you can’t drag files from the super users browser to any others unless you open a second terminal window and start a second instance of Nautilus in the same manner.  But it’s pretty easy to do all the browsing you need with the one window using the Edit>Copy and Edit>Paste menu options.

Note: The rooted instance of Nautilus will only let you browse volumes that have already been mounted.  If you’ve not already accessed your external hard drive or the Macintosh HD hard drive using the Places menu as mentioned earlier, do so now and then close or minimize those windows to get them out of the way, leaving the super-user instance of Nautilus running up front.

Copying Your Data

Once you’ve started the Nautilus file browser as the super-user, you can click on “Macintosh HD” in the left hand side of the Natilus window to begin browsing your hard drive.  For most users the most important data is going to be stored in the Users folder.  Simply scroll through the Macintosh HD hard drive to find a folder called Users.  If you browse through it a little you will quickly be familiar with the files you are looking at inside the Users folder.  You just need to copy everything out to the external hard drive.  To makes things simple and quick it’s easy to just copy and paste the entire Users folder to an external hard drive (as mentioned, NTFS drives are recommended purely to make the copying of data back to the computer easier after the OS has been reinstalled).

Also note: Stopping after the Users folder alone may not be adequate enough for some advanced users who may have data stored in other folders, such as the /var folder if the system was an Apache server.  Details about where your production/business critical data is auto-saved should be researched from the developers/publishers of said software or their respective README.txt/help documentation before proceeding to format your hard drive as all data will be lost after formatting.  In almost all cases everything will be in the Users folder, but fair warning to you if you are not certain.  For more information, refer to this official help article about application data storage locations.  By the way, the ” ~/ ” folder they refer to is shorthand for “your home folder”, which is inside the Users folder; you will find that everything they list is stored somewhere in there so you should be good with not copying anything else.

Reinstalling Mac OS

Now with all the user data backed up on an external hard drive you can restart the system with your original Mac OS install discs and proceed to use the Disk Utility to erase and re-format the hard drive and then proceed with installing the OS on a fresh partition.  Just press that Option key again to bring up the boot menu and boot from the MacOS install disc 1.  I would strongly recommend searching for and installing any and all available updates available for the OS and software before moving data back to the computer.

Moving Your Data Back

I have found that moving data back isn’t going to be as simple as moving the entire Users folder at once because Mac doesn’t like to let you merge folders.  You will be able to copy and paste the files and folders in groups to get everything back to where it was originally.  Alternatively you can use this tool called Folder Merge for Mac to help you copy all your files and folders back into place while skipping the ones that can’t be overwritten in their place.

If all goes well, you should be able to backup the data from your Mac and reinstall the OS in a matter of about 3 hours, most of which is a just a matter of sitting and waiting for things to finish.

Troubleshooting:  What if the drive isn’t shown?

In newer versions of Ubuntu (verions 11.04 and newer) the new Unity desktop interface is used, so there is no Places menu to open up.  However, you can still open your Nautilus file browser by clicking on the Home Folder icon.  Once open, look along the left side of the screen to see if your drive is shown among the other popular locations.

If it is not shown it may be necessary to mount the drive manually via a terminal window.  To open a terminal in Ubuntu 11.04 or later, click the Ubuntu button at the top of your dock bar to open the search panel and type in “Terminal”.  You’ll see the shortcut for Terminal appear which you can just click on to open up a terminal/command prompt.

Once the terminal is open you’ll want to get a list of the drives Linux is able to see.  To do this, type in the command:

sudo fdisk -l

The output will look something like this:

Starting at the top Linux is telling me that it sees an 80 gigabyte sized hard drive and has called the drive /dev/sda.  Within that hard drive are three partitions, called /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda5.  Below that we see there is a second 2000 gigabyte sized external hard drive and it has been called /dev/sdb, with only one partition called /dev/sdb1.  If we were looking at a Mac we’d likely only care about /dev/sda partitions and would only be interested in mounting whichever of these partitions is the largest.  You can quickly determine which is the largest of them all by checking under the Blocks column.

Once you’ve determined which partition is the largest we need to mount it.  For the sake of example, lets pretend that /dev/sda1 needs to be mounted.  Before we can do that we need to create a temporary placeholder folder for this partition to be aliased with after mounting.  To create an empty folder on your desktop called “temp” you would type:

mkdir ~/Desktop/temp

(Note: all linux terminal commands are case-sensitive).  Now we can mount /dev/sda1 into this temp folder with the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 ~/Desktop/temp

You can close or minimize the terminal window at this point and find the folder we created called temp on your desktop and open it.  Within should be the contents of your Mac hard drive, and you can now begin copying data from there into an external hard drive or other external media.  When you are finished it’s easiest to use the shut down menu in the top-right corner to shut the computer down (which will eject the disk for you).  If you were successful at extracting your data the next step would be to boot from your MacOS disc and proceed with using the Disk Utility to remove/format the existing partition(s) on your Mac’s hard drive, create a new partition and install MacOS on top.  I would recommend disconnecting your external hard drive before doing this so you don’t risk deleting your external hard drives partition by accident.

Good luck!

And just so everybody else out there reading this knows, I now charge a flat rate of $30 labor per device to replace LCD panels on all netbooks and laptops!

Unfortunately there is no good way to send a fax from your computer using Skype. The audio compression that takes place when sound is transmitted from one side to the other undergoes a great deal of detail loss, and this results in error correction protocols taking over and throttling the speed of the fax modem down to a crawl. So in theory, you could use Skype somehow to send a fax but it would literally take forever.

Enter in online faxing services. These are companies that allow you to send and receive faxes over the Internet. In doing some research to find one that performed well and at a modest price I stumbled across someone recommending a company called PamFax.  It was not long after first trying their service that I was pretty sure I could close the book on this egg hunt.

PamFax is delivered to you as a small program you install on your system and use to create your account.  They offer a free membership program which allows you to send three pages for free to see if you like their product or not.  I decided to sign up for the free account and then used a nearby fax machine where I work to send a fax to my new PamFax number.  The instant the fax was sent my PamFax account page auto-updated itself to tell me I had received a new fax.  Faxes are put into an inbox, just like emails, and each fax is downloadable in PDF format.

Sending a fax is also very easy.  You can either use the PamFax program to upload files you want to send or use the virtual PamFax printer device to send your documents to PamFax when you press Print in any application.  Here’s a video that demonstrates how easy it is to send a Fax:

Of course there will be times when you need to fax a physical document that’s already on paper.  The best way to do that is use a flatbed scanner to scan the documents into a PDF file.  You can do this very quickly with any number of Scanner-to-PDF style programs and any scanner.  A free one I’ve found to work well is aptly called Scan to PDF by Ironfist Software.  It is a free utility that you can use to scan multiple pages and then save all of them as one PDF file, which you’d then upload to PamFax for faxing to one or multiple recipients.

The cost for sending a fax varies based on whether or not you want to pay a monthly fee.  If you don’t pay a monthly fee it will cost you 13 cents per page sent and you will not be able to receive faxes.  If you step it up to the “Basic” package you will be able to receive unlimited faxes at a monthly rate of $5.84 plus 13 cents per page sent.  The professional package costs $8.80 a month, includes 20 free page out per month (9 cents per page after that), allows you to keep your received faxes online forever, and gives you the ability to administrate employee access to the account and regulate their limitations.  So there’s something for everybody.

In the end I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to install and use PamFax.  What’s even more impressive to me is their support for Linux. It’s rare that I have to send a fax but the next time I need to I know exactly what I’m going to use.  Good bye Kinko’s!

In the last month I’ve fixed three different computers just by blowing dust out of them.  These systems would turn on, reach the POST screen (which typically is the logo of the manufacturer or the BIOS) but would just hang there indefinitely.  Blowing the system out with a can of air (or in one case an air compressor) was all it took to bring the systems back to life.  Dust is just as much of a problem for laptops, but not so much for getting the motherboard dirty (because they’re fairly well sealed off from the outside air) but for clogging the heatsink fins so that the cooling fan can’t push air past the fins to keep your CPU cool.  The side effects of this are a noisy laptop that runs hot, or even powers itself off abruptly as a failsafe.

All CPUs these days have internal temperature sensors with a threshold for a certain amount of heat.  If that threshold is exceeded the processor will either throttle itself down in speed to the point where the system runs far slower than usual or the BIOS takes over and just shuts the system off completely.  So if you have a hot, noisy laptop that shuts off every now and then, you probably need to go buy a can of air.

You’ll find cans of air in the electronics section of just about any major retail store.  You need to be careful with these things because they contain a liquid that itself can conduct electricity and short your electronics out.  To prevent the can from shooting this stuff out it’s important to always hold it level and upright, not sideways or upside down.  This liquid also has an extremely low boiling point, which causes it to feel very cold when it’s not under pressure.  You can feel this by touching the can after using it for a little bit, and even hear the liquid boiling away inside to replenish the can with more compressed gas.  Something fun kids like to do with this stuff is spray it at glass while holding it upside down to produce a cold frost on any surface.  So you need to be careful not to do this to your own skin by accident or you might get a little frost bite.

These things can go pretty quick so I like to shoot the air in short bursts to try and save air while maintaining higher pressure.  Be sure to use that little straw that comes with these things to get a more focused shot of air into the areas that need it most.  I would also recommend you do this outdoors as the dust particles could make you sick if you inhale them.  Be sure to shoot everything, especially the inside of the power supply (that grey box your power cord plugs into) from all sides.

On laptops the only thing you can really dust out is the heatsink and your keyboard.  Some laptops have exhaust vents that only come out the back of the laptop, while others come out the side.  What I like to do is position the laptop in such a way so that I can shoot air directly into this exhaust vent against the normal flow of air produced by the fan while the laptop is running.  Having the laptop on while you do this is a good thing because the fan will help blow dust you’ve loosened back out and also help break it apart into smaller particulates that can fit through the fins.  Also shoot air into the intake of the fan.  Go back and forth between the exhaust and intake a few times until you can’t produce any more dust with your air.  Just beware that if you have never done this before you might have so much dust built up on the backside of the heatsink that loosening it up might cause a large chunk to get wedged in the fan, preventing it from spinning.  This isn’t much of a problem if you can remove the bottom panel from the laptop to access the intake of the fan but not all laptops let you do this and you might have to dismantle the entire machine to reach the fan and pull the fat dust bunny out with some tweezers.

I like to keep a can of air in the glove compartment of my car so I’ll always have something on hand to clean a system out when I make house calls.  But you should keep a can nearby and clean your system every 3 to 6 months to help improve air flow in your system so it can stay cool as well as reduce the possibility of something important being shorted out.

From here you’ll have access to my SoundCloud uploads which are finished projects, learn about my other works in progress and read a little about the making of some of my songs.  It’s not much to look at right now but I’m going to try and make things look a little more fancy in the coming months.

You can read more about the show by clicking here.

After hours of drinking stimulants and skipping sleep, this is the result, weighing in at roughly 13 minutes in length.  It is actually a combination of a new song with an old one that I originally wrote while living in Iraq during the later half of 2009.  It is a long song so you might wanna go to the restroom before you hit play.  Feel free to download the WAV of this song for top notch quality.

Magic Show by David Steinlage

Side Scroller by David Steinlage

These problems don’t strike me as novel or very interesting, mostly because you expect to see them occur at SOME point in time and at random.  Electronics wear out, lightning can strike at any moment, dust buildup shorts something out or jams a cooling fan; these things just happen from time to time.  But there was one issue I saw this year that really stood out as occurring more frequently than any other problem by far.  A problem  that seemed to happen so suddenly, so widely that you could almost call it “trend setting”.  So I wanted to take a look back and talk a bit about a problem I’ve seen more often than anything else this year:

“Warning:  You’re infected!  Click here now!”

The most prominent problem I saw this year, more than any other problem I got calls about, were from people saying they had gotten alerts popping up on their system similar to the one pictured above.  Typically you would be intimidated by a popup that said your system had a LOT of viruses on it and to click on various buttons/links to remove them.  Unfortunately it was all a ruse as these alerts were themselves part of a virus masquerading around as anti-virus software, taking computers hostage.   Their names and appearance had some variation but most of their tactics were the same:

• Prevent user from opening any other applications (including Task Manager)
• If you were able to open a web browser, any page you tried to visit would be replaced with a page that would fear-monger the user even further
• Change the browser proxy settings to point to a non-existent server and in doing so prevent the user from accessing the Internet for downloading removal tools
• Annoy the user with never-ending, obnoxious pop-ups that would invite the user to pay the developers of the fake anti-virus software ransom money
• Replicate itself across multiple, random locations on the hard drive, making it more difficult to remove manually

I began to get a lot of phone calls for this exact type of issue during the middle of the summer this year, and of course everyone wanted to know how their computer came to get this sort of junk software on their machine in the first place.  Along those lines:  Where do viruses come from, how could one have gotten on my computer and WHY on earth would someone create such an evil thing in the first place?

I don’t have the monetary resources to conduct an “official” study (and as such you should classify everything here to be anecdotal), so the next best thing I can do is look for things that were in common between PCs that fell victim to the same infection at about the same time.  The one thing that stood out the most to me was that Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat and/or Java were out of date and needed updates to be installed.

In the year 2010, Adobe has had to make multiple announcements about zero-day exploits found in their Flash plugin that could allow Flash to do things like crash a computer or to take control of it (e.g., facilitate the installation of a malicious payload or virus).

Just what is Flash, anyway?  Flash is a plugin for web browsers that has been a mainstay in webpages for over a decade.  Youtube videos, for example, are played within Flash.  Most advertisements you see on the web use Flash to animate video, elements, buttons, letters, etc.  Some websites are made entirely in Flash.  In the early days Flash was designed as an alternative to animated gif images and cartoon-like animations because for some uses it could actually conserve bandwidth because instead of pixels and color pallets taking up file space, you would instead be working with vectors (think connect-the-dots to create a shape of something, like a stick-figure man, and move the dots/vertices to animate it).  An awesome example of cartoon flash animation using very little bandwidth is www.homestarrunner.com (a favorite cartoon series I used to follow in the old days).  Over time Flash has evolved into quite a feature rich plugin that many have attempted to clone and dethrone, but all attempts have failed (so far).

In any case, as a result of being more efficient than animated bitmaps and saving web hosts money on bandwidth and faster loading times while increasing the “eye-candy factor” during the days of dial-up, Flash became a preferred/common means of deploying advertisements on the web, and eventually advertising itself became so big that there are now companies that do nothing but produce and host Flash-based advertisements for other websites. What this means is that many websites do not actually host/serve the advertisements that you see on their website, as they have offset the bandwidth requirements for this function to third party companies.  Unfortunately, because advertising is a big deal online, it raises the bounty and incentive a malicious hacker might have to penetrate the advertising servers and replace clean advertisements with infected versions that would download and install Malware all by itself, taking advantage of security exploits in the plugin that have not been patched by the user.  This has been going on for at least the last 4 years or more and it’s a phenomenon knows as “Malvertising”.

So what are some ways to prevent this type of thing from affecting you?

1. Make sure you apply updates for all software on your computer when presented with the opportunity

If you see an alert like the one pictured above, address it immediately.  Far too often I see users just minimize the window or click “Later” and forget about it for the rest of the session.  The same thing goes for Windows updates, Adobe updates and generally speaking any updates for software that you use on a regular basis.  Updates happen because security vulnerabilities are found and patched, or slight tweaks resulted in an increase of the programs performance, or because they are adding a new cool feature.  Whatever the case may be, software updates are your friend and you should welcome them without hesitation.  If you are asked to update a piece of software you have never heard of before,  just type the name of that software into Google.  With just 30 seconds of reading you should be able to determine if the program that has an update pending is legit or malicious.

2.  Use Anti-Virus software that is backed by a good reputation, not just hype and marketing

The two most common anti-virus programs I’ve encountered  on computers THAT WERE ALREADY INFECTED has either been Norton or McAfee; both have never seemed to live up to their hype or justify the sponsorship of PC manufactures and Internet Service Providers.  Norton in particular spends gobs of money on absurd advertisements about how you should protect your oscillating fan from David Hasselhoff or saving your unicorn from Dolf Lundgren.  The use of silly metaphors in them are meant to parody the fact that most people don’t understand viruses anymore than they understand Dolf scorching My Little Pony with a flame thrower, purely for illustrative purposes of course.  Lets dumb it down so much that people will say, “This is so dumb, it’s smart (advertising).”  Now we know why a copy of their software costs around $60 or $70 per year…

The sad truth about anti-virus software is that NONE OF THEM are perfect or necessarily worth their weight in dollars, simply because virus programmers have the upper hand.  If a hacker discovers a vulnerability that no one else has discovered yet, he may just keep it in his “stash” for use later.  OR, he might sell that knowledge to the Russian mafia or any number of other interested parties who have their own stash and secret agendas.  It is suspected the Stuxnet worm that ran rampant through Iran earlier this year was the product of a government agency, due to the sheer amount of zero-day exploits it contained for propagating itself, along with its overall sophistication and extremely specific targeting.

Was it a coincidence that days after Adobe announced the discovery of a zero-day exploit in their Flash and Acrobat Reader software in early June that a lot of people started to call me for the exact same Malware problem?  It’s quite likely the vandalism on advertising servers was timed to correspond with these vulnerabilities to maximize exposure.  It takes Adobe around 2 weeks to release patches for vulnerabilities like this so there is a window of time users are exposed and at risk, and this window of time extends out further if you avoid applying updates.

Despite this sad and depressing fact, you’ll be happy to know that many anti-virus programs do provide generous protections that you cannot otherwise get without them.  There are two programs I recommend everyone check out:

• Microsoft Security Essentials
• Malwarebytes

Microsoft Security Essentials is produced by Microsoft itself and is a free program you can install on your system.  It will actively monitor your computers activity and help prevent virus infection.  I encounter network security professionals in web forums here and there and most of them have really begun to sing praise for this program, because of it’s small footprint and high level of virus detection and removal.  Malwarebytes is another program that comes in a free form (though there is a paid version that automates all of it’s functions so you don’t have to do manual scans and updates with it).  Malwarebytes has been an absolute life saver for me this year as it was able to effectively cure about 8 out of 10 PCs of all their woes with one scan.

There are many other commercial (pay) anti-virus programs out there that are good, such as AVG, Avira Anti-Virus, Avast, etc., but I don’t have the time or resources to review all that are available.  While you might be able to find other websites out there that post “comprehensive reviews” of this type of software, it should not surprise you that sometimes these articles are just advertisements for commercial anti-virus software dressed up to look legit and non-partisan.  In my opinion, the best reviews for these things come from individual users and a great place to find reviews for antivirus software is Amazon.com.  They sell some anti-virus software and each of them have their own collection of user reviews that are worth reading over if you decide you want spend money on extra protection not offered by free solutions.

3.  Install A Software Firewall Solution

If your computer is directly connected to the Internet (and does not pass through a router of any kind) then you are putting your computer on the front line and you should protect it with some armor if you want to stand a chance in the wild jungle that is the Internet.  Firewalls prevent unwanted network traffic from passing between your computer and the Internet.  In the same way Flash has it’s own flaws and vulnerabilities from time to time, so too does Windows itself and many vulnerabilities can be exploited with nothing more than a network connection.  Having a firewall in place helps eliminate this possibility.  A firewall can also prevent rogue software that is already on your system from “phoning home, contacting the mother ship” to update itself or otherwise expose your personal data to would be data thieves..  It’s not anti-virus software, but it does add a critical layer of protection.  Windows itself comes with a firewall built in but it’s not as feature rich as some third-party applications out there.  The most popular free firewall that I know of Zone Alarm Free.

4.  Use a proper Ad Blocking browser extension

One of the great features of Zone Alarm Free is the ability to let it block advertisements for you, although its not very smart about it as it basically blocks all gifs or flash content embedded in a website.  This can break a lot of websites that have legit uses for Flash, like Youtube.  So you may want to look into a more proper ad-blocking plugin/add-on/extension for your browser.  A great one for Firefox is called Adblock Plus.

5.  Use a safe web browser

Recently I stumbled across a funny description of Internet Explorer:  “It’s a great tool for downloading Firefox or Google Chrome.”  And it’s the truth.  Internet Explorer has struggled to achieve a respectable reputation among security experts as being a secure browser, when compared to others that compete against it.  Among them are:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Opera

These are all very capable browsers that have a great reputation for handling security and also have shown impressive turnaround when vulnerabilities are discovered.  I would highly recommend you download and install one of the above browsers and start to use it instead of Internet Explorer.

6.  Avoid And Uninstall Web Browser “Toolbars”

The above image is an exaggeration of a point I would like to drill home:  Toolbars are 99% junk and often facilitate no additional functionality than a web browser already has built into itself.  Pop-up blocking and search bars are standard in all modern web browsers, for example.  Many times I have seen toolbars for “MyWebSearch” on computers that happened to be infected with a virus.  I can’t necessarily say there is a causal connection between that particular toolbar and an increase in exposure to malicious software, but its fair to suspect it because if you search for “mywebsearch” on google, every single link (except the first one) goes to instructions for how to remove it.  It’s clear that NOBODY wants this toolbar, and the same could easily be said for most toolbars.  Get rid of them, please!

The easiest way to remove most of these is to use the Add/Remove Software applet in your control panel (In Windows Vista/7, it’s called “Programs and Features”).  If this fails to work then you can often find instructions for manual removal by searching for them with Google.

7.  Avoid P2P Filesharing Programs

Limewire is dead, but the way it worked will live on in other programs like it.  The way Limewire worked mostly relied on you connecting to other peers like yourself and the mesh collective would commence to pass files back and forth in a decentralized fashion.  The problem for Limewire is that it wasn’t entirely decentralized, which is why they were able to shut it down like they did Napster several years ago.  But still, the primary way it worked was by letting anybody share pretty much ANYTHING they wanted, without any real fear if they did something like disguise a virus as a popular new song by some teen-pop musician and share it out to the world as a “joke.”  Using software like this is your call and any legal considerations involved weighs entirely on you.  If you do decide to use file sharing software of this nature, make sure you police all your downloads to be sure you haven’t downloaded a Trojan horse.

8.  Consider Adding Parental Controls To Your PC

Not everybody reading this (in fact, few people reading this) would be willing to walk forward and admit to visiting porn websites online, but such websites make up a large chunk of the web and due to the rogue nature of some of them you are more likely to find ads, script code laced with viruses or strait up automatic downloads for executable binaries with names like “Video.exe” that can lead to your computer being infected.  It’s quite plausible that you might even visit one of these sites “TOTALLY BY ACCIDENT!!!”  So one thing you might consider using is a parental control blocking application that filters out web addresses and reduces the chance of you visiting one by accident or otherwise.  A robust, free parental control program worth trying is K9 Web Protection.

9. Consider Using Linux For Internet Stuff

It would be hard for me to write all of the above out without making a passing mention of using a different operating system, at least part of the time.  I realize not many users are interested in making a big switch from one OS to another, but it is very easy to at least get your feet wet with a Live CD.  In the case of Ubuntu Linux you can boot the entire OS from a CD without making any changes to your computer.  It’s like playing a demo for a video game before deciding to install the full copy, for free.  Instructions for downloading, burning and booting are right on Ubuntu’s website so if you’re even SLIGHTLY tech savvy you may find you enjoy working in Ubuntu more than you do Windows and feel relief from not having to worry about viruses or malware infecting your system.

Conclusion

As I mentioned before, this Malvertising problem is not new but the spike in its frequency of occurrence this year was interesting to me.  It wouldn’t be far out to predict another wave of infections like this striking again, but with the above advice and your increased awareness of the possibility of being infected in such a way should help to drastically reduce the chances of you falling victim to something like this.

Kinect is a new accessory for Microsoft’s Xbox gaming console, which involves a special infrared light emitter and a pair of cameras that can see you in 3D and use the movements of your body (arms, hands, feet, everything) to control the game, instead of actual game controllers with buttons.  There’s been a lot of mixed feelings about how good of a product it actually is and considering it’s a first-generation product of Microsoft there’s probably good reason to be very cautious and skeptical.  I own a PlayStation, a Wii and have avoided getting an Xbox over the years for multiple reasons, the largest concern being the quality of the hardware (red ring of death, anybody?).  I’ve yet to see a video demonstrating Kinect that actually causes to want to buy one; call me old fashioned?

Today I came across a video that someone made with a separate video camera to record themselves while they played a game called GEL Ride; a kids racing game like Mario Kart.  He did this so you could see how the Kinect reacts to body movement.  All I can say is… this is NOT the game that will convince me to get a Kinect and Xbox.  See for yourself… and yes, this video is real and it is hilarious.

On the non-gaming side of things you might be interested to learn that the protocol used by the Kinect to communicate with the Xbox has been hacked, and people have been using their Kinects to do things no one anticipated.  It’s suspected Microsoft intentionally left the protocol open to being so easily reverse engineered and the suspected motive of leaving the protocol wide open might be that it’s just one more way to sell Kinects to non-Xbox users like me.  Hell of a Plan B if you ask me; Kudos to them.  Here’s one of the COOLEST things I’ve seen anybody do with it so far (it gets really cool about 30 seconds in):

1.  I already own this album (in fact I own every Nine Inch Nails album; I’m what you would call a “loyal fan“).
2.  The album was published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license.  This means I could give you a copy of the song because I purchased it.  Look out for musicians who publish their works under licenses like this.

So let’s get to using this Youtube Downloader thingy!

First, download the software from Download.com by clicking here.

Run/Open the file once you have downloaded it to install the software.  Once installed, you’ll have a new shortcut in your Start Menu.  This is what the program looks like when it’s running:

Leave this window up and go visit Youtube.  Find a video you like and then copy the URL from the address bar at the top…..

…into the first box in Youtube Downloader, like this:

Now click Download.

Once the video is downloaded you can convert it to an MP3 by changing the selector at the top from “Download a video…” to “Convert or play a video…”, like this:

Now all you have to do is click the Browse button to search for the file you just downloaded, and change the “Convert Video to:” box to read MP3, like this:

Now click Convert.  It will ask you about quality settings (and of course it’s best to just leave it on “Best Quality” and click okay).  That’s pretty much it.  A conversion process will happen, taking perhaps 30 seconds,  and you’ll be given an MP3 file that you can play on pretty much any portable audio player out there.  It’s up to you if you want to delete the original video file.

A word about piracy/file-sharing

Piracy/file-sharing can be a very polarizing topic to talk about, especially when the conversation occurs between professional musicians who make their living off writing music.  On one side of the fence you’ve got your Lars Ulrich and Gene Simmons who see piracy of their music as a direct threat to music sales and thus their paycheck.  On the other side of the fence you have bands like Radiohead and musicians like Trent Reznor who see the sharing of their music as a marketing platform that can increase band exposure, increase their fan base, and subsequently increase their physical merchandise and ticket sales.  Both sides are entitled to their opinions but I lean towards the latter group when thinking about this stuff.

Along the lines of music piracy is software piracy.  There is a software developer who goes by the name Notch who created a computer game called Minecraft by himself that has earned him nearly one million dollars in under a year, and it was still in the Alpha stage when it hit that impressive number.  He has a very keen insight into piracy and I would like to suggest you check out his blog post about the topic if you have the time.  It mostly boils down to distinguishing (or debating) the difference between the loss of potential revenue versus actual revenue lost, determining a fair way to measure the differences.

In marketing there is a strategy known as “loss-leader” and pirated music could be thought of as a loss-leader for a musician who has additional products to offer, like vinyl, or limited “deluxe edition” packages, not to mention concert tickets and who knows what else (one of my favorite musicians offers up everything from autographed cover art by Strom Thorgenson to 5 hour long studio workshops with the band and their very own equipment).  Then there’s new, up-and-coming musicians who don’t yet have anything better to hope for than a chance to be listened to and are willing to let people preview their entire collection in the hopes of turning them into a loyal fan who will go buy all their albums and other merchandise someday down the road.

Shameless plug: Check out my Kompoz profile to listen/download/pirate my music.

So let’s imagine that instead of a computer we were talking about the human body.  The parts between the human body and computers that would roughly equal each other would be:

CPU = The math-crunching part of your brain.

RAM = Your short term memory.  Stuff in here is being thought about right now and is instantly available to the CPU if needed.

Hard Drive = Not so much a part of your brain as it is a thick book being held in your hand.  Like a book, it requires you to actually LOOK at it to get information out of it, which requires you to also use your other hand to thumb through its thousands of pages and use a pencil and eraser to add or remove information from it; lots of physical hand movement going on here.  It is similar to your own long-term memory.  Information stays here after you shut the computer off or go to sleep, but takes longer to recall and longer to write into than RAM.

For reference, here is a short video showing off the inside of a hard drive while it is working.  Think about the book and your hands thumbing through and writing/erasing pages while watching this video:

In computers, RAM consists of little chips that do not contain any moving parts but can store information temporarily while the computer is powered on.  Data can be read from and written into RAM in a matter of nanoseconds at rates as fast as or faster than a gigabyte per second, primarily because there are no moving parts, just like the CPU (or the human brain).  In a very real way, RAM and the CPU are like different parts of a brain that work in concert to produce results quickly.

When a computer is told to load a program, it has to copy that program it into RAM for later use.  In the human body, “loading a program” would be kind of like opening that thick book I mentioned earlier to a chapter like, oh I don’t know, “Chess:  Instructions and Rules.”  If you can remember all the instructions and rules right after reading them for the first time, then you can play the game without any need to stop and read the manual every time it’s your turn.   Likewise, if a computer is able to load a program into RAM completely, then it won’t have much need to access the hard drive after it’s been loaded.

In the old days, if you didn’t have enough RAM to load your software into, it simply wouldn’t run at all.  This isn’t true these days because modern operating systems use a feature called “Virtual Memory” (or “swap space”) where free space on the hard drive is used as a sort of simulated fake RAM.  This would be kind of like taking that book, turning it to the back where the pages are blank, and taking notes… a LOT of notes.  This leads to the dreaded hard drive “grind” (that sound you hear when the hard drives is constantly doing something; that KRRRRRRRR sound) where the hard drive is so overwhelmed with reading and writing information that the entire system slows to a crawl while it waits for the hard drive to finish whatever it’s doing.  In humans, this would be kind of like trying to do taxes for 20 corporations at the same time; you’d practically wish you were dead.

Fortunately, RAM can be easily upgraded and these days it’s one of the most economic ways to improve your computers performance and postpone its obsolescence.   With more RAM, your computer can load larger, more complex programs and relieve your hard drive from the daunting task of pretending to be RAM.

I had a major streak of creative energy after lifting weights earlier today and made this in about 5 hours time.  It’s a work in progress.  It’s easily in there with the Psytrance genre.  Enjoy!

Some of you might know me to be a bit of a Linux geek who is a sucker for the open-source philosophy and culture.  It sure is a beautiful thing in the world of computers; using software that’s free of charge and free to modify because a bunch of people decided to give it away to the public and do whatever they want with it.   This has worked out VERY well for Linux since it began, with bored programmers using the Internet as a global workbench to approach and tinker with any software they wanted and the best results would come to the surface as a new standard, often with no money changing hands.

It’s difficult for most people to imagine doing something like this because we don’t know a thing about computer source code.  We sort of have a foggy idea about it and could boil it down to “a list of instructions for a computer to follow” and add that those instructions can be edited and improved upon by anyone.  Any description more complex than that and it starts to sound like Greek… but for this post, it’s good enough.

Now  imagine you took this model of open-participation and applied it to music production, doing it all on the Internet.  You’re a musician, you play an instrument or have a singing talent and want to find other musicians who share your musical taste.  This is difficult to do in the real world, especially if you’re stuck in Kansas like me.  Sure, it’s easy to find a Kareoke machine on any given night if you look hard enough but finding good, original, local musicians is hard.  So the next best thing is to go online and (in a way that’s reminiscent of posting personal ads looking for a significant other) post your own creations/recordings to be judged by others… perhaps even loved by others, modified by others, built upon by others until eventually the little tune or melody you started with turns into a fleshed out composition that sounds very professional.

This is exactly the kind of situation I’ve found myself in during the last 3 weeks after I did some searching on google for “online music collaboration” and discovered Kompoz.com and indabamusic.com.

I signed up for both at the same time and uploaded the same music (three songs of my own) to both sites.  All I had to do after that was sit back and wait for others to possibly like my music and wish to add something to it, or not.  Over on Kompoz, in a matter of just 2 or 3 hours, a fellow from Latvia named Nikitt had uploaded a new guitar track to one of my songs on Kompoz.  Within a few days after that I was getting emails from people wanting to perform lyrics to the track.    A few days later, another astonishing guitar track was added by a dude from Florida who calls himself Grumpy.  And in all this time, none of the tracks I uploaded to Indaba got even a hint of attention or interest from anybody.  So either they think my music sucks over at that website or (more likely) the user interface for indaba is a mess that makes it difficult for bored musicians to find new projects.  So  maybe Indaba would work for you but it certainly didn’t work for me.

But enough about Indaba failing me.  Kompoz on the other hand has really bolstered my dream of writing a lot of good music.  It’s just so much easier to be able to upload something and for someone else to come along and add an idea to it.  It really is a lot of fun; I would tell my fiance Kristin that it’s like Christmas every day because you never know what you’re going to get.  This happens in part because some of the people who use the site live on the other side of the planet and leave stuff online while you’re asleep and when you wake up you might be surprised to find new recordings uploaded or at least some productive comments.

So this is what I’ve been doing with some of my spare time lately and just wanted to share.  You can check out my Kompoz profile and projects by clicking here.  If you happen to be a musician I encourage you to join Kompoz.com with a free membership, but if you’re serious about music production it pays to get a premium membership for $50 a year so you can exchange high quality WAV files and even publish music for commercial release and get royalties out of it.

So about 90 seconds ago I learned about this website and knew I had to write a quick blog about it.  The site is called Ninite Easy PC Setup.  This is a website that allows you to download multiple popular Windows applications, from web browsers to anti-virus software, and install them all at once!!  This is a HUGE, HUGE time saver.

You look through their selection of software, check off the programs you want and it will create a custom bundle from your selection and wrap it all into one easy install package for you to download.  When you run the installer, it installs all the apps, one by one, automatically without user intervention and without any spam “extras” that might come along with some of them (like browser toolbars that do more harm than good).

Check it out at www.ninite.com

Back to regular font land now, I just wanted to add instructions for Windows and Ubuntu users on how to install this font.

If you are a Windows user, all you have to do is copy the TTF file into your c:\windows\fonts folder and that should be it.

If you use Ubuntu, save the file to your desktop.  Then right-click on it and click “Open With Font Viewer”.  This will pop up:

Unlike my window, yours will have a “Install” button in the lower right corner for you to click on.  Just click Install and you’re all done.

gksu nautilus /usr/share/fonts/truetype

I got a call today from someone who was in need of help with their Power Mac G5 computer.  The problem they were having was the system would power up, the famous startup chime sound effect would play but there would be no video displayed on the monitor.  As far as the monitor was concerned the computer was still off as the power light on it would remain amber instead of turn green.  Unfortunately you don’t get Mac-oriented training in most technical institutes so I didn’t know exactly how to approach the problem.  Is it hardware?  Is it software?  It was time to call for reinforcements!

With the help of a friend of mine who happens to use a G5 for graphics design work on a daily basis we began troubleshooting this machine.  Going off of Apple’s official troubleshooting pages we tried holding Command-Apple-P-R at boot in an attempt to reset the PRAM (which is similar to a PC’s CMOS) but for some reason it would never reset, or at least we never heard the second chime sound indicating a reset.

Ultimately the thing that did the trick was unplugging the systems power cord, opening the case up, removing the dual-fan assembly that’s in front of the RAM slots and pressing the PMU Reset button located on the “logic board” ONCE!  The ONCE part of this was stressed as pressing it more than once could potentially turn the system a trendy looking boat anchor.

When the system was powered back up there was no video for a moment and then the OS finally started to boot.  I shut the system down,  turned it back on and it still worked.  So I had considered this a finished job and decided to shutdown and take the computer back to it’s owner.  Well, then things got strange all over again.

With the system back under the desk in its original location, reconnecting the USB cables for the printer, keyboard and mouse to the computer and pressing the power button I was greeted to a chime, the grey-on-grey Apple boot-splash screen but that was it.  No whirly-circle busy animation, no hard drive activity, nothing.  So I forced the power off and waited before retrying again.  Suddenly we were back to square one with no video on screen.

I decided to see if hitting the PMU reset would help here so I unplugged the system, opened the case, pressed the button and shut it back up.  That didn’t work.  Finally I unplugged everything from the system except the keyboard and the power and turned it on again.  The system finally booted up to the desktop.  I shut it down and reattached the printer and the networking cable while the system was powered off.  For some reason this had an effect on the computers ability to boot up because it didn’t want to show video once again.  I pulled everything but the keyboard one more time, powered it up and it booted all the way up once more.  While the computer was on I reattached all the USB cables as they were, which produced no problems, shut the computer down, and finally upon powering it back up it successfully booted all the way.

So, we have a very interesting glitch here with Apple’s Power Mac G5 machines.  It would seem that if you have the system powered off and you attach certain devices via USB while the system is off, it gets confused when you first turn it on.  Perhaps the PRAM keeps an inventory of USB devices and where they are plugged in that throws a fit if anything on those ports change while it’s off.  Well, that’s what I think.  It’s only a theory.  Alternatively there might have been something going on with the printer; perhaps some funky USB-to-LPT converter wasn’t declaring itself properly.All that I know is the best thing to try if you have this kind of problem is to unplug the machine and all cables attached, hit the PMU reset ONCE, plug the power and keyboard only back in and then press the power button with your fingers crossed.

This reminds me of a PC that my fiances father owned that had a PCI USB port expansion card in it to add 3 more ports to the back of the PC.  You had to plug USB devices in before turning the computer on or they wouldn’t be detected by Windows.  Kind of the opposite of what’s going with this Mac.  I’m sure fixing something like that would be a matter of a firmware update for the card itself but there wasn’t one available when I checked, nor were any updates available for Mac OS today.  Anyway, it was a learning experience for me; its not too often you get a chance to attempt fixing a Mac hardware problem.

After sifting through the comments for another video by the same robot-building guru I found out that the song in this video is called “Parks On Fire” by Trifonic.

I’ve just purchased their deluxe digital copy of two of their CDs for 8 dollars.  You can stream/preview the whole thing with this little jukebox I’ve embedded here.  If you enjoy it, show your support for an independent musical group and buy their album!

Commands and links mentioned:

• sudo apt-get install mencoder ffmpeg mplayer vlc ubuntu-restricted-extras
• http://code.google.com/p/ps3mediaserver/downloads/list

You don’t need anti-virus for Linux. Others in here will do a better job at explaining why this is, but in short, the OS has a big advantage here due to it being open source. The operating system is a product of crowd-sourcing, much in the same way as Wikipedia has been since it first showed up several years ago. And much like the highly-moderated articles of Wikipedia that require membership and an approval process for changes made to locked articles, so to is a strict moderation that goes on with the source code for Linux before it’s allowed to become part of the official distribution. Everybody is out to identify possible flaws or weaknesses or bugs in the source code and it’s much easier for any single person to make a contribution because the OS and much of the software that runs on it is open-source.

In Windows, the users don’t have the luxury of being able to dig through the source code to look for flaws. All they can do is report symptoms of problems to Microsoft, and the limited number of paid programmers that do have access to the source code then have to decide what flaws are the most important and which ones don’t merit their attention. So with Windows, a bug that affects only 500 people won’t be as important as a bug that affects 500,000 and probably won’t be fixed at all. But if it were Linux and if just one or two of those 500 people were a programmer who had access to the source code and figured out how to fix the problem on their own, the other 498 would actually stand to benefit from a patch that ends up being released thanks to the work of that one developer who had some spare time on his hands and decided to do something about a bug simply because he could.

So throughout the long life of Linux there has been this much more diversified, seasoned, multi-cultured source for development feedback that has helped to make it a much stronger, more “mature” operating system, especially in terms of the way security was designed. If there was ever a person out there who found a way to circumvent that security, there is at least one other who knows exactly how to repair the flaw. The reason viruses are able to best Windows is because their developers can only patch so many holes, and the ones they don’t have time to get around to end up being exploited the most. Third-party software developers that make Anti-Virus software make a killing because Microsoft is unable to handle this responsibility all by themselves, and even still, the best anti-virus software isn’t perfect.

The reason anti-virus software isn’t necessary in Linux is simply because the OS and its updates that patch vulnerabilities do the exact job anti-virus software in Windows is meant for: Prevent unwanted, malicious software or network activity from compromising the system. If there were a flaw in Linux found that allowed something like that, it wouldn’t be the job of some third-party software to safeguard the user against but the job of the OS itself. The reason anti-virus software even exists is simply because Microsoft is unable to handle the immense work load of patching their own source code as well as a crowd of Linux geeks can.

Am I saying Linux is perfect and invincible to viruses? Might it become more susceptible to viruses in the future if it were to ever become as popular as Windows is today? I would think that with an increase in the number of users would also come a complimentary increase in the number of clever developers that would only help to increase the number of eyes available to find flaws and fix them. Saying that Linux would get a lot of viruses down the road because more people are going to use it is like saying Wikipedia will become rife with widespread, uncontrollable vandalism because more people visit it. It hasn’t happened yet, and very likely never will happen because of the way it is designed, moderated and improved upon by the hive mind.

EDIT to add: As mentioned in the first comments below, I failed to acknowledge that while Linux is more robust in the area of security, nothing can compensate for the weakest link in this arrangement:  The User.  A novice user could easily be enticed by a sinister website  that tells them to download a deb file which might contain malicious code and absentmindedly install it or execute a destructive command from the terminal window because they didn’t know any better (like rm -rf ~/*).  Fortunately for novice users there is little if any need to actually venture out into uncharted territory like a terminal window or strange websites to get software, thanks to the official repositories that contain a HUGE collection of software which continues to grow.  I’ve even heard you will soon be able to purchase proprietary Linux-based software through it.  Unfortunately, little can really be done to compensate for user negligence, and trying to compensate for all possibilities would likely result in too many annoying alerts and prompts for the average user (like when Windows Vista sprang the UAC on its users).

There are only a couple of circumstances that I believe anti-virus software on a Linux platform would might be worth having which involve helping to protect other Windows systems.  Say you got an email from someone that contained a virus but you never knew it was there and forwarded it onto someone else who uses Windows, resulting in their day being ruined and you being blamed.  So that’s one scenario.  You might also have a Linux server administrating a network of Windows based workstations which you have read/write access to and use the server to conduct scans of these machines over the network, but at the expense of finite network bandwidth and CPU cycles on the server.

• Lightweight:  It’s written in Python and loads very fast.
• Simple:  Sometimes losing a couple “bells and whistles” is a good thing.
• Multiple platforms:  Gitso works on Windows, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.
• Active Development Pipeline:  A feature request I submitted was approved for the next version less than a half hour after I submitted it.
• Open-Source:  Free as in freedom.

There are a lot of features in the coming versions of this software I have been looking for in a VNC tool for a long time.  And who knows, I might learn a thing or two about programming in Python with this little tool.

Step one:

First you need to click System -> Administration -> Software Sources. On the updates tab make sure “Check for updates: ‘Daily’” is set and “Install security updates without confirmation” is set. Then close this window.

Step two:

Open a terminal window and paste in the following command:

gksudo gedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

This will open a file in your text editor. In that file is a section that looks like this (which will vary slightly, depending on the version of Ubuntu you are using):

Step three:

Remove the slashes “//” from the next to last line, like this:

That’s it!

Save and close the file and then restart your system. From now on all updates for Ubuntu will attempt to install in the background automatically without any intervention required by the user. You won’t even know they are being applied unless a system restart is required as it is after kernel updates.

However, if you feel it’s necessary, you can have the system automatically restart itself if one is required.  This is achieved by removing the slashes at the bottom of the same text file, in the portion which pertain to auto-restarting, and changing the value at the end of the line from “false” to “true” to enable it.  But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing.

The drawback I knew I’d probably run into with this is the good chance that my wireless network connection would nearly be crippled.  I don’t have a big house, but I was going to be adding a couple more walls in between my computer and the router.

Now, I don’t go around talking too much about playing video games, but lately I’ve been on a streak of Left 4 Dead 2 because my best friend Jordan asked me to get it so we could play together online.  Games like that demand the best of connections that you can muster, and adding another gap of lag between myself and those game servers got me worried.  I haven’t yet tried to do multiplay since the move, but did notice that my wifi said that my signal was now “Very Low”.

So I pulled out my new Nexus One cell phone with Android Linux on it and fired on an app I got from the market for free called Wifi Analyser.  It kind of looks like this:

Above is just an example image I found with Google. What this program will show you is a line graph that displays the radio frequency usage of nearby wireless networks.  You see, wireless networks are kind of like walkie-talkies.  If some kid in your neighborhood is using the same radio frequency as you, your signals will obviously overlap and interfere with each other.  This app is made to quickly show you what frequency ranges are the most used in your immediate vicinity.  In my case I had quite a lot of overlap.  So I logged into my router, changed the wireless channel from 6 to 11 and that made a world of difference.  Windows says my signal is “Very good” now.

If you don’t know how to log into your router a good website to consult about this is portforward.com.  This site is intended to be used as an interactive guide that shows you how to login to your router and change your port forwarding configuration.  So the only part you need to pay attention to is the first half that shows you how to access your routers configuration settings.  The last half can be tossed aside.  Router configuration is a lot like browsing a website that has different check boxes, fly-outs and text fields for you to manage.  Just click around until you find something that says “wireless” and look for a setting that pertains to the radio channel it’s using.  The default for most routers these days is 6, or sometimes “auto”.  If it’s auto, you can at least experiment with it to see if based on your observations there is a frequency range that is more open and less cluttered than one it’s currently using.  And if it doesn’t seem to help your performance any, the change can be reversed.

Having the same phone for more than two years tends to wear on you.  I’ve never had a true “smartphone” before, short of playing around with the iPhone I bought my girlfriend for her birthday last year so getting this little gizmo was a big deal for me.  There’s a lot I love about the phone, namely the Android Linux OS that runs on it, but also that beautiful AMOLED screen which absolutely trumps the current selection of phone out there.  No phone has a screen this crisp and vivid right now.

Blah blah blah, this phone is pretty damn nice.  Enough said, really.

Click to download “Flow” by David Steinlage (Extended sample)

“Flow” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available via the author. www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.

Unfortunately, I have come to learn that when you get a refurb, it’s possible the manufacturer has replaced the case on the outside with one that has a slightly different model number.  Long story short, I had found that this was actually an e200v1 (or perhaps an e250v1) and its firmware doesn’t support flash memory cards that are SDHC (e.g., anything over 2GB in size).  Even if I had upgraded to the latest version of the firmware available for this player, it still wouldn’t have fixed the problem.

Now for the good news:  While I was digging around for a fix, I came across an open-source software project called Rockbox.  Rockbox is a replacement firmware that will run on several types of MP3 players, and one of the features I was hoping to gain by installing it was support for SDHC cards.  What I got was a hell of a lot more than I expected.

For starts, this OS loads FAST.  Not only that but it came with a bunch of extra applications, visual themes, and GAMES!  Yeah baby!  I couldn’t believe it when I loaded up a variant of id Software’s DOOM on my cheap $30 MP3 player.  There’s no other way to say it but Rockbox is one really awesome piece of software and I’m really happy I found it!  THANK YOU ROCKBOX!

Anyway, the latest track is called Ridin’ The Ditch Witch (click on the link to download the MP3; 256 kbps CBR).  I would call it classic rock music with just a dash of psy-trance.  Check it out, enjoy and please leave compliments if you like it.

“Ridin’ The Ditch Witch” by David Steinlage is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.davestechsupport.com/contact.html.

Regular readers of my blog may remember a website that I and my associate John put together for the band Prymal Rhythm.  Well there’s a little back-story about how the responsibility of building that website came to fall in my lap.  You see I happen to be related to three of the five members of the band.  One of them is my cousin and two others are his uncles.  That being the case I volunteered a great deal of time building that site up from scratch into the polished looking site it is today and I did so with joy because, hey, we’re family.

In a gesture of sorts to thank me for all the hard work I did for free, the three members asked the organizers (my aunt and uncle) if it would be cool for me to attend this years family reunion/vacation, which has traditionally been limited to immediate members of their family.  So about a month or two ago I was contacted by my uncle and was invited to join the family on their family vacation.  Being invited to join this group was sort of like being inducted into a secret society of epic coolness I can only begin to describe.

These yearly vacations take place at a small cabin that my aunt’s father originally purchased in the 1970s in Shell Knob, Missouri on Table Rock Lake.  Since that time the entire family (or as many as are able to make the time) have dedicated one trip out of every year to reunite at this cabin and proceed to have a rejuvenating amount of fun together.

Now before I get into the fun part of the trip, I should mention something that I have a high amount of respect for; a certain rule of sorts the family has had at all times.  And that is: Keep the technology to a bare minimum. There is no air conditioning at this small cabin, only a lot of fans for every window.  There is no TV and no hand-held video gaming.  Text messaging or using your phone while in the presence of others is frowned upon and more or less anything else that could suck you out of the familial bonding going on around you.  Being an addict of the Internet with websites like Digg and Reddit, you might have thought I’d lose my mind being isolated from these things, but it was quite the opposite.  There were far more interesting stuff to do that the thought of wasting time in front of a computer by myself never crossed my mind.

Swimming in the lake on an inflatable bed with a cold beer in your hand was just a way to break the ice on the first day and try to stay cool when it’s over 90 degrees outside.  I got a some compliments out of using my sandals as ores to row my air raft of sorts.  At one point I was so relaxed by the beauty of the forested area surrounding me that I actually backstroked an eighth of a mile away from the shore before I ran into the shore on the opposite side of the cove from our mini-beach.  I felt like I was literally inside a giant bowl filled with water, rimmed with trees and the horizon had a slightly curved fish-eye camera lens effect to it.  I was AWAY and at peace.  So peaceful that I was unaware of the horrible sunburn I was about to receive (but it was worth it).

Above:  Me and my cousin Johnny

So what kind of activities did we have?  Most of these are actually traditions that everyone did every year and in some cases plan ahead for.  There was a whole shelf filled with board games; RISK being one that was hyped quite a bit on the first day but so much other stuff occurred that the RISK geeks of the tribe never got around to it.  Other games included Catch Phrase, Charades, a card game called Mafia, and the list of games could go on and on (I’m still kicking myself for forgetting to bring Apples to Apples with me).  On one night there is a talent show, where everyone is encouraged to go up “on stage” and perform some sort of act.  Now that I know about this I’ve got to get started on thinking up some sort of performance.  There were three Djembe drums there at the time… perhaps I’ll go buy one of my own and next time I go do some sort of ten minute jam with other volunteers.

One of the other benefits of the location we were at was the fact that there was far less light pollution in the sky at night, making the stars a lot easier to see.  It was mesmerizing to look up at them and notice how seldom you get to take in that kind of scenery back at home in the city.  I took the opportunity to change the topic of conversation to outer space, mentioning a lecture I saw on TED.com where the speaker called the exploration and study of space “the archaeology of the future” because, like traditional archaeology that digs stuff out of the ground and the deeper that stuff is the older it usually is, so too in space the older something is the further away from us it is (because of how long it takes light to travel across the universe).  Though my uncle being retired from the Navy told me about what it’s like to see the sky at night from the middle of the ocean where there is zero light at all.  The view is 10 times that much more clear.

One of the most involved activities I participated in was a 2 mile hike through some woods to a secluded cave that few know about.

The story goes that my aunts brothers were wondering around about 35 years ago (probably while high on peyote or something, though I never bothered to ask just what the hell they were doing wandering around a forest in the early 1970s) and just found it by accident (or perhaps you might say “serendipitously discovered“).

This cave is about 100 yards long, 30 yards deep/tall and 2 to 10 yards wide depending on where you were standing.  Getting to this cave was a very refreshing thing because you go from a hot and humid day hiking uphill sweating your ass off to a cool 60 degrees in a pitch black darkness.  It added another dollop of awesomeness and unique flare to the entire collective event.

Above:  A very happy family

On the last day we had a speed boat and everybody took turns heading out in groups of 10 to go test their luck at water skiing, wake boarding and slalom skiing.  I’d been skiing on snow in the mountains many times but never on water.  I wiped out on the first three tries but on the fourth try I managed to stay up for about 15 seconds before wiping out again.  Had I not sustained a horrible sunburn on day one, I would have gone back out with the last group for a few more chances, but I didn’t want to press my luck with the risk for skin cancer.

The food was spectacular!  Each night different people were involved/responsible for putting dinner together.  On two nights out of the three we actually got to eat some elk that someone had hunted themselves with a .30-06, served in cuts as well as Kielbasa sausage, not to mention the pork ribs, BBQ chicken and a plethora of veggies.  Nothing quite as satisfying as eating delicious food after a long day of fun.

It was one of the most memorable vacation experiences I think I’ve ever had.  There is so much to respect and admire about the entire thing.  I commented to my uncle about his father-in-law purchasing the cabin, “What an investment it has become!”  So I think I’ve found a somewhat new goal in my life.  Before I die, I’m going to buy a small cabin of sorts to start hosting my own family reunion from on a regular basis as a long term investment in our future.  But before that, I’ll probably buy a boat and lend it to the cabin I’m now a proud member of.

——

VNC is the default remote-desktop protocol for Ubuntu Linux and it can be used by anyone to access their home PC while they are away from home.  Anyone who has used VNC and also has a router are likely familiar with setting up a port-forward rule in their router so that all inbound traffic destined for port number 5900 is sent to the correct/desired PC.  But what if you wanted to be able to do this with multiple PCs on a home network and not have to relay through one PC in order to access another one?

You can do this by setting Ubuntu’s default VNC server (vino) to listen on an alternative port number.  Up until recently, changing this port number was as easy as clicking on an Advanced tab in your Remote Desktop preferences window.  For some reason, this new panel was removed after a more recent update so changing this port number became a bit of a mystery.

I’ve not done any hard digging to find out why this panel was removed, but my guess is they actually rolled the version of vino back to something older to temporarily avoid a known bug encountered with vino on servers that had Compiz enabled.  I’m sure they’ll get it fixed eventually.

In the mean time, this setting is still easy to change if you know where to go.   Here’s what you need to do:

1. Open your Gnome Configuration Editor.  You can do this quickly by pressing Alt-F2, then typing gconf-editor into the box and pressing Enter.
2. In the editor, click Desktop>Gnome>Remote Access.

Once you get to this point, you’ll notice several VNC related settings on the right half of the Gnome Configuration Editor window.  Edit the mentioned values as follows:

alternative_port: In the line that says “Alternative Port” near the top double-click the 5900 to edit and change it to the desired port number you’d like to use.  After you’ve changed this,  right-click on this value again to make a pop-out menu appear and then click “Set As Default”.

authentication_methods:  This value should say (or mention) “[vnc]“.  It might say [none] and that’s okay, but you still need to add “vnc”, so double-click on the value to bring up an edit window and click the Add button.  It will ask you to supply a name/value, so just type in “vnc” (no quotes) and press enter.   You’ll end up with a value of [none,vnc].  I don’t know if it matters or not, but at this point I edited the values further so that vnc was listed above none, so it ended up looking like [vnc,none] in the end.  My thinking behind this has to do with the way some blacklists (TCP/IP for example) delimit their endings.  That’s a whole other blog post…

enabled: There is a solitary check box by this parameter.  Make sure its box has a check-mark inside of it.

use_alternative_port:  Also make sure this parameter has a check mark in it’s box as well.  Also, right-click on this value and then click “Set as Default” for it as well.

Now close Gnome Configuration Editor.

That’s it!  Restart the computer to get the settings to take effect.

You should also do one or more of the following:

• Use Firestarter to add a rule allowing inbound traffic on the new port number you specified above so that your host firewall doesn’t block it.  (Click Applications>Add/Remove and search for Firestarter to install it if you don’t have it already).
• Set a new port-forwarding filter up in your router to direct inbound traffic on that new port towards the PC you just modified (duh!)

To connect to a VNC server on an alternative port, you just add a colon and the new port number to the end of the host address.  Lets pretend the new number if 5901 instead of 5900.  You would type the host address like this:

• 192.168.1.10:5901
• dyndnshostname.homeip.net:5901
• ubuntu.local:5901
• I’ve also used a 1 instead of 5901 and it works.  For 5902 you could probably use just the number 2 by itself, and so on.

And that’s all there is to it!

Recently, I posted the following in their Networking forum:

I have a new Linksys/Cisco router WRT54G2 v.1 with the latest firmware installed. I currently use port forwarding for things like VNC and SSH into my home PC. However, every time I try to set a new rule (for both TCP and UDP) up for bittorrent, the bittorrent clients I try say the port is closed. I’m using an Ubuntu Linux system, and both Transmission and Deluge will say the ports I select are closed, even if I change the port numbers and do another test. So I’m just wondering if anyone has encountered anything like this before and might have an idea of what could be causing this problem.

The thread was alive for a matter of seconds before a moderator locked the thread and replied with the following:

Please read the rules. We will not help with P2P apps.

I was surprised to see this happen, and that’s probably because I use www.ubuntuforums.org more often than any other forum for technical assistance.  Linux people like me approach the controversial topic of bittorrent a little differently…  I decided to send the moderator a private message to let him know what I thought about his decision:

Sorry for violating the rules. However, I would argue that I did not ask a question pertaining to P2P applications at all but a question strictly about networking problems with a Linksys router. I should also remind you that bittorrent is a common protocol used for the transfer of free, non-copyrighted information spanning from GPL licensed open-source software to free music or movies released under the creative-commons license, which is becoming more popular. There is nothing inherently illegal about using bittorrent (the protocol), but it would seem the moderators of techguy.org hold a contrary consensus that I feel they should consider revising in recognition of the legitimate and legal uses of bittorrent.

The above comment and any replies received in any form will be posted publicly on my blog. Thank you for your time.

I got a reply fairly fast.  Here’s what it said:

We cannot and will not assist in the illegal downloading of software through P2P applications, and that includes any impediments offered by networking components to such downloading. Any legal uses of such software are few and will unfortunately need to be included in this prohibition.

The policy has been in place for quite some time now and will not be changed.

Thank you for your concern,
Elvandil

I like his use of the word “prohibition”; like bittorrent is some sort of drug paraphernalia.  I also noticed Mr. Elvandil happens to be Microsoft MVP and a die-hard Windows user who is probably adverse to anything of value that isn’t proprietary.  This is just my own opinion as he is ignoring the fact that millions of people use Linux and a large portion of us download and share our Linux ISO files (for burning to CD) via bittorrent, among many other things 100% legal to share.  It is a world he is unfamiliar with or in denial about.

Fortunately in the world of Linux it’s recognized that bittorrent itself is not illegal at all and I was glad to see a helpful reply in ubuntuforums.org within minutes; a reply that made me realize that sometimes I can be a completely narrow-minded person, too.  ”Did you check your host-firewall?”  Why… NO!    So I opened my firewall manager Firestarter and sure enough saw blocked events taking place on the port I told my bittorrent client and router to use.  All I had to do with allow inbound traffic to take place on that port.  Talk about overlooking the obvious!

The dead router this little journey into hell all started off with was a Netgear WGT624 v3 with the latest firmware installed.  I’d owned this router for several years with nary a hiccup or serious problem the occasional power cycle couldn’t fix.  But as mentioned above, things started to get flaky and I had tried everything I and other forum crawling network experts could think of.  So I decided to head to my nearby Wal-Mart just a couple blocks away and pick up a new one; a Netgear WGR614 v9 router (and I installed the latest firmware after it arrived).  To my shock and disgust it had the exact same problem as the WGT624: data corruption.

So I exchanged it for a third router (a Netgear WPN824 v3) spending about 25 dollars extra after exchanging in the WGR614.  This new router solved the problem I was having with corrupted packets and I was relieved.  But then a new fucking problem cropped up!  For some reason the router would require a power cycle at least two or three times a day.  This was often because for some odd reason it would just randomly stop passing HTTP traffic between me and the Internet.  I could ping the modem (gateway) IP, as well as the ISP’s DNS server addresses, but I couldn’t ping Google nor visit any website except the routers internal configuration utility page (e.g., 192.168.1.1).  Even more bizarre was that one time this occurred after I had already accessed my computer by remote while I was away from home, using VNC on port 5900.  Let me say that again:  I had accessed my home PC over the Internet, and the router told me there was no active Internet connection when it went to check for firmware updates automatically after I logged into it to see if I could find the problem.

I put up with this router for a few days, hoping that after a while things would smooth out and I wouldn’t have to do power cycles so often.  They didn’t get better.  In fact, they got even worse.  I was already having to power cycle the router on a regular basis until one day PORT FORWARDING STOPPED WORKING!!  I couldn’t access my remote desktop over the Internet anymore and more importantly, I couldn’t accept incoming connection requests from Virtual Dave users.

Unfortunately I made the mistake early on (because the packet corruption problem had been resolved by the WPN824) that I was going to be happy with this router, and I threw the receipt away, so I couldn’t exchange it for a different router.  The only option I had left was to take this router back to Wal-Mart and exchange it for another one exactly like it.

Not only did this replacement WPN824 mimic all the problems the previous WPN824 had, but the packaging had evidence of actually being a refurbished product, sold off the shelf by Wal-Mart as a new item at full price!

I’m sure it’s one of the ways Netgear cuts corners for the sake of competing with other “rolled-back prices” in Wal-Mart; I hope they don’t pull this shit with other vendors.  I can’t assert that Wal-Mart is knowingly selling refurbished products at the same cost as a new item, but from the look of the professional shrink wrap job, they may not actually be aware of what’s going on.

Now you might say to me, “just because you have two seals doesn’t mean that you have refurbished rather than new. It may simply mean that at one point someone had to open the package for a customer, and the customer ended up not wanting it, or it was returned.”

Okay, I see your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that the router still didn’t work, nor did another one exactly like it I had purchased just a couple days earlier. Something odd I noticed between the two is the first of those two needed a firmware upgrade, but the second one didn’t. Just an observation.

There was one other suspicious piece of “evidence” I didn’t photograph and that was the “install the netgear software on your PC before you setup your router” sticker that covers the downlink ports on the back. It had obviously been re-applied before.

Also, the shrink wrap on the box wasn’t something you’d see from the standard cheap heat gun seal you’d find in most stores that will re-stock items with explicit “open-item” sticker with a reduced price on it; this LOOKED brand new from the outside, like it was sealed at the factory. So I guess the theory is, someone bought it from another Wal-Mart, found it didn’t work, returned it, Wal-Mart sent it to Netgear because they were told it was defective, Netgear put a new sticker on the bag around the router, and re-wrapped the packaging in house with little or no testing done on the hardware. I highly doubt Wal-Mart has spare Netgear stickers laying around to help disguise an open router bag.  And good lord, what does this say about the state of our economy!  I mean, if I were Netgear and I were serious about deception, I would still at least use a NEW replacement bag with a NEW tamper-sticker, instead of reusing an old one with a broken label stuck to it to save a few cents.

So to recap the sequence of routers I’ve been through:

Original Netgear WGT624 v3 (loved for years, dying of old age I thought), followed by a WGR614 v9 (which had the same problems as the previous router), followed by TWO WPN824 v3 routers. 4 Netgear routers, one old, two “new” and one that was obviously opened/returned/refurbished being sold as a new item.  They all failed me in the end.

I’ve said to hell with Netgear and Wal-Mart, caving in and going to pick up a Linksys/Cisco from Best Buy, but I’m not going to give it a thumbs up or down until I’ve had some time to test it out.  From what I hear, Linksys/Cisco’s are back up to snuff and have a better reputation than they did when I stopped using their products years ago.  We’ll see.

It all kicked off with a short drive from my friend John’s house in Lawrence to the Starlite Amphitheater in Kansas City, Missouri.  We arrived around 3:45 p.m. and joined a group of roughly 100-125 people who all participated in the donation drive for Eric De La Cruz and were anxiously awaiting for their opportunity to meet and greet with the band.  One girl I was standing next was so excited, she said, “I’m looking at the same sky Trent Reznor is looking at.”  I couldn’t help but laugh.

After passing through the gates and being handed my guest pass stickers (which only went to the top-tier donors) we were given a briefing on what to expect next.  We were then led down the hill and around to the back of the venue where we waited in line to walk into a pavilion area of sorts, shake hands with the band, have one item of ours signed by all the members of the band, have our picture taken and even give everybody a hug if we wanted.  From here, the group was split into two and the lower-tier donors were lead back out into the seating area of the venue while us top-tier donors were then lead to a dining hall for dinner.

I was personally expecting to see something like a series of tables pushed together with the band sitting down somewhere and everyone else surrounding them and having some lively table talk.  To our disappointment, we were sat in groups of 8 per table and more or less had to wait there for 50 minutes before Trent arrived to say thanks for the donations and open up for a few questions before going back to whatever it is he does before a show.  This was really the only minor annoyance about the entire experience.  Time constraints and what not are understandable, though the words “dinner with the band” was in the description, and I didn’t realize the word “with” was being used in the Mitch Hedberg-ish sense.  (Mitch Hedberg joked that whenever he goes to the bathroom to shave, he assumes someone else on the planet is also shaving, so he’ll say, “I’m gonna go shave, too.”)

We were then asked to go back out to the main seating area while Street Sweeper Social Club played the first act, and then return to the pavilion next so we could be escorted to the side of the stage and enjoy NIN.  It was surprisingly quiet compared to the loudness you’re pounded with in the seating area.  The staff throughout the entire experience were very kind and polite.  I really didn’t get any good pictures of the side stage area as most of my time was being spent video taping the show.  I’m not going to bother with re-encoding the video and posting it here because, well, I’m feeling kinda lazy, but also because I’m sure someone out there’s got better video than I do.  The view was somewhat obstructed, the camera is shaking from time to time, and the audio sounds a little muffled.

After the show was over we were escorted back out through the seating area because Janes Addiction didn’t really want anybody backstage (certainly not side stage) while performing.  But my sister and I snuck back around and actually caught a glimpse of the lead singer and guitarist head through the double doors we had exited from to go out to the stage and perform.  And that was pretty much the extent of anything exciting that could possibly happen.  I watched Trent walk through a hustling team of roadies loading crates of gear and equipment on his way to his tour bus never to be seen again.  Not being a big fan of Janes Addiction, the four of us decided to leave the show early and beat the traffic to have a small after party of our own back at home.

That was more or less it.  Like I said, I had my expectations high and it’s something I’m sure everybody does who has never participated in something like this.  You have these fantasies of a “best case scenario” of actually getting to sit down and chat with the band for 5 minutes and stuff like that, but it’s simply not the reality of these kinds of things.  I mean, you have to think about these things from the perspective of the band members.  What would you rather do after a show:  Hang out in a decked out bus while surrounded by beautiful women, or doing your best to gum it up with speechless fans who are skilled at the art of making social encounters totally awkward?

In the end, I had fun… I don’t think I’d call it jaw-dropping-awesome kind of fun, but that’s just me personally.  The novelty of the event hasn’t sank in just yet, I guess.  I also got this vinyl record I bought years ago autographed by the band (including their art director, Rob Sheriden, who is a perpetually depressed looking fella):

Overall review:  GOOD TIMES!

Now most of you out there (or at least anyone who isn’t really into NIN) are probably saying, “Why would anyone spend that much money just to get backstage and gum it up with people they may never see or speak to again?”  Well… let me put it this way.  Imagine you could meet any single person in the whole world who you’ve wanted to meet for over a decade but couldn’t. Just think of your favorite actor/actress, or author, celebrity, musician, mad scientist perhaps… I don’t care who, just think of someone who you’ve always wanted to say, “Thank you.” to in person because that’s just how much of an influence they’ve had on you and you want them to know.  Then one day, you’re offered that one chance.  That’s kinda what this is like.  An opportunity to do something you’ll never forget for the rest of your life.

Besides, all the money is going towards a worthy cause.  I’ll get to honestly say that I met my favorite musician of all time (one of just a small handful of life long goals/dreams I have) and contribute towards saving a human life in the process.  And I’ll be proud about it for the rest of my life.  I imagine myself decades from now thinking back on the life I lived and appreciate such an experience more so than, say, the experience I’d probably get from spending that kind of money towards something completely material, like an expensive HDTV.  I couldn’t imagine myself retired years from now telling my grandkids about the day I bought a new HDTV and expect them to marvel at my totally boring story.

For me, the things that matter in life aren’t things (stuff) at all.  The things that matter in life are experiences, events, people, emotions, passion, romance,  ideas, adventures, thrills, challenges and also remembering that one of these days you’re gonna die.  Because if you do like most young people and tell yourself it’s too far away to bother thinking about it right now, you might start to procrastinate and regret not doing the things that would otherwise hold their value to you forever.

So, here’s to being ALIVE and happy to finally get to do something I’ve always wanted to do but never believed would ever occur.

Oh, one last thing.  THANKS DAD!  You’ve always been there if I needed a favor or help with about anything and that means the world to me.

This is for something important. Eric De La Cruz is dying and needs a heart transplant. He keeps getting turned down for a transplant list because he’s on Nevada Medicaid, and there are no transplant centers in Nevada. We want to get involved and hopefully so do you, so we’re extending a hand. His sister Veronica (former Anchor and Internet Correspondent for CNN) has started a campaign to save his life.

Eric’s situation shines a bright light on a broken health care system, and his particular set of problems are being addressed on the political front, aiming for reform in addition to the need for immediate financial help to keep him alive TODAY. I think we can help with the latter.

Here’s what we’re offering – three options:

If you have a ticket to a NIN/JA show: if you donate $1,000 to this cause, we’ll invite you to come hang out with us before the NIN/JA show of your choice. You and a guest can watch soundcheck, eat dinner backstage with us, take pics / get autographs and watch the show from the side of the stage if you’d like.

If you donate $300, you and a friend can join us for soundcheck and a handshaking / hug session before doors open at the NIN/JA show of your choice.

If you do NOT have a ticket to a NIN/JA show: if you donate $1,200 to this cause, we’ll invite you to come hang out with us before the NIN/JA show of your choice and provide 2 tickets (best available). You and a guest can watch soundcheck, eat dinner backstage with us, take pics / get autographs and watch the show from the side of the stage if you’d like.

100% of the money collected from this will go directly to Eric’s fund.

I hope you’ll consider helping out with this.

Sincerely, Trent Reznor

Go here for more info. If I’m lucky and can find the money, I’ll get to meet my all time favorite musician AND help save a life.

About 2 months ago or so I read the tutorial in the above link to help get my fingerprint sensor setup in Ubuntu.  The problem was that it left one simple instruction out:  Paste a line of  text AT THE TOP of a config file (and not at the bottom like I did).  The mistake has been corrected and I’m happy to say my finger print sensor is working in Ubuntu 9.04.  Based on the directions from the the link above, here’s how to set it up (these instructions are meant for version 9.04; see the above link for instructions for 8.04 and 8.10):

Step 1: Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal and paste in the following command:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install aes2501-wy fprint-demo libfprint0 libpam-fprint

Step 2: Still in Terminal, paste in the following text:

sudo gedit /etc/pam.d/common-auth

This will open a text file called common-auth in Gnome Text Editor.  (Here’s where I screwed up last time).

Step 3: If you want to use both the password and the fingerprint to authenticate (more secure) add at the bottom:

auth required pam_fprint.so

If you want to use either the fingerprint or the password to authenticate (i.e. completely bypass the password through the fingerprint) the following string must be placed at the top of the file:

auth sufficient pam_fprint.so

Once pasted, save and close the file.

Step 4: Press Alt-F2, type “fprint_demo” without the quotes and press enter.

This will launch the fingerprint utility that you can use to enroll the finger you wish to use for future authentications.

That’s basically it.  Special notes:

• If you happen to screw something up in the config file by mistake and lock yourself out of your PC by accident, you can boot into Recovery Mode from the GRUB boot menu to access a root command prompt and edit the above config file using nano (nano /etc/pam.d/common-auth).
• Not all login screens are compatible with this feature.
• To test your finger print in fprint_demo, click on the verify tab at the top and use the verify button to compare an enrolled fingerprint to another finger (or the same finger) and you’ll see the difference.

As of Ubuntu 9.04, I’ve noticed the following quirks:

• Often you will not see an on-screen prompt asking you to swipe your finger across the sensor if the system is waiting for it.  Examples include the login screen, running Update Manager or Synaptic Package Manager, and otherwise most other programs that required your password to run them.
• The only actual on-screen requests I’ve seen so far is when you are unlocking a screen-saver, or are running a program with sudo privileges in a terminal window.

No, I don’t have a lot of money.  I would have bought tickets for this show via pre-sale a while back if had I’d know for certain I’d still be here in the states.  The catch about buying pre-sale is that you have to show ID, and the ID must match the name on the pre-sold ticket.  Now the concert is 8 days away and I’m certain I’ll still be around when it happens.  The difference being about $40 perhaps… so what.  For the occasion… well, who knows what I would have spent otherwise.  Like I said, it means a lot to me.

I remember being in 8th grade and not knowing about NIN at all until my best friend Bart showed up with an NIN T-shirt on and subtly keyed me in on the existence of such a band.  Before then I was trying my best to be cool by listening to Van Halen and Aerosmith (thanks for the misdirection, KQRC).  In fact, for a few months, I hadn’t heard a single NIN track until someone let me borrow Pretty Hate Machine for a few hours in between drivers education classes during the summer.  (Those were the days).

From their it spiraled out.  The Downward Spiral was the most intersting and inspired collection of music I had heard from anywhere (with the exception of Tool’s Ænima album).   At the time it seemed like Best Buy had the best supply of regular albums, and Circut City (no longer in business here) had the best supply of import singles.  I had purchased almost every CD put out there, with exception the rarest of imports from Japan which were redundant and overpriced.  There was already plenty of people out there who were ahead of me when it came to being collectors of memorabilia.  In all, I’ve probably purchased about 20 or 25 CDs from NIN, a few of which were duplicate (or triplicate) purchased, do to various lose of older copies I had once owned.  I am quite proud to say that none of the vinyl copies of albums I’ve purchased have needed to be replaced (last I checked, the vinyl copy of The Fragile I have was worth about $300… but I don’t regret opening my own copy).

So what did the tickets cost me?  $180 for a pair.  That’s not bad, considering it’s the second time I’ve paid that much for tickets to an NIN show (the first time was in Denver, and I actually got to meet Rob Sheriden after the show (though the friend I took with me who never paid me a cent got to meet Trent himself which really pissed me off); there’s even a video of me floating around the net of me screaming into the camera, “I love you, Trent!” after the show that NIN posted on their site, and I’m not ashamed to admit it).

Why did I like this music so much when I was younger and up till the present day?  Well… all I can say is that it’s just what I was naturally attracted to.  People who discount it as offensive or weird or strange probably haven’t actually taken the time to give it a glance and that’s their own problem or whatever.  Everybody should be able to enjoy what they want and like on their own terms, in their own space.  NIN, for me, kind of struck a chord because I was the kind of kid who was kind of lonely, but it wasn’t that bad.  I had friends, I wasn’t THAT  lonely, but I still felt like I didn’t fit in.  So, for some odd reason, I seemed to identify with the music Trent Reznor made.  It was abstract, abrasive, aggressive, intriguing, inspiring and sometimes an echo of what I felt back then.  I wouldn’t say that the music of NIN that was out back then is what I would identify with now, and neither would Trent.  He hates being asked questions like, “Why don’t you play “Down In It” on stage any more?”  because it’s something he’s moved away from, and I feel the same way when it comes to identifying with those songs.  My older brother on the other hand, who’s enjoyed NIN since the very beginning has said otherwise, and I would to if I were him.

I’m not sure what else to say about the music.  I don’t really think much should be said.  If you’re still reading this, you can preview his music via many ways (best of which is through www.nin.com itself), but otherwise, that’s about all I have to say.

Hopefully, since my girlfriend is stuck working that night, I’ll be able to steal her phone for the night and try out that new NIN iPhone app.

Her birthday was last Friday and I decided at the last minute to get her a new phone she’d be sure to appreciate.  I had to make my mind up between having her stick with T-Mobile and get her a Google Phone, or go for the gusto and get her an iPhone with her family’s minute plan they have with AT&T.   Her brother and sister both have iPhones and love them and I’ve envied them myself only holding off on getting one for myself because of the long term cost of owning one.  Being a penny pincher, I’d personally opt for a Google Phone with Android Linux running on it so I could save a few dollars every month while feeding my inner nerd; owning a phone that gives you access to a Command Line Interface of all things.  But I felt that in my girlfriends’ case, the best choice would be the iPhone.  It’s just easier to use and looks nicer that any other phone out there.  An added bonus is that her brother and sister already have one, and this relieves me of having to show her how to use the phone to its fullest extent.  I’m proud to say she loves it.

Now I’m keeping myself in the loop with the latest updates regarding the iPhone and I was happy to learn that in about a month or so iPhone’s OS version 3 will be officially released.  And with that release comes several major new features, the most important (in my opinion) being the integration of MMS messaging.  For years we’ve been able to send pictures and video to each other with plain old text messaging.  I was surprised to find out in the introduction of the iPhone, this feature was not built in.  Excuse me for saying this, but it seems pretty lame of Apple to leave something so common out of the feature list.  What’s more sad is owners of the first iPhone still will not get this MMS feature among many others, and will be subsequently be inclined to purchase a new phone just to take advantage of features they rightly deserve.  Considering the amount of money they paid when the iPhone first flew out the door before dropping in price by over 100 dollars in just a few months time, forever being called a “nerd tax”… anyway, I’m glad I didn’t buy into the first generation of the phone.

Bob Church was a father, grandfather, husband, friend, mentor and an avid writer with a strong following of fans. His blog, located at http://not-quite-right-bubba.blogspot.com/ serves as an archive of some of his best writings, numbered in the hundreds. Bob Church died of pancreatic cancer on Wednesday the 29th of April 2009. This video is a slide show of photos of Bob in chronological order taken from various sources. It was directed by the entire Church family and assembled by David Steinlage. If you would like a copy of this video on DVD, along with other videos that were shot at his 61st birthday party, simply email David at dave@davestechsupport.com

Bob Church, the father of my girlfriend Kristin, passed away this afternoon at the age of 61.  For the last 10 months Bob has been in a long and trying fight with cancer.  I’ve written a decent bit here and there about the history of this here and you can find it by following my tag link for him to the left.  He went peacefully while surrounded by family and close friends.

Among his dying wishes was the request that he be cremated and instead of having a formal memorial service, those who knew him should join together for a sort of commemorative party/get-together.  That event will be this Saturday.  So if you knew Bob and have a way of getting to Topeka, you are invited to come and celebrate Bobs life and the memories he has left with us all.

That’s the original auction photo, and not only did it arrive looking as good as it did above, but a second sticker with the Linux penguin mascot also came along with it, which I didn’t expect.  So I was quite happy with what I purchased.

That laptop bit the dust about 3 weeks ago and I’ve since replaced it with a new laptop.  Again, I wanted to get a cool case badge like the one above.  But had some trouble finding it.

A lot of people would tell me, “Go to System76.com!  They’ll send you a few badges for free.”  I did that.  Here’s what I got:

It’s thin, cheap looking and with a solid white backing instead of a thicker, shinny alluminum backing.  I’m not really complaining though; it’s nice that System76 will send these to you for free by just asking for some.  But you get what you pay for, and they don’t offer nicer quality stickers either.  So the search continued.

Then I recently discovered another place online.  I think I was using google’s formerly named “Froogle” online shopping search engine, and discovered a site called ZeReason.com.  And to my delight, I found they sell good quality stickers at one hell of a discount (10 badges for $5.00 shipped)!

Well those stickers were ordered about a week ago and they just arrived today.  Here’s what they looked like:

And here’s one on my laptop after I ripped off the XP sticker and replaced it with the new Ubuntu sticker:

So if you’re looking to totally nerd out your Ubuntu laptop or PC, then stop on by www.zareason.com.  I’m quite pleased with the quality of these stickers and you will be too. Сайт знакомств

All of these hot babes are great looking but it is up to you to select your six favorite as they compete for a chance to be in an official Prymal Rhythm calendar.  Putting together the actual contest involved a good amount of PHP work by my programmer/site developer.  We had to come up with a way to help prevent ballot stuffing and figured the best way to do that is to require registration with a username/password and an confirmed email account.  This is where the next upgrade came in:  a new Members Area and a Forum for fans to chat with each other through.

This is a surprise bonus feature the fans have not been made aware of yet.

The last thing we did was basicly give the entire website a face lift by wrapping every page in the theme that was selected for the forum so the entire site matches and looks really cool.  There’s still a little work left to do but I would have to say we’re about 80% done now.  It’s been quite an exercise.

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Since the founding of Microsoft by Bill Gates, who stepped down as CEO  effectively handing the reigns to Mr. Ballmer, the software company has refused to  release its source-code; the programing used to create their popular operating system.  Keeping it closed-source has been a strategy used by Microsoft to ensure they could maximize profits on sales of their product, but Steve Ballmer said he felt the time was right to go open source for a multitude of reasons.  “Not only did we feel like rubbing it in Apple’s face by removing the price tag from our product entirely, but we feel it’s time to get some help from the public on refining Windows.  Because let’s face it; they use Windows more than we do, so we might as well let them fix it themselves for a change.”

Ballmer went on to explain that with Microsofts’ closed-source model, the repair of bugs and security holes in their software is much more challenging.  “Our studies have shown that software developers and programmers actually become less productive in direct correlation to the amount of money you pay them for their work.  It’s gotten so bad that the shutdown menu in Vista took several months to create and design, and that’s pretty damned embarrassing if you ask me.”

Reactions to the unexpected change have been mostly positive to sarcastic.  Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical which develops and promotes their free Ubuntu Linux operating system, considered the change to be a little amusing.  “You know what they say:  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”  Apple CEO Steve Jobs responded to the move by boldly stating  “So what?!”  When asked if Apple would consider making a similar change in their software development model, he replied in a typical sales pitch: “It takes a lot of money to build computers as cool as ours.  Buy one,” he added with a crazed, hypnotic look in his eyes.  “You’ll LOVE it.”

The open-source version of Windows 7 was originally slated to be released late in 2009, but with the sudden change in development structure, Microsoft actually anticipates this date to be unusually ahead of schedule.  “Now that we’ve shaken our software development department down and replaced our laziest, most expensive programmers with dedicated Microsoft Windows fans who work for us out of sheer love for the brand, we anticipate faster development in the areas of security, stability and most importantly, system performance.”  Microsoft was also originally planning to release seven various editions of Windows 7 (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, Enterprise, Ultimate and Star Trek Collectors edition), but it has been deduced that by making the software 100% open-source, the user will be able to get any edition they want for free simply by selecting which edition they want during installation at no difference in cost.  “It’s a win win for everyone,” added Ballmer.

Also:  APRIL FOOLS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
http://mtc.sri.com/Conficker/addendumC/

As stated in the links above, the virus takes advantage of a buffer-overflow vulnerability of certain server services on Windows based machines.  Microsoft issued an update (MS08-067) for Windows 2000 SP4, XP SP2 & SP3, and Vista to patch this hole back in October of last year. So if you have installed all available Windows updates you should be fine and not need to worry.  It is highly recommended you install all available updates if you have not done so lately.  To force your PC to check for available updates, click Start>All Programs>Windows Update and follow the on-screen instructions.

If your computer is directly connected to the Internet it is advised that you have a quality software firewall installed and blocking unexpected inbound traffic.  A comparison of free firewall software can be found here:  http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-firewall.htm

In addition you should also have a quality anti-virus software solution in place.  Any of the following will suffice:

• CA Anti-Virus
• Symantec Anti-Virus
• F-Secure Anti-Virus
• Panda Anti-Virus
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus
• McAfee Anti-Virus
• BitDefender Anti-Virus

I personally recommend  AVG Free Edition

In summery:

• Be sure to apply all available updates for Microsoft Windows
• Ensure you have some form of firewall blocking unwanted network traffic
• Install a quality anti-virus solution

Now lets all have a happy April Fools day!

It goes without saying that downloading a movie illegally via bittorrent is probably going to piss the MPAA off.  But if they’re smart about this, they could actually take the concept of scan-to-download idea and turn it into a big money maker.  There’s probably plenty of people who would purchase a digital download of a movie if it were offered to them at a reasonable price.  Just take a look at iTunes or Amazon offering DRM-free MP3 merchandise.  You might even take a look at what Valve Software did with Steam recently:  They cut the price of Left 4 Dead by 50% and noticed a 3000% increase in sales.  Ultimately it just goes to show that there is an ever increasing number of people who want to purchase digital merchandise and they’re willing to pay for it as long as it’s not overpriced.  I could even see movies being offered up for free with commercials inserted in a hulu.com style.

Anyway, cool app for a cell phone to say the least.  Thought for pirates, it would be kind of like saying, “Hey.  As if my IP address weren’t enough information, here’s my phone number too.”

As cool as this technology is, I have to say that I think it’s already up against some stiff competition from smart phones like the Google Phone and the iPhone.  For instance, the video shows a demo of evaluating different kinds of paper towels for the user so they can pick out the one that is the most environmentally friendly.  A somewhat similar application that already exists on the Google Phone (and others before it in Japan) is a program that allows you to use the built-in camera to scan the products UPC barcode, which would then give you an instant price check for that product at local stores and even through online merchants.

It would take little effort to expand the capabilities of the above smart phone application to allow for sorting of the search results to be prioritized for other criteria besides price.

The key feature that the projector/camera technology does have that you can’t easily do with a cell phone is the ability to project visual data onto any surface and interact with it in 3D space via hand gestures.  While there are a lot of unique uses for this, a drawback of this is that you are required to have a usable surface in front of you in the first place, and I think (for now) the LCD screen of a smart phone has the upper hand in that department.  For instance, you could be walking down a street at high noon and look at a building (like some sort of historical landmark) but not have a usable surface to project meta-data on to (although I suppose something could be read to you through an ear piece).  On a cell phone, the screen is much more visible in nearly any lighting and given further software development, all kinds of information could be overlayed onto a camera captured video stream as seen below:

The end goal in both of these technologies is pretty strait forward:  Overlay relevant information on top of the real world.  And between these two technologies, I have to say that I think smart phones still have the upper hand… for now. Even though smart phones don’t have the freedom of using hand gestures to operate your phone, it could be argued that multi-touch screens are comparable (for things like zooming on maps, photos, etc.).

What I think the real knockout advantage of a cell phone (besides the fact that an LCD screen works as a better display surface than most real life objects) is the fact that information is presented to you in a more private, personal fashion.  If you were to have personal information projected out, anybody nearby could eavesdrop on whatever is being shown to you.  For example, you wouldn’t want your online bank statement to be projected on to a wall when you’re surrounded by strangers at an airport.  It’s more personal to have such things confined to a smalls screen that you have more control over.  Then again, the idea is to use a cell phone as the core processor of the system, so in the event you have to look something personal up that you don’t want projected, you would just take your phone out of your pocket and do whatever it is that you need to do.

A bold prediction is made at the very end of the first video:  That we will one day have the ability to augment digital information on reality through some kind of brain implant.  While such a wild technology is still a long ways away, it will likely occur within a couple decades time and the development of this is only the first of several steps towards a technology we once thought to be impossible.

If you want to try this out for yourself you’ll need a webcam and you have to visit this website.   And yes, I realize how ironic it is to have a campaign that hails the greatness of renewable energy asking you to waste a piece of paper to play with a little 3D model of some windmills.  At least you can recycle that paper.

The only annoying thing about this is if you want to look at your little augmented reality up close, which requires putting the paper closer to the webcam… which can be tricky:

As demonstrated above, you can clearly see that there is a little scarecrow standing among the windmills.  Or maybe you can’t see because the paper is directly between you and your monitor!!!  Damn it!

I was browsing reddit.com and came across a link to a blog someone else wrote recently listing 50 very nice downloadable themes that you can install on Ubuntu.  You’ll find that blog by clicking here.  It has a nice clean listing with screenshots of all the themes that give you a very good glance at several themes in a short amount of time.

Unfortunately for new users, that’s all this blog contains.  What it doesn’t really tell you is how to change your theme or install any of the ones available for download. (Correction: The post actually does have a screenshot showing you how to access your theme settings).  So I wanted to help out new users with doing this.  Here’s how it’s done:

1. Download the theme;  you’re looking for a “GTK” theme.
2. You’ll typically end up downloading either a zip file or a tar.gz file.  If it’s a zip file, you need to look for a tar.gz file within the zip.  The tar.gz files are usually the actual theme itself, which are often bundled with other non-critical files, like a readme.txt file that you can open seperately.
3. Right-click on the desktop and click “Change Desktop Background”.  Once open, click the Theme tab at the top-left.
4. Click the Install… button in the lower right, browse for and select the downloaded tar.gz file, and click Open.

That should do it.  If it doesn’t look back at the package file you downloaded for a bundled readme.txt or similar file that might detail special installation instructions.  If there wasn’t a text file like this included or your can’t find one, there might be one the web page you got the theme from.

Another think it doesn’t tell you is how to run Conky.  What’s Conky?  Conky is a customizable system monitor.  You know — something that tells you your CPU/memory usage, temperatures, HD activity stats and other geeky things most humans don’t care about.  Here’s a one screenshot with Conky running on the right side:

You can install Conky by clicking System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager.  Then search for conky, mark it for installation and click apply.  You can then run conky from terminal by typing “conky” in.  You can also have it run automatically at login by clicking System>Preferences>Sessions, clicking Add, and just type “conky” (no quotes) into the Command box.  There are also config files for conky people have made in their spare time that you can download to save you the trouble of reading the manual and making conky into something uber nerdy looking.  A HUGE thread on Ubuntu Forums can be found here that has a TON of files with screenshots you can browse over for different looks and themes.

Finally, the last thing that’s not talked about in the above mentioned blog is how to install a dockbar, like the one at the bottom of screenshots like this:

Check out this guide to read more about installing one of these things.

Lastly, it’s highly recommended you have compiz enabled, if possible.  Otherwise you will probably have problems with themes that look best with customized transparency of certain things, and the same goes for dockbars.

You’ll notice the watch I’m wearing in the picture.  That was a gift from my girlfriend for Valentines Day.  It’s made by Fossil and is called a “Skeleton Watch” because you can see all the gears ticking away on the inside from both sides.  She picked this specific one out because a long time ago I told her about being five years old and dismantling a wind-up alarm clock so I could see how it worked, and taking it to Kindergarten class for show-and-tell.  I don’t know what it is about stuff like that, but ever since I was a kid I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to understand how all things worked.  It’s one of the coolest and most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever gotten from anyone.

SECOND EDIT:  I have found deb files available for download of this software.  See the section about installing Easycam below for further details about downloading and installing.

So I’m getting ready for a very big trip and will be spending a lot of time away from home.  I’ll be a LONG ways away for a pretty long time.  My girlfriend will be staying at home to keep an eye on the place and I wanted be able to communicate with her via webcam while I’m gone.  So I decided to purchase two Logitech Communicate MP webcams from Tigerdirect, each costing about $45 (and they’re damn nice too).

Very few webcams are natively compatible with Linux and require you to install special drivers (sometimes you even have to compile the drivers from source-code… yuck).  Compiling the drivers is something very few users are up to doing to get a simple webcam working.  But I found a pretty useful application that makes this process a snap.  It’s very aptly named Easycam.

Easycam is a little app that will detect the type of webcam you have attached to your PC and automatically install the driver needed to make it work with your applications with just a couple clicks.  However, installing the application takes a few steps.  Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through.

NOTE:  Some of the following instructions are outdated and have been crossed out.  It is recommended that you try to download the deb files and install them individually and not attempt to add the third-party repository to your Software Sources as originally instructed.  Visit this link to download the deb files.  If you are running Ubuntu, you will need the all the deb files except for the qt package.  If you are running Kubuntu, you will need all of the deb files except for the gtk package.  Download them all an double-click on them in this order:  

1. easygspca.deb
2. The easycam2-gtk.deb  or easycam2-qt.deb  package (depending on your OS)
3. Finally the easycam2-core.deb  package.

Once the three packages are installed, proceed past the crossed out section below and follow the rest of the instructions as usual.

I’m basically going to be repeating the instructions found at the Ubuntu Community Documentation for Easycam, with small notes of my own here and there.

Step One:  Adding Easycam Software Sources

Click System>Administration>Software Sources.  You’ll get this window when it’s loaded up:

Click on the tab that says Third-Party Software at the top.

Click on the +Add… button at the bottom.  You’ll get a pop up box asking you enter an “APT Line”.  Paste in the following text:

deb http://blognux.free.fr/ubuntu hardy main

Then click the Add Source button.  This will add the above source to the Third Party Software listing and take you back to the above screen.  Now click the +Add… button one more time and paste in this APT line:

deb-src http://blognux.free.fr/ubuntu hardy main

And then click Add Source.  You’ll see both sources added now.  Click the Close button in the bottom-right now, and then click the “Reload” button:

Step Two:  Installing Easycam

Click System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager.  Once it’s up, do a search for “easycam”:

Click on the checkbox next to easycam-gtk and click “Mark for Installation”.  (If you’re running Kubuntu, check off the easycam-qt for installation instead).  Then click the apply button at the top (not shown in screenshot above).  Now Easycam is installed and ready to be run.

Step Three:  Running Easycam

To run Easycam, you have to open a terminal window by clicking Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  This will open a window with a command prompt.  You just need to paste in the following text if you’re running Ubuntu:

gksudo 'python /usr/share/EasyCam2/core.py --gtk'

If you’re running Kubuntu, paste this text in instead:

kdesudo 'python /usr/share/EasyCam2/core.py --qt'

After you enter your password, this window will appear:

Click Forward.

The model of your webcam should appear in the little box.  If it doesn’t… this might not work, but for most of you out there it should appear.  Click Foward.

Now click Start The Installation.  This will install the drivers you need. You see a bunch of funky stuff going on in the terminal window.  You can ignore that.  Eventually, the screen will look like this when it’s finished:

The guy who wrote this software is French.  I know the progress bar looks kind of screwed up, but if it looks like the above, it’s finished.  Click Foward.

If you click the Execute menu at the top and then click Webcam, it will launch the little “photo booth” program called Cheese.  This program can be used to take little pictures from your camera or videos.  It’s similar to Mac OS’s Photobooth software.  Here’s a candid shot of me trying it out:

Now you probably want to do something more with your webcam that just take pictures of yourself, right?  I would hope so!  Well if I were you, I’d check out  Skype if you haven’t already.  Skype is a Voice Over IP/Instant Messenger program that you can use to make phone calls from your computer, as well as start audio/video conversations with others who are also using Skype.  I recommend it simply because a lot of people use it and it’s free to signup, and Skype-to-Skype calls are also free.  There is also a Windows and Mac OS X version available so your non-Ubuntu friends can join the party. You do have to buy minutes if you plan on making land-line/cell phone calls (I pay about $30 a year for unlimited United States phone calls), so it’s not a bad deal.  You can download an Ubuntu version of this software by clicking here.

There is one other similar program called Ekiga that you might want to check out.  It is similar to Skype and is open-source.  Though I’ve never used it before so I can’t say much more about it.

The last type of webcam program I was hoping to find for Ubuntu would be something that can record video based on motion detection (set your cam up to be a security camera).  I have seen and tried Windows software that can do this with extra features like alert you via email (and perhaps SMS text messaging) and allow you to view your camera by remote.  The closest thing to this that I’ve heard of is a program called geekast, which you can use with a seperate program called peercast to broadcast your webcam on an IP address if you want.  But the program is severely underdeveloped (the home page for it was down at the time of this writing).  So it looks like the best webcam oriented program you can use right now is Skype, and it’s mighty fine if you ask me (but there is still room for improvement).

But today (which is turning out to be a pretty great day for a lot of different reasons) I logged in to check on my comments and notice the following:

Oooo!!  An update button!  In the past, something like this would direct you to WordPress.com and have you download a zip, extract the few hundred files out, delete certain folders from your server, then upload the necessary files to replace the old ones, THEN go to a special web link on your server to complete/verify the upgrade.  In a word, it SUCKED.  To my delight, this is what I got after clicking the button:

Automatically?  Huzzah!!

Now I know that to advanced web developers, this doesn’t come across as a big deal because if you had shell access to your server, you could just SSH into your server and run a couple of commands that would extract the download and fore-go the need to upload hundreds of tiny files.  But that costs extra and when it comes to web hosting fees, I try to keep things on the cheap side.

So Cheers to the WordPress devs!  You’ve made my life just a little easier.

While we’re on the topic of Music Videos, take a look at these others (non-Nine Inch Nails) that I ran across today.  Both of them utilize stop-animation.  The first one is just cool, and the second one is not only cool but pretty damn hilarious as well.

Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.

Every now and then I drop by the Ubuntu Brainstorm website to post an idea that I think would help improve the user experience of Ubuntu Linux. Sometimes these ideas are geared more towards a specific application rather than the operating system and in this case the suggestion I made recently has to do with Firefox.

One of the things that’s bothered me about using Firefox in Linux is the fact that when you click on a link for a file, an Open With dialog box appears, but if you want to open the file with something other than the default application shown, you are forced to browse the Linux root file system. This strikes me as an unfriendly way to have the user select an alternate application. If anything it wreaks of Linux elitism, the kind that acts like nothing is wrong with the way things are currently being done. If this were Windows or Mac OS and you wanted to find a different application to open a file, you wouldn’t expect to have to wade through sub-directories of a file structure most sane users wouldn’t want to be familiar with.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.  This is what appears when you hit Browse (for applications) button in Firefox on a Windows PC:

You’re presented with a simple list of applications to scroll through and pick the one you want.  It works the same way with Internet Explorer, and I would suspect all browsers do this in Mac OS X as well.

Now, here’s what you get in Linux when you click on the “Other…” button (which is equivalent to Browse in this context):

Do I even have to ask you which of the two above examples looks more user-friendly?

Anyway, if you’re a member of Ubuntu Brainstorm, I encourage you to vote for my idea by clicking here. And if you’re not a member, sign up! It’s free and only takes a minute and you could post an idea that will forever change Ubuntu Linux for the better.

Now, I’m not the first person to submit a suggestion about this quirk. In fact someone submitted a bug report about 4 years ago suggesting the exact same thing.  You might ask yourself, “If they submitted a bug report that long ago, why hasn’t it been fixed by now?”  Because in the eyes of developers (who are obviously a strange, bizarre species of emotionally sensitive anti-social hermits), this isn’t a bug.  It’s a “feature request”, and is considered something of a lower priority as a result.

It’s damn frustrating, I know.  Just look at the responses I got when I tried to point out that Amarok was installing missing a certain mp3 decoder package in GNOME systems, and was told that in order to get it to work correctly out of the box, a “feature request” would have to be submitted and approved before the app would install with all the necessary packages.  So for things like this it seems the only thing that gets developers off their pias/lazy asses are statistics (votes, in this case) showing them that people (normal earth-dwelling humans) actually want a feature to be added to an app.  I would suspect they need this kind of persuading because they have a very difficult time understanding what non-technical people expect from their computers.  But seriously, what idiot out there thought it was smarter to force users to browse the root file system instead of present a simple list of installed applications to pick from?  So please go vote this idea up, because it seems that sometimes a “feature” is actually something that should have been there in the first place, but wasn’t implimented for very stupid reasons.

Ripping is a term used to describe the act of taking a video DVD and copying it to your hard drive, while additionally encoding the video into a smaller format like Divx/xvid/mpeg-4 and saving it as an AVI file. Not so long ago I wrote a blog that shows you how to take such an AVI file and convert it into a viewable, playable DVD. So I thought it would be best to show you how to move the video in the opposite direction. I consider this to be a legitimate format for people to back their DVD’s into for two reasons:

1. Many DVD players are now capable of playing Divx/Xvid formated videos all on their own.
2. It’s more compact (700 ~ 1400 MB per film, a blank DVD is capable of storing about 4300 MB). You could have multiple films stored on one disposable disc.

NOTE: Scroll down past this DVD to AVI ripping guide if you want to see how you can backup your entire DVD (menus and all) to a blank DVD.

Remember that you are supposed to be using this little guide for the purposes of backing up DVD’s that you actually paid for and own. So when your dog eats it or your hyperactive 4 year old exerts his primitive He-Man and snaps the disc in half with his own bare hands, you don’t have to worry about buying a replacement copy. What you don’t want to do with this information is… oh, I don’t know… rent movies by the truck load so you can copy them all off to your PC before you return them. You wouldn’t want to do that. Not only because doing such a thing is illegal, but also because you might make Jesus sad.

Jesus has feelings too! Not just lawyers.

Now that your conscience is stricken with guilt and fear, we can all be sure you’re not going to try anything illegal with this “forbidden knowledge.” So lets move along to the fun stuff!

First, we need to install libdvdcss2 for decoding DVDs!

Before we can even rip a commercial DVD we need a specific decoder (known as libdvdcss2) to be installed. The easiest way to get it is to add the Medibuntu repository to your software sources. To do this in Ubuntu:

1. Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal
2. Paste in the following text in the Terminal window:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

3. Then paste in this text:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

The line of text in the first box adds the Medibuntu repositories to your system and updates your package listings.  The second box installs the libdvdcss2 decoder.  Both commands will work with any version of Ubuntu.

Now that we have our decoder installed, lets rip!

Ripping/Backing Up a DVD with k9copy in Ubuntu Linux

There are several applications available that you can install and use with Ubuntu to rip DVDs. One of the most popular is called k9copy. This program can be used not only for backing DVDs up as AVI files on your hard drive, but it can also shrink DVD-9 discs down to DVD-5 so you can burn complete backups onto a blank DVD-R. I decided to try this app out to see if it would live up to all the hype. Here’s how you install it:

1. Click on the Applications Menu
2. Click “Add/Remove…” (or Ubuntu Software Center if you’re running 10.04)
3. Search for “k9copy”
4. Check k9copy
5. Click the apply button.

Now that we have k9copy installed we can fire it up by clicking Applications>Sound & Video>k9copy.

In my experience, this is what k9copy will look like when you first run it, even if there is a DVD in your DVD drive. So if you have a disc in the drive, eject it, then push it back in and k9copy will open it up.

Now being shown is the DVD content structure, made up of titles that contain content objects, such as video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams and menus. (By the way, Death At A Funeral is a f-ing hilarious film and I highly recommend you go buy it). For the purposes of backing up just the movie we’ll want to select one video stream and at least one audio stream (6-channel surround sound, 2 channel stereo, english, french, director commentary, etc). You’ll notice that each title here shows a total size in megabytes each takes up. The largest one in the picture above is Titleset 1, weighing in at a hefty size of 3733.10 MB. So we know THAT’s the movie because the size of it is so large, and everything else is just menus, perhaps a trailer for some other movie, etc., and they can all be ignored and excluded from our rip. Just remember that it’s not always “Titleset 1″ that contains the movie, so check the size of the title set before ripping to find the one with the largest size first. In this example it’s clearly Titleset 1. So we expand it open (with the little [+] boxes next to the name) to reveal its contents:

After expanding the Titleset 1 treebranch, I placed a check next to the “audio 1 English ac3 6ch 48kHz drc” option, which basicly means “Six Channel (surround sound) English audio.” Doing this automatically checks off the video stream associated with it. I could check off other audio streams if I wanted to, but that would take up extra space and possibly reduce the video quality of our output, depending upon how large we want the outputed AVI file to be.

If you look down a little, you’ll see the video and audio ripping settings (shown above). By default k9copy wants to resize the width of the video you’re ripping to 640, which is actually a little smaller than the default video stream size of 720. If I were you, I’d change the above to say 720. You’ll also see a target file size of 700 MB selected. Depending on the length of the movie and the amount of action in it, you might want to increase this size. 700 is good for films that are about an hour and a half long. Any longer than this and you might want to change the size to something larger. Best test this to feel out your own preferences before backing up several discs, but 700 has usually been good for me.

TIP: For the best video quality in your output AVI, check off the box that says 2-pass. What this does is a practice encode (to feel out the parts of the video that contain the most action) and then a true encode which will use the information gathered from the practice encoding to more dynamically adjust the bitrate.

By default, the codec selected says “Copy”. We want to change this to some other video codec. I have the best luck using Xvid.

Once you’ve set your video codec to Xvid, click on the Audio tab. This will show the above settings. Just like the video codec, you will probably want to change the audio codec as well, although this is not required. For instance, if you want to preserve the 6-channel surround sound audio from a movie you’re about to backup, it’s best to leave the above setting on Copy. However, if you’re ripping the 2-channel stereo audio, it’s better to change this to the MP3 LAME codec. And if you do put it to MP3, you should probably change your bitrate from 128 to 192 or better (no greater than 320). This will increase the sound quality. For this example, I’m going to leave it on copy.

Once you have your video and audio streams checked, your video and audio preferences configured, you can go up to the top of k9copy and click on the Create MPEG-4.

This will ask you where you would like to save the AVI file it’s about to create and that’s entirely up to you. I like to place these AVI files on the desktop and then decide whether or not I want to burn them to a blank Data DVD once I have a few other movies backed up and ready to be burnt. Once you click Save, k9copy will begin to combine your selected video and audio streams together into a single AVI file.

What if I want to backup the whole DVD? Menus and all?

This can also be done with k9copy and it’s very easy. In fact I wish I had just written a guide for how to do this because it wouldn’t have taken as long for me to make. The first thing you’ll want to do is check everything off:

If you click the top-most checkbox, all the other sub-boxes will check themselves off. Now all you have to do is click the Copy button at the top (shown above). This will ask you where you want to save an ISO file. After the ISO has been created, you just have to right-click on it (while a blank DVD is in the drive) and click “Open with CD/DVD Creator” or “Open with Brasero” or “Open with Gnomebaker”, depending on the burning software you have installed. This will burn the ISO image to the DVD, and once you insert it into a DVD player, it’ll play just like a regular DVD with menus and all. Just keep in mind that when you do it this way, you might see a little worse video quality because the menus, all the extra audio streams that you may not need or want, deleted scenes, etc., have been included. And because the average single layer blank DVD can only hold about half that of a regular DVD, everything has been re-encoded and shrunk.

More information can be found at:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu

On Wednesday January the 21st of 2009, Bob and Louise Church celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary!  Surrounded by close family and friends they held a formal ceremony in their living room to renew their vows.  It was a very beautiful and touching event and I did my best to record the ceremony for the family and friends who were unable to attend.  You can click here to download the video.  The video is encoded in Xvid MPEG4 format.  If you’re running Windows, and it does not want to play, download and install the K-Lite Codec Pack which will add the necessary video decoder needed to play this video.

Following the ceremony, Bob was asked to open up a surprise package that had just arrived in the mail a couple days earlier.  Inside were dozens of copies of his new book (click here to preview and purchase your own copy) which was assembled by close friends of his who are part of an Internet based writers group (Word Catalyst Magazine) which Bob is a member of.

I of course recorded video of the opening of the package the books were delivered in as well as his initial reactions to the book.  You can download and view that video by clicking here.

Unfortunately there was little opportunity to capture the author himself reading from his new publication as there were some hyperactive grandchildren making a lot of distracting noise.  But don’t you worry!  I will be keeping on Bob to record a few readings from his book for his biggest fans to view.

I’ve been looking around on the web trying to find a high quality copy of this song and it’s very difficult.  What I did find was a copy of the song on Youtube.  You’d be surprised how often the most rare of songs end up on Youtube; it’s perfect for looking up those difficult to find trance and techno songs nobody listens to (according to eminem, and from the looks of the “view count”, he’s right).  So I just wanted to share the song I heard and liked so much.  Bare in mind that the audio quality is a little sub-par, and it’s recommended that you wear headphones or have some decent bass in your audio setup.  Enjoy!

1) Go click Applications > Accessories > Passwords and Encryption keys
2) The should be entries there listing an array of keyring password.
3) Right click on them and select change password
4) Enter the old password if you have one then leave the new password blank. (A warning message should appear)

I’ve not done this personally (I haven’t had to) but if I’m guessing correctly, the “warning message” mentioned above in step 4 is likely the same warning message pictured below, asking if you are sure you want to use “Unsafe Storage”.  You can read more about what this means below.

—————-[Begin old post]—————-

I would have made the title of this post “How to remove the Keyring password manager in Ubuntu Linux” but that’s kinda long…  Anyway, you might be wondering what the keyring password manager is.  It is a built in feature of Ubuntu (specifically, a package called “Seahorse“) that remembers passwords for things like FTP account logins, Evolution Email accounts, your wireless network authentication passwords, etc., and locks them all behind a kind of Master Password of sorts.  So for example, lets pretend that the password for your wireless network was 64 characters long and was just a bunch of random numbers and letters that you’d only be able to remember if you were some kind of freak savant mathematician.  The keyring password manager would remember this for you, but will only allow the system to access and use that long password after you grant it access to the keyring.

As nice and handy as this might sound to security buffs, it’s struck me as a minor inconvenience.  For starts, if I were to configure Ubuntu to automatically login to my account after I turn the computer on, I would then also be asked to type in my keyring password so it would connect to my wireless network.  This becomes a bigger problem if, for instance, I were to connect to my computer remotely and had to reset it for some reason, like applying a recent kernel update.  The snag there would be that after restarting, my computer would boot up, but since I’m not physically sitting in front of it, it would sit there waiting for me to enter a keyring password before it would reconnect to my wireless network, and I’d have to go home or ask someone else to type in the password for me.

So what I’ve always wanted to have happen is this:

• I start or restart the computer by remote (such as through SSH or VNC).
• After booting it automatically logs into my account and connects to my wireless network without asking for any passwords along the way so I can VNC right back into the system with no further trouble.

I’ve finally learned how to do this, and it’s stupid easy to do.

There is of course a few security drawbacks about doing this.  For starts, if any person were to gain physical access to my machine they’d be able to connect to my wireless network without needing to enter a password. Then again, if someone I don’t trust has somehow gained physical access to my machine I might as well go ahead and consider it to be compromised.

Now, if the PC were in an office with a bunch of random co-workers always around, I’d be a lot more concerned.  If that were the case, I’d have that puppy locked down with a power on password, disable booting from the CD-ROM/Ethernet/USB in the BIOS, perhaps have a GRUB password and be working from an encrypted HD with the required /boot partition on a USB key, and of course auto-login would be disabled so I would be required to enter anywhere from 2 to 3 different passwords just to login to the system.  But this thing is in my house behind two large dogs and a dead-bolt locked door, functioning as a server that requires a password for me to access it by via SSH or VNC anyway.  So for this particular PC, I see little harm in opting out of using this security feature.

So here’s how you get rid of the keyring manager.  Please note: This will erase saved passwords you have so be sure you know or remember them before you make your computer forget them!

1. Open up your Home Folder by clicking Places>Home Folder
2. Press CTRL-H (or click View>Show Hidden Files)
3. Find a folder called .gnome2 (it has a period at the beginning of the name) and open it by double clicking on it
4. Inside of the .gnome2 folder, there is another folder called keyrings.  Open it up.
5. Delete any files you find within the keyrings folder
6. Restart the computer

After you restart and login (if you’re automatically logging in) you’ll probably be asked to enter your wireless networks WPA/WEP encryption key (because we made it forget).  After you type that password in, the keyring manager will appear to let you know that it would like to handle the storage of that password and lock it away with a new keyring.  The box looks like this:

Instead of typing in a new password, leave both boxes completely empty and click Create.

You’ll then be asked if you know what the hell you’re doing:

Go ahead and click Use Unsafe Storage.

WARNING: Doing this creates a new file in your ~/.gnome2/keyrings/ folder called default.keyring and it will now house passwords IN CLEAR TEXT and not in an encrypted form.  So it is imperative that you are certain no untrustworthy persons can access your user account (either physically or by remote) or they will be able to easily open and read this file and obtain many passwords (for things such as FTP accounts, SSH, e-mail accounts, etc).  Proceed with caution.

From here on all keyring-stored passwords you enter will not safeguarded behind a master password or encryption.  Whether or not you want to do this is entirely up to you.  I personally have had enough of the keyring manager and consider it kind of annoying.  But as I said before, you may have certain environmental factors that make having a master password over the rest of your passwords a good idea.  Keep in mind that the keyring password manager has absolutely nothing to do with your administrative/root privilages password that has to be entered any time you want to apply updates, or add/remove software.  You will still have to type your account password in for these actions, and that is something I am quite comfortable with. I’m just happy I don’t have to have to ask my girlfriend to type in a keyring password every time I want to restart the computer while I’m away from home.

The song below is called In This Twilight.  It was the last song played at every concert of the tour (so long as there was time for an encore, and there often was).  It is one of several very well made fan-mix videos, and you can find more listed here.

Here is one more of my favorites entitled 28 Ghost IV.  The name itself means nothing (it was simply track #28 out of 36 instrumentals released last year on an four-part album called Ghosts I-IV).  No lyrics.  Just beautiful music.  Enjoy!

I can’t wait to see the HD fan-mixes in a few months!

Bob Church, father of my girlfriend Kristin, has published a new book!  Actually… his friends did it for him as a surprise.  You see, Bob has been a member of a little writers group on the Internet for a few years.  His writings have inspired and captivated many fellow authors.  But soon after the picture on the cover of the book was taken in the summer of last year, Bob was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Near the end of 2008, Bob and his wife Louise decided to move back from Moberly, Missouri to Topeka where their two daughters, their son and two grand-daughters live so that they could more easily spend his last days together as a family, despite their inability to sell the house they left behind in order to make the big move.  Chemotherapy sessions were already underway for two months when this happened and the move took a dreadful toll on Bob’s health.  Visits to the emergency room became frequent.  Seeing Bob awake and in a good mood was  rare.  And everyone was very worried.  Then, roughly a month or two after moving to Topeka, he decided to end his chemo after his doctors concluded it was doing him more harm than good.

Since that time his health and energy have seemed to very gradually increase.  We’ve spent several evenings together as a family watching the entire HBO series The Soporanos, one episode after another.  We’ve also continued this little tradition with another HBO series called Deadwood, which (all profanity and vulgarity aside) echos a lot of the kind of writing and dialoge styles Bob most appreciates. And just yesterday, Bob decided to whip out a laptop and get his ass on the Internet for the first time in nearly 3 months!  So for those of you out there who know Bob but live far away, you’ll be quite pleased to learn that his spirits have been the best I’ve ever seen in a very long time and it is a breath of fresh air.

Bob’s very own copy of this book will be in the mail and shipping to him very soon.  It is slated to make an appearence in about a week and I’ve been asked to video his opening the package when it arrives so his friends who cannot travel up can see his reaction.  Perhaps if I twist his arm a little, he’ll read us some of his writing, too.

The book is available for purchase from blurb.com by visiting this address.  Prices start at $13.95 for the softcover, $30.95 hardcover and weighs in at a whopping 400 pages.  You can even preview the first 15 pages of the book online before purchasing.  So go check it out!  Buy a copy!

Nine Inch Nails released a surprise (belated) Christmas gift for their fans yesterday: 405 GB of unedited concert footage, filmed with 4 to 7 HD video cameras between three seperate shows.

Victoria
Portland
Sacramento

This is not your typical download to say the least.  It will probably take me weeks to download just one of those.

There is currently an open-source project being headed up at http://thisoneisonus.org/ which originally formed together to create a full length DVD using video that was filmed by fans at the concerts.  Now we have all of this HD video to toss into that mix.  So if you can’t wait to download all of the video above, you can be rest assured that there will eventually be a professionally edited mix of all the video into one much smaller download.

So one of the cool things I was asked to do for someone a couple of months ago was show them how to convert an AVI video into a playable DVD that they could give to a friend.  I had originally suggested VSO ConvertXtoDVD program, which I had a lot of good luck with in the past.  But I wanted to do the same thing in Linux and I found a program that I think does a better job.  It’s called DeVeDe, and you Windows users out there will be happy to know that there is a Windows version of this software available for download.  But for us Ubuntu Linux users there’s an easier method used to install it on your computer.

To install DeVeDe in Ubuntu Linux, click on the Applications menu at the top, then the Add/Remove Programs at the bottom of the menu.  Once the application search tool is loaded, do a simple search for “Devede” and you’ll find it in no time.  Simply check it off,  click the apply button and you’re in business!

How To Use DeVeDe To Convert Video Into DVD

The first thing that will appear when you load DeVeDe is a little window asking you what kind of conversion you are wanting to do.

For this tutorial we’re going to use the default option of “Video DVD” and click OK.

Next we’re presented with this interface.

The box that says “Titles” already contains one object called “Title 1″ and to the right we see the Files that are currently contained within that Title (none for the moment).  The word “Title 1″ is what will currently appear on the DVD menu, so you’ll probably want to change that later by clicking on the properties button below the Titles box.  For now, you want to click the Add button below the Files box so you can add an avi (or other video format) to your new DVD Title.  When you click add, you’re presented with this:

You’ll want to click on the bar I have highlighted in green above to open a file browser and select the video of your choice.  Also, if you live in America you will want to make sure the video format in the above box is set to NTSC.   Once you have a video selected, the OK button at the bottom will become clickable and you’ll be taken back to the previous interface with the Titles and Files boxes…

Above you can see that I have one video in the files box, which is essentially a container for “Title 1″ to the right.  I could add more videos to the files box for that title if I wanted to create a collection of videos that would play back to back after selecting “Title 1″ from the menu of the DVD after it’s burnt.  I could also create new titles to act as containers for other videos, which would present multiple items in the DVD menu.  But in this case, we’re just wanting to burn a movie and be done with it.

Notice that the current Disc Usage in the above picture shows that the video I selected is currently estimated to consume about 50% of the DVD, at a video stream bitrate of 2001 Kbits/sec.  We’d like this data rate to be increased so better video quality will be retained after the conversion, as well as to make use of the rest of the otherwise unused DVD space.  This can be done by clicking on the Adjust Disc Usage button I have highlighted above.  This will automatically adjust the data bitrate of all the videos that are about to be converted.  It’s also a handy for reducing the bitrate for videos in case you’re trying to force 2 or more videos to fit together onto one disc, so long as you’re willing to compromise video quality in the process.

Also notice the destination media size selected just to the left of the disc usage percentage.  Single-layered DVD’s (4.7 GB) are selected as the default destination media size by DeVeDe.  If you intend to burn the output iso file to double-layered 8.5 GB disc, click on that box that says 4.7 GB DVD and out will pop a drop menu that will offer “8.5 GB” as a size option.

Take the time to click the “Preview Menu” button so you can see what it will look like.  If you click the Menu Option button, you’ll get this window:

This will allow you to customize the menu’s appearance.  There aren’t any fancy effects or animated menu options available with DeVeDe, but for most people DeVeDe does more than enough.  Remember to rename the “Title 1″ in the Titles/Files window so it will reflect the content you are about to convert.

Once you are satisfied with your video selection and the main menu of your disc, you can click the Forward button.  Up will pop this box that simply asks you what you want the output iso file to be named:

Your Home Folder (zeke in the above example) is selected as the default destination for your output.  You can change this to whatever you want.  In the end, you’ll end up with an movie.iso (or whatever you named it) file that will need to be burnt to a DVD.  To do this, all you have to do is right-click on the file and select “Open with CD/DVD Creator” or “Open with Brasero” or even “Open with Gnomebaker”.  I’m sure there are others, but all three of these burning utilities will get the job done.

It is recommended that you use DVD-R over any other blank media (such as DVD+R) for maximum compatibility with stand-alone DVD players.  Not all DVD players are capable of playing home made DVD’s, but most are.  And if yours is one of those that won’t play it… perhaps it’s time to spend some money on yourself and get a new one.  There are some nice cheap Philips DVD players that are additionally capable of playing Divx/Xvid avi files, as well as mp3′s and jpeg slide shows for about $40 at wal-mart.

Otherwise, happy burning!

Guess what.  I still have that exact teddy bear.  It was a gift from my dad… I believe for my first birthday (I’ll have to double-check that factoid).  Here it is sitting on top of my PC:

Now… there were of course a lot of other neat pictures of me as a child in that collection.  Like this striking photo that I didn’t know anything about until a few weeks ago:

It was taken by a local newspaper photographer… I can’t remember exactly why at the moment but it was just after I was born in the good old days of 1982.  My mother still has the original news paper clipping with caption that used this photo… I’ll have to get a copy of that sometime.

Then there are the cute action shots:

Reading Garfield

Fixing The TV

Jammin’

Breaking Child Labor Laws (And Makin’ Bank!)

There are too many pictures to show.  No, I don’t feel like posting the one of me sitting on Santa’s lap while wearing a boy scout uniform (I’m not making this up either).  As funny looking as it is, I can’t help but look at it and think to myself, “Wow, look at all that brainwashing in action!”  Bottom line is, this was an AWESOME Christmas gift!  Thanks mom!

I’m not going to go into the technical differences.  All I want to say is that I liked this interface because it felt like a good blend of the interface between what you find in a default Windows install (a task bar on the bottom used for switching between open applications/show the desktop/house the trashcan).  It also had an upper task bar that reminds me of the classic Mac OS (upper panel with application/places/system menus/clock/sound controls, both panels are completely customizable).  But there’s another interface called KDE, which is more like Windows than GNOME or Mac OS.  Here’s a screenshot I just took from my laptop after installing the kubuntu-desktop package (Click to see full size):

It’s something very nice to play with and try out if you have some free time.  (EDIT:  Don’t try this on a production machine.  Do it on a machine that you can tinker with in case something goes wrong). If you’re runing GNOME right now and you’d like to try this out, do this following:

1.  Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal

2.  Type:

• sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

After it’s finished, log off.

When the login screen appears, click on the “Options” button in the lower left and then click “Change Session”.  Here you’ll be shown a list of the different “Front End” (Interfaces, such as KDE, GNOME and others) that you can use with Ubuntu.  KDE should be in the list.  Select it, and then click OK.

Proceed to login with your username and password.  It will then ask you if you want to make KDE the default, or if you want to just use it once for now, and revert back to GNOME at the next login.

If you’ve never used KDE on your PC before, it will take some time to load all the way to the desktop on the very first run.  I believe it sets up all the menus and shortcuts for all the installed software.  If you log off and log back into KDE, all the logins (and the  splash screen) will load a lot faster

I’m experimenting with this interface just for fun and to become acquainted with it.  I’m not going to criticize it, although there are tiny things about it that I don’t like.  That happens to everybody who tries a new GUI.  But other than the minor things, I’m liking it a LOT.

Being as I work 12 hour shifts there and have a lot of free time on my hands… I thought I’d make a little modification:

So I shot a quick reply back from my phone: “What’s the pay range?”

Most everybody I’ve ever gotten a job offer from or who have posted job listings state in clear print what the job is going to pay, usually like this: “Pay rate is $11 ~ $14 an hour, based upon experience,” or, “Pay is exactly $17 an hour, 8 hours a day for 3 days only.”  So you can at least get a ball park idea of what you will get if you pursue the offer.

His reply back to me: “Can you give me a call or do you have a number I can reach you at.”

This set a red flag off. For one,  his original email to me said he found my website… apparently he overlooked the phone number that’s plastered all over it (if not the entire site). Two: He didn’t answer my question.  What’s wrong with putting a pay rate down in written reply? From where I’m siting there is a lot wrong with not making this clear from the beginning. An email (printed text in general) can be honored of as part of the contract agreement.  It could even be used against them in court of they didn’t hold to a promise made or high-balled their offer to entice me.  But an unrecorded phone call? Who knows what kind of BS they’d throw at me. I could just imagine it: “Yes the pay will probably be X dollars. But it’s not even up to me so we’ll have to wait and see.  We need you to submit your background check/W-9 paperwork first.”

After giving it some thought I decided to not call, but reply: “I appreciate your interest, but must respectfully decline. I am quite busy with other contracts as well as my own freelance work and feel that there would be a potential conflict of interest down the road. I am also suspicious about ********’s policy of not quoting pay ranges in writing.”

I’m pretty sure it was the right thing to do.  There is a good chance that the job they wanted to offer me came,  not with hourly based compensation, but salary based compensation.  Salary (in my observations) seems to end up being unfair to most people.  You often end up working more than you had expected to work and get little if any extra thanks for your efforts.  And if you complain about it management will likely tell you its your problem to deal with, not theirs (which wouldn’t be their reply if you were paid by the hour).

It would be different if this job involved fixing PCs in an office environment, where usage policies were enforced and virus frequency reduced.  But salary pay to fix an unlimited number of home PCs that are who knows how many miles away and infected with who knows what?  I doubt I’d end up getting a fair break.  I’m glad I turned this offer down.

You can read a little more about Cisco’s incompetent and/or deliberately obstructive behavior here.

I’ll just keep this very short.  Internet Explorer has once again dropped the ball in the realm of Internet security and it’s something that’s been present for over 48 hours already.  You can read about the problem via BBC’s website by clicking here.

The article states in bold letters at the top, “Security experts recommend switching to a rival browser until the problem is fixed.”  Need a rival web browser?  Download Firefox at www.firefox.com.  It’s free, faster and much more secure than Internet Explorer ever will be.  Seriously.  Why is it more secure, you ask?  Because it’s open-source, just like Linux.  But again… don’t wanna turn this into a “Microsoft sucks” bashing post.

Also, on the side, I should mention that I’ve see a LOT of Windows systems get hit with viruses in the last 3 weeks, a good chunk of which have come in from emails on Facebook.  Which isn’t to say that Facebook is bad.  It just doesn’t have much of an effective spam filter or virus scanner built into it.  You would think that after a few people have recieved the same spam from their friend whose computer was compromised, they’d start filtering messages with the same links, the same stupid subject line, and all the rest that comes along with basic social engineering-based viruses.  It’s what Yahoo and Google do.  So to you Facebook/Myspace users out there (and everyone else who doesn’t uses these services), be VERY cautious about clicking on links to websites you’ve never visited to before in email sent to you by a friend.  They may not have actually sent you something.  In fact, it’s possible their account password was phished, changed, and their account used as a lauch pad for spreading the same infection to other people (like you).  So be careful.

I recently rebuilt my PC with all new hardware (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, eventually a big terabyte hard drive, and most importantly a NICE video card).  As a result I’ve been spending more time gaming on my PC.  I more or less quit gaming about 3 years ago after I started using Ubuntu more instead of Windows.  No, I didn’t really hold back on gaming because of Ubuntu (I still had Windows installed and could easily fire it up if I felt like playing), but I stopped because my hardware really sucked.  Not only that but there weren’t really many games on the market that seemed to be worth a damn, so I didn’t have much incentive to spend money on hardware.  Holding off for a few extra years helped me concentrate more on learning a new operating system in the meantime and saved me a lot of money on new hardware.

In short, I think I’ve put about $300 into all the hardware and it’s more than capable of playing Crysis as well as future games based upon the id Tech 5 engine.  The card I purchased is a nVidia 9600GSO with 756MB of video RAM (yes, the card came with that silly door hanger pictured above).  The amount of RAM alone is 3 times more than any card I’ve ever had in the past so I knew I would likely be very satisfied with its capabilities, and I have been VERY satisfied.  The CPU is an AMD X2 (Dual Core) 5600 (2.9 Ghz per core).  After doing some tests (video conversion in particular) the system appears to be just a hair over 4 times faster than my old setup.  I’d write more… but I got some gaming to do.

Not so long ago I wrote a post called Make your dumb cell phone smart with J2ME which showed most of you (depending on the type of phone you have) how to download Java Mobile applications and install them on your phone.  One of the applications I gave a thumbs-up to was called Movamail, which allowed you to check and compose your IMAP/SMTP/POP3 email from your cell phone.  About 3 days ago I noticed that no matter how many times I tried, Movamail would fail to connect to my email address.  I later discovered that their entire website is now dead.  So it would appear that Movamail forgot to pay their electricity bill.

I did some looking around for a replacement app and I’ve found one that I feel very comfortable with and have confidence it will not go under in the same manner that Movamail did.  It’s called Flurrymail.

I found the Flurrymail applications on www.getjar.com, where you’ll find a ton of J2ME mobile applications (most of them are junk but there are a few gems out there).  Flurrymail had received a lot of positive comments, most of which said it was easy to use.  So if you’d like to download it click here.

Now when I first set this thing up it asked me to signup with Flurrymail’s website.  No big deal.  But I will tell you that it’s much easier to do all of this at their website, www.flurrymail.com, instead of through your cell phone.  After I filled out their little signup form, I had trouble logging in.  I was getting a “Either your username or password is incorrect” error messages, and even after I confirmed my username and password with their “I forgot my password” link, it still wouldn’t let me it.  I was about to post a complaint on their support forums, but while waiting for activation from a moderator, I tried to sign in to my new account again a few hours later and it worked.  All I had to do at that point was add my email account to my new Flurry account.  The cool thing about this is that you can add multiple email accounts to your flurry mail so that it’s possible to check multiple in-boxes from your cell phone at the same time.  Not just IMAP/SMTP/POP3 accounts, but also many mainstream web-based email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, .mac and AOL.

Setting up my email from their website proved to be easier than I had anticipated.  All I had to do to configure my IMAP email was enter my server name, username and password and it automatically setup the SMTP settings for sending mail.  It literally took about 30 seconds.  This app rocks the socks off Movamail in speed and reliability.  Movamail would often take a few connection reattempts in order for it to work, but Flurry is very quick and works every time I check my Inbox.  Win!

Glancing back at this person basking in the glow of their costly purchase you reply, “Mine does something like that.”  While reaching for your own Ubuntu equipped laptop, they proceed to tap the Tab key while holding the Windows button, thumbing through their 3D Rolodex of running apps in an attempt to grab your attention again.  “You can switch between them like this,” they add, while verging upon self-induced nerdgasm.  In your most professional tone you reply, “Neat.”

Revealing your own laptop, a device that could easily be 4 years old by now, you set it down and turn it on with a semi-placid smile.  They appear to be conflicted with child-like curiosity and clinical anxiety as the boot-splash screen appears.  To sooth the mild nervousness while waiting, they go back to fiddling with their side-bar and grin again while changing the themed appearance of the analog clock.  But once your cost free, open-source Linux OS is up and running, you start to watch their eyes, waiting for that split second their glued stare falters back to your laptop, and that’s when they see this on your screen:

You didn’t even give them any advanced warning.  For a second they’re in a state of denial, but as you start to drag your mouse around to freely rotate that cube, they can’t help but let their hands fall away from their respective peripherals.  Drool almost precipitates as you maximize and minimize windows.  Some vanish with a Star Trek teleporter effect; others in a ball of flames and smoke.  They feel that perhaps they’ve been fooled by a dreadful hoax, like those poor saps who partook in the Mojave experiments.  And then…

So, what’s this about watching Youtube?

Right.  Sorry, got carried away there.  Bloggers call that “filler”.  Without it the post would be about as exciting as milk without the the stawberry syrup…. Moving along:

If you’ve got Compiz running right now try this:

• Hold down the Windows Key (called the SuperButton in Ubuntu)
• Roll the scroll wheel up on your mouse

This will cause you to zoom into wherever your mouse is located. To zoom out, just hold that Super Button down again, and scroll down instead of up.

Now you’re might be thinking, “I see what you’re getting at.  You’re going to show us how to zoom in on our Youtube videos so we can watch them full screen.  Big fat deal!”

Well, no it’s not a big deal.  But something you’ll probably discover and be annoyed by when you try this with Youtube is the fact that the mouse cursor stays on the screen, often right over the middle of the video you’re trying to watch.  So, here’s the other half of this trick:

• After zooming in, press SuperButton + L

This will unlock the cursor from the zoom, allowing you to move it off screen and away from the video you want to watch.  When you’re finished, you just hit Super Button + L again to lock it again, and then Super + Downscroll to zoom back out to normal.

I prefer to do this with Youtube (and other flash-based videos) because often times using their built in “Full-screen” buttons causes the frame rate to get jerky (Windows suffers from the same problem).  But when you zoom into the videos with Compiz, they often playback more smoothly.  Anyway, enjoy your Youtube.

P.S.

If you haven’t heard, Steam is officially coming to Linux!  Hence the epicness of the Black Mesa teaser.

While googling for a solution to recovery the comment I accidentally tossed into my WordPress database purgatory, I found a cool spam management plugin called Akismet.  You can download it from www.akismet.com.  This little thing has a lot of really cool features, including pie-charts and line-graphs showing statistics about the daily spam and “ham” (real comments) submitted to your blog.  And for once, I almost never ever see 40+ spam messages a day waiting to be trashed.  Not to mention the fact that you can very easily recover comments you didn’t mean to mark as spam in the first place.  If you’re a user of WordPress, I highly recommend this little plugin.  The only slight drawback is that you have to sign up for a free account with WordPress.com, but that only takes a few minutes and I’d bet that most of you out there have already done this.  Blog on!

Virtualbox:

Open a terminal window and paste in the following text:

• sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

After about 30 seconds or so it should be finished and your Virtualbox should be back to normal. Whew!

VMware Server:

Open a terminal window and paste in the following text:

• sudo vmware-config.pl -default

Yesterday while I was browsing Ubuntu Forums I came across a thread posted by someone named EssexJames.  He recounts a recent experience with showing his 10 year old son Ubuntu:

I enjoyed setting up Ubuntu 8.10 with my 10 year old son. We learned about Ubuntu together and I was pleased that he was really engaged and interested in the whole process of installation and the philosophy of Ubuntu.

We looked at the various packages that can be installed – to see if there was anything that looked really interesting. We got some graphics and video applications. All excellent.

Then we hit a snag. “Daddy, what’s Brainf**k?” he said. (This is the name of one of the packages).

Can I ask the community that develops Ubuntu and those that compile distributions, to please bear in mind that computers are family devices.

This forum’s terms and conditions state “…you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar…”. It’s a great shame that the development community don’t apply similar rules.

He continues in a follow up post:

If the objective of Ubuntu and other Linux distributions is to provide an operating system which people can use to replace Microsoft software, then it will need to tidy up the use of profanities in the code and application names. Families with children will see these things, decide it’s not for them, pay the devil and go to Microsoft instead.

I’ll happily f and blind with the best of them, but don’t expect profanities to appear on-screen when installing operating system software.

I wanted my son to become enthused by Linux and to learn about it himself. I install filters for web browsing for him – but I didn’t think I’d need one for an operating system and its components.

There have been several good replies to these two posts that I wanted share with you.  Indeed, it would be rather awkward for any parent who is showing their child a free OS and then discover within the package manager (which organizes over 26,000 different individual programs/dependencies and actually requires you to type in an administrator password before it can even be looked at) an uttering of profanity.  Here’s what some members of the Ubuntu community had to say in response to this:

From “steveneddy”:

I suggest that you explain it to him politely and professionally and if it bothers you, don’t mention it to him again.

All children are going to learn these words eventually.

This is a good time to wear the Daddy hat and sit down with the little tyke and have a man to man talk.

I also raised my two daughters, now 20 and 23, and have my two grandchildren here living with me.

We just have to decide that when that day arrives, and it will, that we are man enough to explain things like this to them in an adult manner so that they understand why it is that way and why some of us choose not to use those types of words around our children.

Don’t think worse of the whole community just because of the lapse in judgment of one developer.

From “starcannon”:

It is best to preview any material that you wish to expose your children to. It would be wrong to drop software simply because someone does not like the name. I would say that if freedom of speech and all of its implications are not something your prepared to deal with, perhaps some other OS is appropriate for your situation; I think Ubuntu is the greatest thing since sliced bread. I have 2 daughters, one is 11 and the other is 12, I do not see that they have been damaged at all by the occasional exposure to a slang word in the package manager, they hear much worse on the school bus; and then there is popular media such as television, movies, and music, all 3 of which have much more offensive words and ideas than a satirically named and obscure [programming] language.

There is plenty of xxx software for MS Windows, arguably much more than for any other OS, the difference is that when one searches for software for windows they may use the google search engine, when one searches for software for Ubuntu they use the Synaptic search engine; ironic isn’t it that if one runs across the “F” word on google while looking for windows software, that is acceptable; if however, one runs across it on the Synaptic search engine it is not acceptable. Ultimately I don’t care what a package is named, I care what the package does, indeed I never even knew about BF until you posted about it, /shrug, and again, it is your responsibility as a parent to do the parenting, not Microsoft’s, not Canonical’s, not Linux’s, not GNU’s, not Apple’s. Accept responsibility or don’t either way I certainly hope that package availability is never based on psuedo puritan ideals that have not even come close to actually existing in over 125 years.

“Grant A”, complimenting starcannon adds:

You are 100% correct. People say they are getting their kids ready for the real world, and THIS is the result. V-Chips, and their kin have made parents very lazy and thus devaluing the social standards the U.S. once held. Life has cuss words, believe it or not your children WILL hear these words. It is up to YOU to teach your child what it means. And no matter what you do, you can train him, you can stick a shock collar on him (please don’t) he WILL still say cuss words, or think them. I know a preacher who is a profane cusser. I am very offended that you want to step upon my rights to FREE speech as declared in over 200 countries, I do not tolerate fascism.

I am aware that this post may have sounded derogatory, but it wasn’t. Sometimes the blunt truth is the best truth. I’m not going to sugar coat everything I say on the Internet. I tried to keep this as civil as possible and avoided all the flaming I wanted to do. Please teach your children yourself, who else will? The Internet is not your baby sitter. If you don’t want your kid to see cuss words, you might as well have left him illiterate.

I agree with all of what was said in the above responses.  It ultimately falls on the parent to do the parenting of their child.  Grant A’s mentioning of the V-Chip, I think, is a good example of how some parents try to use technology to avoid awkward conversations with their child about things like sex, violence, drugs and “adult” language.  That being said, it should be emphasized that the Internet itself is a far more profane place than a simple package manager ever could be. Slightly off topic, I think to call any computer which is attached to the Internet a “family device” is a contradiction, no matter what operating system you choose to use.

EssexJames has marked his thread as “Solved” since posting it yesterday, but he’s not posted any kind of followup to indicate exactly what the replies have solved for him.  So I sent him a private message asking him what he’s decided and he says, although little can be quickly done to enable a profanity filter in Synaptic (and possibly won’t be implemented quickly because of resistance/misunderstandings), he and his son will continue to use Ubuntu.  He added that he will also start keeping a closer eye on him and his computer activities.  Good job, dad!

What a concert.  I think the last time I saw Nine Inch Nails live was in Denver, Colorado back in 2001.  No no, that’s too far back; I saw them again in KC a few years later.  As always they put on a spectacular show, this time around featuring the uber-cool “stealth screens” (which you can see in the above photo suspended over the band).  WIRED magazine did an article not so long ago about the ingenious use of these screens, which the band would interact with while on stage.  There’s a video included with the article (here’s a YouTube hosted copy of that same video, in case the one on Wired’s website doesn’t work) that explains all the cool tricks they could do with this new setup so check it out. You might be interested to learn that the computer responsible for generating the visuals on stage (aka, “the brain”) runs Linux.

The opening act was an little known “experimental rock” band called Boris (although I thought the big orange sign behind them on stage said “Bong”).

Their music was… pretty damn annoying.  If your favorite NIN CD of all time was Fixed (which itself was an experimental remix album based on Broken, an album Trent Reznor originally wrote because he was intentionally trying to destroy his career because he quickly grew to hate the legal/business sides of the music industry, and somehow ended up winning a Grammy for it) you might have been able to get into Boris.  For the most part Kristin and I were just praying for them to finish up and get the hell off the stage.  I know others in the arena got into them, and that’s perfectly fine.  I actually could have given one of their songs a thumb up if it hadn’t lasted for 15+ minutes, ending with their goofy drummer standing on top of his trap set with his arms in the air like a D-bag before walking off stage without the rest of the band.   And they kept playing the same drone for another 5 minutes after that.  Rather than ridicule them as being horrible… I decided that their performance was simply funny.  The drummer reminded me of Animal the Muppet.

Every time one of the band members yelled, “Whoooooooo!” into the microphone, I told Kristin to take a drink of her beer.  That helped keep her smiling because otherwise it was like watching someone wince at the sound of children scratching a chalkboard with lawn rakes.  I give them an A for effort.

After they were finished, and the rest of the fans arrived after the opening act, the show got off without a hitch and went on pretty flawlessly (so far as I could tell).  You can read other reviews by fans who also attended this show by visiting the tour journal at the ETS forums, found here.  There’s also a TON of videos from various shows on Youtube that you can look up and watch if you’ve got the time to spare.  I’ve even uploaded a few to my Facebook profile.

There is one song (The Greater Good) that is rather dark and creepy… a lot of whispered lyrics.  My girlfriend, being mostly unfamiliar with NIN, had trouble making out what he was saying.  The lyrics were, “Breath us in…. slowly…. slowly.”  She thought he was saying, “I breath my skin…. smelly…. smelly.”  HILARIOUS!  Every time she repeated what she thought the words were I about fell over from laughter.

One my favorite parts of the show was during the song Survivalism, which is off of the Year Zero album.  Year Zero was a concept album which Trent wrote shortly after the re-election of George Bush in 2004.  The premise behind the album was essentially what an album from about 15 years or so in the future might sound like if things in the government continued its streak of corruption.  It had a heavy George Orwell/1984-ish theme about it (warrentless wiretapping, facism/totalitarianism, excessive censorship of information,  etc.)  It was quite fun to see the backdrop for this song being “security cameras” aimed at the fans while the song played.  I especially liked the little touch in the lower right screen:

Overall I was very pleased with the show and would have felt it still worth the money if the opening act had not played.  One last little note mentioned by Trent during the show:  “For those of you who don’t know, you can download our latest album for free from our website.  And you can download every other album that’s not free from everybody else’s website.”

Download “The Slip” from www.nin.com for free

Bob is a skilled writer of tall tales, short stories and beautiful poems.  I was honored and saddened to have helped him post his very last update to his blog yesterday, announcing that he has no further intentions of adding anything further to his collection of over 320+ writings that have accumulated there since 2006.  Even with the absence of fresh material he continues to gain new fans and inspire fellow poets who hope to one day write with the same kind of colorful essence and flow he’s demonstrated.

The decision to end chemotherapy came yesterday, partially from the doctors who have been working with Bob, and partially from Bob himself.  The cold truth of the matter is that these treatments are wretched in their induction of unbearable sickness, and the doctors feel at this point that continuing treatment of this kind would only do more harm than good.  They both feel that these final days should be spent with him in as best condition he can possibly be instead of sickened to the core and unable to visit with family and friends.  Regular secondary medications have kept the physical pain and anxiety he’s endured suppressed to a more tolerable level.  Unfortunately the medication he takes does little to suppress the same symptoms endured by all of us around him, and things are quite depressing right now.

So the plan is to make the best of things and try hard to not let our emotions rob what little time is left.  We’re planing on watching Wall-E today, a film I love so much that I watched it 4 times in the theaters when it was first released.  Being bed bound in the living room, one of the best things we can do with him is watch movies as a family, and a few other unique titles are down the line.  I’ll write more some other time about a movie Bob and I first had a very excited discussion about when we met for the very first time in person at an Olive Garden in Columbia, Missouri.  And I’m going to host it on my server for others to download without hassle as a dedication to him.  Speaking of Columbia, Kristin and I will be going there tomorrow night to see Nine Inch Nails in concert in an arena that is across the street from the VA hospital Bob’s chemotherapy treatments started at earlier this year…

Enjoy!

1. Customize the appearance of Ubuntu (wallpaper, theme, fonts, dockbars, etc.)
2. Run Update Manager.
3. Install Flash, Java, Windows Media Codecs and MS fonts with just 4 clicks!
4. Install Compiz Fusion Advanced Settings Manager with one more click.
5. Install WINE with one more click and use it to run Windows based software.
6. Reveal Archive Manager in the Accessories menu and use it to create zip archives.
7. Install the libdvdcss2 decoder so you can watch DVD’s.
8. Install Skype from a *.deb file.
9. Install Google Earth using Terminal.
10. Install Virtualbox.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade && sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras compizconfig-settings-manager wine libqt4-core libqt4-gui && sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y --force-yes install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y libdvdcss2 && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && wget http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb && sudo dpkg -i skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb && wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/GE4/release_4_2/GoogleEarthLinux.bin && sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin && wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.4/virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_i386.deb && sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_i386.deb* && sudo adduser $USER vboxusers && echo “none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=666 0 0? | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

NOTE: A couple of the files that are downloaded using the above commands are intended for 32-bit/i386 processors.  If you are running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu, read the very last section of this post to see what you need to do differently.

You’re probably looking at that huge command thinking, “What the hell is THAT?!”  At first glance, it’s very difficult to see each individual command, much less know what every command does.  So I’m going to break it down one step at a time.

Now, as cool as it might seem to copy and paste one long command like this into a terminal window to accomplish all of these tasks in less time, it has its pitfalls.  For one, it’s easy to accidentally not copy everything you intend to paste.   In addition to this, the entire series of commands usually take longer than the sudo authorization timeout.  What that means is, after about 5 minutes or so, another sudo command will be invoked and because it’s been a few minutes since you entered your password for the first sudo, it will ask you for it again.  This defeats the purpose of trying to find a way to automate all of these things.

Fortunately, there’s a more reliable way to do this.  And it’s called Scripting.  More on that later.  Right now, I want to break these commands down piece by piece so you can see each one and understand what they do.  The commands we’re going to learn about are:

• sudo (Used to gain root privileges in the Terminal)
• apt-get (Used to check for updates, install and remove software)
• && (Used to chain-link commands together into strings)
• wget (Used to download files from the Internet from the Terminal)
• dpkg (Used to open and install *.deb packages)
• echo (Used to reflect input out to a to-be-specified destination)
• The | pipe symbol (routes output from a command into another command)
• tee (accepts text input and can be used to append text files)

The Mega Command — In Baby Steps

Of course one of the first things we need to do is open a Terminal window by clicking Applications>Accessories>Terminal.

Step 2 in our list of 10 things to do says “Run Update Manager.”  This is done in the terminal window with the following command:

sudo apt-get update

The very first part of the command you see is the word sudo.  As discussed in my Linux Terminal For Beginners blog, this command is what gives the user root-level privileges in a terminal window and it requires the administrator password to be entered in order for it to work.  Root access is required for installing software, applying system updates and modifying system configuration files that you normally don’t have permission to edit (among other things).  An easy way to remember sudo is to think “Super User DO.”

Following sudo is the command apt-get with the update option added.  The apt-get program is used to install, remove, upgrade and even reinstall software packages in Ubuntu.  In this case we’re telling apt-get to check the distribution repositories to see what updates are available for your system, and that’s it.  Technically this is called resynchronizing your software source indexes.

After this we have:

&&

The two ampersands characters (&&) act sort of like a chain link which tells the terminal, “Once the  command preceding && is finished with whatever it’s doing, proceed to execute whatever follows && as long as there were no errors.”  By using multiple &&’s, you can daisy-chain multiple commands back to back in a long string.  So now you know what all those &&’s up there are all about.

Following && is:

sudo apt-get -y upgrade

This tells Ubuntu to review the list of available updates that were just acquired by the index re-sync, download and install them.  The -y option automatically answers “Yes” to the “Do you want to continue” prompt that apt-get presents when you are about to install or remove software.  This command is followed by another &&.

Next up we have Steps 3, 4 and 5 in our list:

sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras compizconfig-settings-manager wine libqt4-core libqt4-gui

This command installs the Ubuntu Restricted Extra’s package (which contains Flash, Java, Win32 Video Codecs, MS Fonts and a couple of other little bells and whistles), Compiz Configuration Settings Manager and WINE.   I also added in the libqt4-core and libqt4-gui packages because the Skype installation later down the line depends on them… so I figured we should take care of them now.

While the Ubuntu Restricted Extras are installing, you will have to answer “OK” and “Yes” to the following two screens by using the Tab-Key and Enter Key on your keyboard:

If you happen to know of a way to automate these answers from the command line please let me know!

Step 7: We then come to adding the Medibuntu repositories so we can install the 3rd party libdvdcss2 DVD codec package.  The commands needed for installing libdvdcss2 (and what each one does) are outlined in my original 10 Things To Do After You Install Ubuntu Linux.  You basically did three copy & paste steps entirely within the terminal window.  All I had to do for this little challenge was simply insert &&’s in between these three steps to make one long chain:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y --force-yes medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

And that’s pretty much it.  For some reason I had to add a –force-yes after the -y in order to make it answer Yes for you.

Step 8: Next up is Skype.  Installing Skype via the terminal consists of using the following two commands chained together with an &&:

wget http://download.skype.com/linux/skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb && sudo dpkg -i skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb

At the beginning is the wget command, followed by a http address.  wget (if I’m not mistaken) simply stands for Web Get, and it is used for downloading files off of the Internet from the command line.  In this case, it’s downloading the skype-debian_2.0.0.72-1_i386.deb installer file.  Normally you would save a file like this to your PC and then double-click on it to start the GUI based installer.  But we want to install this package from the command line.  We do this using the dpkg -i command, followed by the file name of the deb file we just downloaded.  And that’s that.

Step 9: Next up is Google Earth.

wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/GE4/release_4_2/GoogleEarthLinux.bin && sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin

We use wget again to download a binary installer file, which is then executed by the sh command interpreter (sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin).  This will launch the GUI based installer, which unfortunately requires you to click the Install button and then Close the program out for the rest of the string to continue.

Step 10: Finally, we come down to installing Virtualbox.  This takes three commands:  Downloading the deb file with wget, using dpkg -i to install it, and then using the echo, | pipe and tee commands to append a line of text to the bottom of your fstab file (which grants Virtualbox access to your USB ports).  This is done with the following:

wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.4/virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_i386.deb && sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_i386.deb* && sudo adduser $USER vboxusers && echo “none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=666 0 0″ | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Here we can see wget being used to download a deb file, followed by the dpkg -i command being used to install it.  (You will be asked to press the Enter key to select “OK” when a dialog box appears notifying you about Virtualbox creating the vboxusers group).

What we see after that is the echo command.  And I’d like to go into a little detail about this very last bit because it’s very cool.

echo does just what it sounds like.  It echoes (bounces back/reflects) the input we give it.  If you were to type echo “the cat in the hat” in a terminal window, you would see the terminal print back the cat in the hat because you didn’t send it anywhere but to the terminal itself.  What we want to do is echo some text to another command that can append our /etc/fstab text file, and in this case, that command is tee.  The syntax we’re using is:

• echo “some text” | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

So how do we get our echoed text to go to tee instead of back to our terminal window?  Right after the “some text” part, we see a | pipe symbol.  Here’s a picture of what it looks like on your keyboard:

Pipe takes the output that echo spits out and pushes it out to the tee command.  The -a after tee stands for append, and it will insert whatever echo sends it into the end of our /etc/fstab file.

Now, let’s take all of this and make a script.

Doing The Above With A Script

A script is nothing more than a text file that contains a list of commands to be executed one after another.  So lets start by creating a text file.  You can either:

• Click Applications>Accessories>Text Editor
• In Terminal, type gedit and then press Enter.

Once our text editor is open, you’ll want to paste in this line of text at the very top:

• #!/bin/bash

Bash stands for GNU Bourne-Again SHell, and is the default command interpreter used by your Terminal in Ubuntu.  While it’s not necessary to include this at the begining (because Bash is the default), it is good practice, as there are other command interpreters out there that may not interpret your script the same way Bash does.  This will force whatever version of Linux you are using to use Bash to run the script.

Following this, we can start by pasting in our commands, separating them line by line.  I’ve already taken the above commands and put them into a script that you can use.  You can download it by clicking here, or from the Terminal type:

• wget http://www.davestechsupport.com/blog/downloads/megascript.sh

To view or edit this script in your text editor, type:

• gedit megascript.sh

You’ll notice that in the script there are no instances of sudo present.  That’s because we will be running the script itself with sudo, which in turn gives everything within the script root privileges.  So now you won’t have to type your admin password more than once.  Now that we have our script, we need to run it.  We need to give our script permission to be executed.  To do this, type:

• chmod +x megascript.sh

And to run the script, we type:

• sudo ./megascript.sh

As it was in the above steps with Java and Google Earth, you will have to be present at the computer to click “OK”, “Yes” and “Install” to keep things moving.  I’ll update this blog if anyone out there knows of a way to automatically send these answers to these programs so that the script is 100% automatic and not depend on user participation for it to finish.

Other Neat Things You Can Try

You could optionally add these three lines of text to the end of the above script:

• echo “The Megascript is finished and your system will restart in 10 seconds!  Press CTRL-C to cancel the reboot.”
• sleep 10;
• init 6

The first line echos the quoted text to the terminal window notifying you that the script has completed (well, all of the important stuff has finished, the script is still running).  The next command sleep 10 causes the script to pause for 10 seconds.  You could hit CTRL-C here if you wanted to interrupt the process.  Finally, the command init 6 logs you out of your session and reboots the entire machine, which is a good idea because you likely just finished installing a Kernel update, and the changes you made to your fstab file require a reboot in order for it to take effect.

I got creative with the sleep and echo commands, using them in one-second intervals to have a count-down be displayed in the terminal.  I also added a beep to each second with the echo -e ‘\a’ command.

Additionally, you could insert comments after each command in your script using double-pound symbols.  For example, the commands in your script could look like this:

• apt-get update ## This checks for the latest updates
• apt-get -y upgrade ## This installed all available updates

Doing this allows you to leave notes that describe the purpose of individual commands in case you forget.

Special Instructions for 64-bit Processors

There are two deb files downloaded in the steps above that are intended for 32-processors.  The Skype deb file and the Virtualbox deb file. Skype does not have a 64-bit specific version of their software available for download but there is a chance it will run.  However, there are ways to install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit version of Ubuntu.  Based upon this guide, I’ve modified the code (and the script).  However, I don’t have a 64-bit processor and have not tested this to make sure it works.

Virtualbox does have a 64-bit version of their software available, and it can be downloaded from this address.  You don’t need to do this though because I’ve already modified the code for this alternate download and installation.

Here’s the new code:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y upgrade && sudo apt-get install -y ubuntu-restricted-extras compizconfig-settings-manager wine libqt4-core libqt4-gui && wget -N boundlesssupremacy.com/Cappy/getlibs/getlibs-all.deb; sudo dpkg -i getlibs-all.deb; sudo getlibs -p bluez-alsa && sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get -y --force-yes install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y libdvdcss2 skype && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && wget http://dl.google.com/earth/client/GE4/release_4_2/GoogleEarthLinux.bin && sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin && wget http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/2.0.4/virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb && sudo dpkg -i virtualbox-2.0_2.0.4-38406_Ubuntu_intrepid_amd64.deb* && sudo adduser $USER vboxusers && echo "none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=666 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

And here is an 64-bit version of my script: megascript64bit.sh

• wget http://www.davestechsupport.com/blog/downloads/megascript64bit.sh

Use the same method to give it execute rights and then run it by typing sudo ./megascript64bit.sh

I give you the product of about 45 minutes worth of work.  Very little time was needed to lay down the tracks, and a lot more time was spent playing around with knobs and browsing through the large bank of instruments I have at my disposal to find just the right sound.  I’m excited to write more.

So, please enjoy this free download of a very short piece of music I wrote.

Just wait for the very end. 

Hey, Ubuntu freaks!  I’m going to have another Terminal tutorial coming out on Wednesday with an introduction to creating bash scripts.  Sit tight!

This puppy is slim, loud and does 6.1 surround sound.  I’m sure there are others out there which can handle more channels than that, but it was more than what I was looking for and has held up for the last few years with no problems, even with the confined space it sits in.

And I wasn’t about to plug it into a handful of tiny 2 inch wide satellite speakers.  If you’re serious about music and the quality of the audio coming out of your PC, you don’t just spend 99 dollars on a set of tiny speakers plus one crappy sub-woofer.  I have a pair of headphones that are worth more than that.  I even spent more than that just for the center channel speaker.  Really, do yourself a favor and invest in quality audio.  It’s money well spent and your ears will thank you later (so long as you don’t deafen yourself).  Listening to surround sound music is a very satisfying; you almost have to smoke a cigarette afterwards.

In an unrelated note… During the last 5 years or so, I’ve made upgrades to my computer for only one of two reasons:  Either Nine Inch Nails released a new album that contained audio tracks my hardware couldn’t handle, or id Software released Doom III.  And it’s been a while since Doom III came out so you can imagine how old my PCs hardware is.  The case isn’t that old, but the guts inside are.  Still, it doesn’t feel old.  It doesn’t feel like a slow computer… probably because I stopped using Windows and did away with all of that hard drive fragmentation, spyware, antivirus nonsense.  It sounds like a joke but you really do have to put more money into a computer in order to stave off the stress that comes with having to deal with all that crap, and all you end up with is delaying the inevitable system meltdown.  But I digress.

My computer is my primary entertainment device, and even though it’s attached to a 35″ TV with an S-Video cable, I don’t think that counts as “watching TV”.  I hate watching TV.

Okay, this post is going no where, which means I probably woke up too early.  But before I end this, I can think of one other thing that rocks besides surround sound:

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) was officially released yesterday.  Boosh!! Often with each new release comes a spike in the number of people who are trying it out for the very first time.  So to help the new users out, I’ve written this guide to introduce you to this popular Linux-based operating system and some of the cool software you can install on it.

Here’s what we’re going to go over:

1. Customize the appearance of Ubuntu (wallpaper, theme, fonts, dockbars, etc.)
2. Run Update Manager.
3. Install Flash, Java, Windows Media Codecs and MS fonts with just 4 clicks!
4. Install Compiz Fusion Advanced Settings Manager with one more click.
5. Install WINE with one more click and use it to run Windows based software.
6. Reveal Archive Manager in the Accessories menu and use it to create zip archives.
7. Install the libdvdcss2 decoder so you can watch DVD’s.
8. Install Skype from a *.deb file.
9. Install Google Earth using Terminal.
10. Install Virtualbox.

1.) Customize Your Ubuntu Desktop
Difficultly: Very Easy

The first thing anybody should want to do with their own computer is make it look the way they want it to look.  Who wants an OS that forces its users to conform to one particular layout over another?  With Ubuntu, you have a lot of flexibility.  You even have the option to use a different desktop environment.  GNOME is the default environment for Ubuntu and it’s what we will see used in the example screenshots in this guide. KDE (which looks very similar to Windows XP/Vista/7) is the default environment for Kubuntu;  xfce is the default for the lightweight Xubuntu.  There are others, such as Fluxbox and IceWM, that are geared towards being minimalistic in resource usage and makes them perfect for older, slower machines.

Below is a screenshot I took of my own desktop shortly after upgrading my computer from 8.04 to 8.10.

You may or may not like the looks of the default desktop.  I’ve always though this default background just looked like a bunch of coffee stains… You can modify the interface in so many different ways the possibilities are endless.  Check out this small gallery of Ubuntu screenshots I put together to see some examples of what you can do to your own Ubuntu desktop.

The best way to explain how to customize your desktop is to show you a video (albeit, from an older version of Ubuntu) that demonstrates how you can modify the following things:

• Changing Wallpapers
• Changing Screensavers
• Panel Properties (Location/Auto-hide/Background)
• Changing/Adding Desktop Themes
• Adding/Moving Launcher Shortcuts to your Panel/Desktop
• Modifying Menu Layouts
• Adding Applets to your Panels
• Modifying your About Me user info
• Customizing your Login screen layouts/themes
• Using Multiple Workspaces

EDIT: Since the original posting of this blog, Alan Pope has removed the video below from Google and I have not yet found a comparable replacement. A very good guide about how to do all of the above can be found here.

There are several little applets that widgets that can be added to your panel, but you can also make changes to the panel itself such as its orientation (Bottom/Top/Left/Right edge of the screen), its background (solid color or transparent), its width and a couple other minor things like auto-hide.  Be careful, it’s easy to accidentally delete a panel.  If that happens, right-click on a remaining panel and click “New Panel” to create a new one. Newly created panels will be completely empty and you will have to right-click on them and select “Add to panel” in order to add things back like a task switcher.

The video makes use of http://art.gnome.org/ during it’s demonstration of changing wallpapers and themes, but another noteworthy site you should check for such things is http://www.gnome-look.org/. My personal favorite website for wallpapers is InterfaceLift Wallpapers.  You should also check this site out for wallpapers, too.

You might have noticed in some screenshots of Ubuntu that some people have added a dockbar (similar to the one used in Mac OS X) to their Ubuntu installation.  Below is a picture of one in action.

Check out this guide I’ve written about adding Cairo-Dock to your Ubuntu install as it is one of the best available for Ubuntu (in my opinion).

2.) Run Update Manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

Typically, a fresh Ubuntu install is actually a tad bit older than the current status of the distribution (this happens with all operating systems, including Windows). So often times after a fresh install, your system might be needed a few updates to be applied. Running Update manager manually after installing can bring your system up to date with the latest security and software patches.  While Update Manager does check for updates automatically, it often doesn’t do it immediately after you login for the first time.  So after a fresh install it is a good idea to force it to check for updates.  To do this:

• Click System>Administration>Update Manager
• Click on the “Check” button to check for updates

If there are updates available, you simply click “Install” to install them.  It will ask you to enter your administrative password when you do this.  This is the password you created for the “first” user during installation. Piece of cake.

*Note: If you’re having hardware issues (e.g., 3D video acceleration not working, wireless adapter not in use, etc.) after installing all available updates, you should check in System>Administration>Hardware Drivers to see if there are any proprietary drivers that need to be enabled.  You simply check the appropriate boxes off for the driver needed, and they will be installed for you.

3.) Install Flash, Java and Extra Video Codecs in just four clicks!
Difficultly: Very Easy

In order to get the best multimedia experience out of our computer, we need to install a few programs and plugins.  Most of you out there are familiar with Flash, Java and multimedia file formats like Divx, Xvid, MP3, ASF, Apple Quicktime, etc. Installing decoders to open these types of files has been made simple by bundling them all together into one package.  And installing it is very easy.  To get started, do the following:

• Click Applications>Add/Remove (now called Ubuntu Software Center).   A new window will appear (see below.)
• Change the “Show:” drop menu in the upper right corner to “All Available Applications” (In Ubuntu Software Center, click View>All Applications)
  
• Search for the word “restricted”

• Once the search returns its results, check off the box next to “Ubuntu Restricted Extras”
• Sit tight. Don’t click the Apply Changes button just yet.  We’re going to check off a few more things

Frequently Asked Question: “What does it mean by restricted extras?”

Answer: The word “restricted” in this context is used to describe these types of multimedia plugins and decoders because most of them are closed-source and proprietary.  Hence, you are restricted from modifying their source code.

4.) Install Compiz Fusion Advanced Settings Manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

Compiz Fusion (the program responsible for the dazzling eye-candy special effects on Ubuntu) is included by default, but its advanced control panel is not. Need of this advanced control panel comes up if you are a power user who wants to use the 3D window management features to the MAX, which means turning your desktop into a rotating cube of multiple workspaces, among other nerdy things. You can also greatly customize your special effect animations and window behaviors using this control panel. So let install it!

• After you’ve checked off Ubuntu Restricted Extras in the above step, do another search for the word “compiz”

• Check off “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings” (shown above)
• Sit tight, and don’t click apply just yet.  There’s more we’re going to search for and check off.

Once the control panel applet is installed, it can be found in System>Preferences>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings.

*Notice: You will want to make sure you have Compiz enabled in System>Preferences>Appearence>Visual Effects before using the above control panel you’ve installed.  Otherwise changes you make with it will not be seen.

5.) Install WINE for running Windows-based software in Ubuntu
Difficultly: Very Easy

WINE is a program that acts as a sort of emulator for Windows programs to run on top of.  Instead of needing to use Windows for running that favorite application or game, you can run the program right in Ubuntu with the help of WINE.  The only catch is that not all Windows program run on WINE yet.  So you should search the WINE applications database to see if a program you’re wanting to use works with WINE.  Below is a screenshot of Half-Life 2 running in Ubuntu, thanks to WINE!

To install WINE:

• In the Add/Remove Applications applet (should still be open from the previous step), search for “wine” and then check off the box next to WINE in the results window.
• Finally, click Apply in the lower right corner to install WINE, as well as the other programs you’ve already checked off in Add/Remove.

Now if you want to run a piece of Windows based software, you simply double-click on the executable (like setup.exe) and it should run just as it would in Windows (provided the WINE Application Database lists that the program you are trying to use and says it works with WINE).  Shortcuts created by software installers are typically added to the Applications>Wine>Programs menu.  You can read more about using WINE here.

NOTE: If double-clicking on an EXE causes the Archive Manager to open instead of WINE, it’s because your default file-association needs to be changed.  To fix this, right-click on an EXE file then click Properties.  A new window will pop up with a few tabs along the top, one of which says “Open With”.  Click this tab, then select WINE from the list and click Close.  From now on, EXE’s will always open with WINE. Also, if you get a message that complains to you about an “execute bit”, it means the EXE file needs to be given permission to run as a program.  To change permissions, right-click on the file, click Properties, then the Permissions tab and check the box off near the bottom that says “Allow to be executed as a program”.

6.) Enable (reveal) your Archive Manager and create zip files
Difficultly: Very Easy

Some of you might be wondering: How can I create a zip file? The answer is with the included Archive Manager. This tool (for some weird reason) isn’t shown in the Applications>Accessories menu by default. But we can reveal it very easily by doing the following:

• Click System>Preferences>Main Menu
• Click on the Accessories menu in the left panel, then check off the Archive Manager (see below). Then click Close.

That it! Now when you open your accessories menu, you’ll be presented with a new shortcut to your Archive Manager. You can use this utility to create zip files. Keep in mind that it can also create other types of archives, such as tar.gz, and a few others (not RAR, at least not without an additional package installed to provide this option to you).  To explore the possibilities, click Applications>Accessories>Archive Manager.  Once open, click New in the upper left corner and take a look at the bottom of the window where you can specify archive file type, password locking and spliting.  After you create a new archive, you simply drag and drop files into the archive manager and it will add them to the new archive.

One other simple way to create an archive is to select all the files you want to put into a zip file (by CTRL-Clicking or SHIFT-Clicking them) or even by clicking on a folder containing the files you want.  Then once they’re selected, right-click on any one of these files or folders and a drop menu will appear.  Just click “Create Archive” and a wizard will appear asking you where you want to save the new file and what format you’d like it to be in.

7.) Install the libdvdcss2 decoder for DVD playback
Difficultly: Medium

Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  This will open a new terminal window.  (If you would like to know more about Terminal, check out my Terminal for Beginners guide). Copy the following command and paste it into the Terminal window and press Enter:

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

This will add the Medibuntu repositories to your 3rd party software sources (in other words, this tells Update manager to check one additional server when it looks for system updates).  Next we’ll install the libdvdcss2 decoder for playing commercial DVD’s as well as an additional set of video/audio decoders that weren’t included with the “restricted” extras from the steps above.  To do this, paste this command into Terminal:

• sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2 w32codecs
  

..And press the Enter key.  It will ask you to type your password (which will not produce any characters on screen while you’re typing, so don’t expect to see *****’s show up) and say “y” for yes to confirm your command.  Once installed, you should be able to watch a DVD simply by inserting a disc into the computer.

NOTE: You may have heard a rumor that installing the libdvdcss2 decoder is illegal. If you live in the US and someone tells you this, refer them to 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201(f). The binaries to crack the DVD video stream encryption are not illegal if you have a license to the content.  In other words, if you have purchased your own legal/legit DVD, then that means you have license to watch it.  After all, the content must be decrypted in order to make the content usable.  However, the law is not the same in all countries so you should check your local country laws.

8.) Install Skype
Difficultly: Very Easy

Skype is a very popular Voice Over IP application that allows you to make cheap phone calls from your computer.  They ask you for 10 bucks for your first set of calls and send special offers your way from time to time.  I’ve been paying 30 bucks a year for the last 3 years to make unlimited calls to anywhere in the United States, so that’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.  It also features webcam capabilities and conference calling.

Installing Skype is easy.  All you have to do is download the deb file from Skype.com.  Here is a direct link:

http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu

Once the deb file is finished downloading, double-click on it.  An installer window will appear with a “Install Package” button in the upper right corner of the window.  Click that button, and when it’s finished, you’ll find Skype in Applications>Internet.

9.) Install Google Earth
Difficultly: Medium

First thing you have to do is download Google Earth. To do that, visit this link: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

After you agree to the license, you’ll be taken to a new page where an automatic download will begin and ask you what you want to do with a file called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Simply save this file to your Desktop for now.

Next we’ll need to open up a terminal window. To open Terminal:

• Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal

When you first open terminal you’ll be given a prompt where you can enter commands. You also will be sitting in your Home Folder. If you type in the letters “ls” (That’s ls, short for the word “list”, in lowercase), you’ll be shown the files and folders in your home folder. Notice that one of them is called “Desktop”. We need to change our directory so we can run our GoogleEarthLinux.bin file. To do this:

• Type “cd Desktop” (no quotes) and hit enter.

In the world of Linux, everything is case-sensitive, so be sure to Capitalize the word “Desktop” in the above command. This command will bring you to your Desktop folder. If you type “ls” again and hit enter, you’ll see the files which reside on your desktop right now. Listed somewhere should be the bin file you just downloaded.

Now for the magic!

• In terminal, type: “sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin” (no quotes) and hit enter.

After you press enter, the following window will appear, and begin to install Google Earth for you:

Shortly after the above screen appears, you’ll get another one that says the program successfully installed. You’ll then be given the option to run Google Earth right away. If you don’t want to, you can just click Quit, and start it later by going to Applications>Internet>Google Earth.

NOTE: Google Earth runs best on PCs that are equipped with 3D graphics acceleration cards/chipsets.  Some video cards require you to have their proprietary drivers enabled in order for them to be utilized by the system.  You can check to see if you need to enable any such drivers by clicking System>Administration>Hardware Drivers.

10.) Install Virtualbox
Difficultly: Medium

Virtualbox is a popular application used on many different operating systems that allows you to create Virtual Machines, upon which you can install any number of operating system.  So, for instance, you could be running Windows XP inside of a window on top of Ubuntu.  This is good for users who are trying to migrate from Windows to Ubuntu but are not quite ready to take the big leap or are being held back by one or two applications that won’t run in Ubuntu.

So here’s what you need to do:

1. Download the Virtualbox deb file for your particular processor architecture (i386 or AMD64) from here.
2. Double-click on the the deb file you downloaded to start the installer.  Click “Install Package” to install Virtualbox.
3. Once that is finished, you will need to add yourself to the vboxusers group.  To do this quickly, open up a Terminal window (Applications>Accessories>Terminal).  Once Terminal is open, paste in the exact text and press the enter key:  sudo adduser $USER vboxusers
4. Reboot the PC.

Another cool thing you can do is add scripts to your Nautilus file browser that will give you new abilities when you right-click on something.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your new Ubuntu Linux operating system!

The VirtualBox kernel driver is not accessible to the current user. Make sure that the user has write permissions for /dev/vboxdrv by adding them to the vboxusers groups. You willneed to logout for the change to take effect..
VBox status code: -1909 (VERR_VM_DRIVER_NOT_ACCESSIBLE).

This threw me off because, for one, I am already a member of the vboxusers group. And attempting to recompile the kernel headers using the sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup terminal command also did not work.  So I had to do a little digging around and finally found the solution, and it is EASY!

The Magic Trick

Let’s keep this short and sweet, okay?  We have four things to do:

• Copy and Paste an entry to our Software Sources list
  
• Copy and Paste a command into a terminal window
• Copy and Paste a line into our fstab file
  
• Run Update Manager

Click on System>Administration>Software Sources.  You will be asked to enter you administrator password.  Once open, click on the “Third-Party Software” tab.  You will likely see something that looks like this:

You can just ignore all of those entries that are unchecked.  What we want to do is add one to this list.  Click the Add+ button at the bottom left and then paste in the following text in the box that appears:

• deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian hardy non-free

I know some of you out there are thinking, “Hardy?  I thought we’re running Intrepid Ibex now…”  Don’t worry, it will work.  Now that you’ve added the above text, click the Add Source button. It will add a new entry to the window.  You can click the close button now.  The following message will then appear:

Click Reload.

Now, open a Terminal window by clicking Applications>Accessories>Terminal.

In here, copy and paste in the following text by using the Edit>Paste menu option in the Terminal window.

• wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/sun_vbox.asc -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Be sure to include all the text above (from the wget to the minus-sign at the end) when copying.  Paste the text into Terminal and press enter (if necessary).  It may also ask you for your administrator password again.

We’re already half way finished.  Now we need to add a line of text to our fstab file.  We are doing this to reestablish Virtualbox’s access to your USB ports.  To edit the file, paste this into the terminal window you should still have open (open another one if you closed the first one).

• sudo gedit /etc/fstab

This will open a text editor.  Paste in the following text at the very bottom of the file:

• none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=46,devmode=666 0 0

You don’t need to make any other changes to the file, though if you see another line at the bottom of the fstab that looks very similar to the one you just pasted it, comment it out by inserting a couple of pound-symbols ## in front of that line, like this:

• ##none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=125,devmode=664 0 0

I suggest commenting out, as opposed to deleting it completely, so that if there is a problem after, you can just reverse the edit you made by removing the pound signs later.  You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to though.  I did it just to be tidy.  For this edit to take effect, you will need to restart the computer after saving the file.

Finally, once you are booted up and running again, run System>Administration>Update Manager.  Check for updates, apply all that are available, and you should be good to go!

If this fails, try downloading the latest copy of Virtualbox from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads and reinstall it (although I did not have to do this as Update Manager took care of all downloading and upgrading automatically after following the above steps).

A new feature has been implimented in 8.10 that will automatically update the kernel headers whenever there are future Linux Kernel updates, so you should’t have to worry about recompiling them in the future.  However, it is possible that come Ubuntu 9.04, you may have to repeat the above steps (or something close to them) in order to fix Virtualbox again.  The alternative to this is to not upgrade Ubuntu to the latest distrobution, which is perfectly fine because 8.04 has Long Term Support (LTS) and will continue to recieve normal updates until April, 2011.

Of course, the simplest way to avoid this traffic jam is to do just that:  avoid it.  Put the upgrade off for a week until the servers aren’t under so much pressure and then use the built-in Upgrade Manager.  This is the perfect solution for the laziest of users who stopped reading this before the end of the previous sentence.  But for antsy users out there (especially us Americans who are addicted to having immediate satisfaction with everything) there is another way to go and it’s the BEST way to upgrade from here on out if you want to do it right now and avoid the traffic.  This is an esspecially useful tactic for people who have multiple computers running Ubuntu who don’t want to wait for each one to download updates, because you can now just go to each one with an upgrade CD and save yourself a lot of time.

What you’ll need:

• A blank CD
• To make sure all current updates for 8.04 have been applied (use the Update Manager to install them)
• An opportunity to walk away from your computer for a couple of hours

Once the upgrade is underway, you will want to leave it running alone and treat the PC like a Crock Pot of stew that will take a couple hours to cook, checking it on occasion but waiting till finished before sipping the flavor.

Here’s What We’re Going To Do

Very, very briefly, here’s the plan:

1. Download (from here) the Ubuntu 8.10 Alternate ISO torrent file and open it up with Transmission Bittorrent Client (included with Ubuntu 8.04 by default).
2. Use Brasero Disc Burning to burn the downloaded ISO to a blank CD.
3. Insert the CD and click “Run Upgrade” when prompted.

Piece of cake.

Downloading Ubuntu 8.10 ALT via BitTorrent

First, visit this web address:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/8.10/

From this page, scroll down until you start to see a listing of file names like this:

Note: The above screenshot shows Release Candidate copies of Ubuntu.  The official release will not contain the letters “rc” in the file name.

There are many files listed here, but the ones you need to look for are those ending in .iso.torrent.  Choose between the i386 and the amd64 versions of Ubuntu and download the appropriate torrent, selecting “Run with Transmission” when you are asked what you’d like to do with the file once it’s finished downloading. You can see the i386 Release Candidate version of 8.10 that I clicked on above in purple; odds are you will likely want the same file.  Don’t download the “desktop” iso files (not shown, but further down the list); otherwise known as the Live CD version of Ubuntu.  These ISOs do not provide the ability to upgrade, so be sure you select one of the two alternate iso.torrent’s.

When transmission loads the torrent file, it will ask you where you want to save the iso file it is about to download for you.  I would select the desktop just to keep things simple and hit OK, then Transmission will begin downloading the iso file from the swarm of other bittorrent users.

A Word About BitTorrent…

For those of you who are not familiar with BitTorrent, here a little summery of how it works:  Instead of having everybody try to download the same thing from a central server, individual users share the overhead by uploading to each other what they’ve already downloaded from others before them and vice versa (everyone is a server AND a client).  As you can see from the screenshot above, this can result in very fast download speeds because you are downloading from multiple locations simultaneously.  This animation helps illustrate how data is shared between multiple users while keeping the work decentralized.

For the purposes of this guide, it’s not very necessary go further into the technical details, but it should be said that BitTorrent performs best either with a direct Internet connection (i.e., no router between your PC and your modem) or with port-forwarding configured on your router if you have one.

Burning Your Alternate ISO File To CD

Once Transmission is finished downloading the ISO go ahead and close transmission.  You’ll now want to burn the ISO file you downloaded onto a blank CD.  Right-click on the downloaded ISO file and select Open With>Brasero Disc Burning.  A small dialog box will come up asking you for other options, but you can just click on the Burn button to get the ball rolling.  Once the CD is burnt, you’re ready to do the upgrade.

Performing The Upgrade With Your Burnt CD

Insert your freshly burnt Ubuntu Alternate CD into your PC while logged into your current Ubuntu installation.  Within a few seconds, you should see a popup that looks like this:

Click “Run Upgrade”.  You’ll then be presented another popup that asks you if you want to use the Internet to check for updates along-side the CD you just inserted.  It’s up to you, but I would select “Yes” to this question.  This way you can be sure your system will be as up-to-date as possible without the need to download everything.  Selecting “No” will still work, and work even faster, but you will still have additional (non-essential) updates that will need to be downloaded in the future.

At some point it will ask you if you want to remove obsolete packages, which you can answer “yes” to.  The computer will generate a summery of everything that is about to take place (what packages will be upgraded, how much data needs to be downloaded, etc.) then you can Start the Upgrade.

And that’s pretty much it.  So enjoy your new upgrade!

Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) Beta was just released and it is a routine event that precedes the fast approaching final release of the next major upgrade to Ubuntu Linux.  A lot of hype and speculation has been generated over the last 6 months about what new features and changes would be included with Ibex.  One change that users have been hoping to see since before the release of 8.04 was a new appearance theme that would look a little glossier and polished.  There are a couple reasons this hasn’t really happened yet and won’t happen for at least another 6 months.  For one, it has met resistance from users who don’t think extra resources should be allocated to eye candy at the expense of system performance.  Compiz is an exception to this, mostly because it can easily be shut off and even when it’s running it barely uses the CPU.  The other reason a visual, thematic overhaul of the interface hasn’t occurred yet is because, simply put, there are more important things to worry about right now.

So you shouldn’t look forward to a major visual upgrade to your Ubuntu system, although such an improvement is not entirely out of the cards.  After all, there will be newer appearance themes included with Ubuntu for you to select from, and that might be all the freshness you feel is necessary with your current installation.  And of course, there will be many other significant improvements made to Ubuntu.

Here are some of the new features you can expect to find in Ubuntu 8.10 -

Encrypted Private Directory

A new folder will be available in your Home Folder that will encrypt any data you place into it.  This is a great security feature for people who have a lot of stuff on their PC that has to remain absolutely confidential, even in the unfortunate event of theft.  Because all of the data is encrypted and locked with your account password, it can only be accessed by you (or, more correctly, by anyone who knows your password).  Pretty nifty feature, if you ask me.

A New Guest Account

One of the features that most Windows users are familiar with is the ability to turn on a Guest account.  This allows people who do not have their own account on the PC to use the computer with the most limited permissions.  They do not have any administrative privileges, nor do they have an account password.  This allows you the ability to let strangers, or otherwise annoying computer illiterate relatives with an affinity for breaking things to use the computer with no worries about them accidentally fouling up the system.  It’s a convenient idiot-proof account in other words.

Faster Booting and Logging In

Once again, as was achieved with the upgrade from 7.10 to 8.04, the upgrade to 8.10 will incorporate even faster booting and user login times.

Flash 10 Player

Ubuntu 8.10 will include Flash 10 RC, which includes drastic performance improvements as well as solves many technical issues involving Pulse Audio.  Full screen flash videos play much more smoothly too.

Built-in BBC News Stream Player

Totem Movie Player will have a new plugin added to it that will allow you the ability to stream content from BBC’s website.

A “remember my password” Checkbox for Root/Sudo Dependent Tasks

Now when you open up something like Update Manager or Synaptic, and you are asked to type in your password so as to grant yourself root privileges, you will be presented with a box that says, “Remember my password” that will type your password in for you for all future sudo password prompts for the remainder of your session.

————–

There are other more technical upgrades being included with Ibex, such as the improved Samba networking services, GNOME 2.24, Xorg 7.4 (which is said to completely eliminate the need for the xorg.conf file; no more manual tweaking necessary), and a lot of other minor things (like an eject button being placed next to removable/ejectable devices).  Oh, and don’t forget Linux Kernel 2.6.27 which is a big leap forward in the hardware compatibility department.  So, not a whole lot on the surface that most users will be able to see and appreciate, but there is a LOT under the hood that is being upgraded which will provide new users with a better first impression of the OS than before.

Ubuntu Linux 8.10 is scheduled to be released October 30th.

There is probably a small number of you out there who have seen a little bit about the Google phone on the web.  You probably won’t see TV commercials for it for a little while, because they want supplies to last for a particular demographic who this phone is being targeted towards:  the geek (specifically, software developers).  I’ve been drooling over this phone and stressing out over the fact that I don’t qualify for the $179 price tag that new T-Mobile users are going to be able to take advantage of.  I, on the other hand, would have to shell out $300 for the phone.  And as much as I would love to have this phone in my hands on October 22nd, I won’t feel down about the fact that it’s not going to happen for me.  And probably won’t happen for another year (which is when my current T-Mobile upgrade contract expires and will allow me to take advantage of a contract discount offer).

So why will I not feel so sad about the fact that I won’t soon be playing with the wicked GPS enabled software, the 3 mega-pixel camera, the open-source Android Linux operating system, the Wi-Fi network capabilities and all that other jazz?  Because something better is right around the corner, and the phone I currently have (a Motorola K1 KRZR) suits my needs quite nicely for now.  I can browse the web with it, send and receive e-mail, look up directions with Google Maps, and a few other neat things.  Though it’s all through a tiny screen using slow typing T9 to enter web addresses that aren’t in any dictionary… you know how much of a pain in the ass that is?  Still, it gets me by and is still classy looking (anything shiny is classy to me).

Speaking of Motorola, I’ve learned that they are currently headhunting for 350 new employees to focus exclusively on developing Android Linux capable phones.  LG and Samsung have made similar announcements of intentions to have Android phones on the market by Q3 of next year, which means we’re going to have a ape shit throwing storm of competition that will result in insane price drops.  Remember when Motorola came out with their first RAZR which debuted at $300, and less than a year later it was considered one of the cheapest pieces of crap for sale on eBay?  I don’t think the G1 will suffer than kind of rapid obsolescence, but it will certainly be outpaced with newer phones that run faster.  Hence, I can’t wait to see what the G2 will have in store (hopefully with an actual USB port and not that proprietary HTC ExtUSB crap).

As you can imagine, the variety of topics in this forum are often all over the place and unpredictable, and of the threads that are closed: often they are closed justifiably.  This is nothing new.  But lately, most of these threads have been closed, not because of the original topic at hand, but because of one or two assholes who don’t know how to act a little more civilized, when debating something controversial or sensitive, show up and spoil the discussion with personally degrading insults.  Rather than ban such users and let the conversations continue, the mods have thought the best thing would be closing the thread.  This has caused a lot of their time to be wasted because the same problems have been repeating more frequently, and they’ve finally gotten fed up with having to spend so much time censoring the forum.  They’ve been hearing opinions from users about the possible closing of the forum for the last few weeks and I always thought that, while the tone of the moderators threatening to close the forum has been stern, you wouldn’t have believed it… until now.

Recently, a new policy has been enacted by the moderators, which allows members to continue visiting the forum and posting in already existing threads, but prevent people from posting new threads.  The theory is that this will cause interest in the forum to dwindle down to a more controllable murmur, as well as experiment to see what the result of closing the forum might be without actually closing the forum cold turkey.

Having discovered this today (a little too late), I wrote the following in a thread that originally suggested the idea of disallowing new threads forever:

It seems I am unable to post a new thread in OMGPP.

This saddens me because:

1. Despite the abuse the forum gets and the trouble moderators have dealt with in an effort to keep things clean and inviting to new Ubuntu forum users, it stands to silence a lot of relevant, healthy debate.

2. The motto, “Anywhere but here” sounds rather the opposite of what open-source communities are supposed to be proud of: being open.

3. The moderators can close the forum if they’d like, but there will be consequences down the road. One consequence is the need to continue closing unwanted threads that land in forums outside of OMGPP at a higher frequency because new users might think it would be acceptable. The community cafe would be forced to absorb the traffic that used to come here.

Idea: Stealing from the comments management system on digg and reddit, why not make the posts on this forum vote-able, and anybody who gets a certain number of negative votes will have their post “muted” or something to that effect. You could even impose a minimum age requirement if you’re concerned about offending easily offended individuals.

Why do I suggest this?! Because I don’t think the moderators have provided the users a way to more easily self-moderate the forum themselves. You have a “report” button. Super! Does it work? Not for the moderators; they work for that button. Why can’t they create a few more buttons that work for them and the rest of us at the same time?

It will be interesting to wait and see what kind of feedback this late suggestion gets, now that some whiny moderators have got the ball rolling on closing it down.  But I have to say that it just seems rather outrageous to see other tech forum websites (like techguy.org and their “Civilized Debate” forum which are dominated with Windows users) exhibit more ability to tolerate or manage “offensive” users/posts/threads than Ubuntu forum users and moderators can tolerate.  What a bunch of thumb sucking babies.  Now, if I had said something like that in the forum that used to be called the Backyard, I’d probably get some sort of silly reprimand from a moderator because it made someone cry (if I had said something more insulting, I would expect to be fairly repremanded… but it feels like things have gotten more and more childish lately).  Of course, making someone cry isn’t my goal in posting in that forum.  My goal would be to express opinions that may very well be more justified than the opinions of someone who would prefer to self-censor what they read and think via complaining to moderators about being “offended.”

Now, I can’t say anything bad about the rest of the forum or the community as a whole.  My hats off to developers, the mods and the forum community users.  And I know that the general consensus says the forum does not get much traffic and thus, won’t be a great loss to the rest of the community.  But I get this feeling that some of what’s going on in this forum lately is being done because someone perceives the Backyard/OGMPP forum as being an embarrassment to the community, or worse, Ubuntu (the operating system) itself.  How pretentious do we have to be?  Well, enough that the forum is going to be officially closed on October the 1st.  It remains to be seen how the rest of the community will react when they find their backyard water-cooler hangout was closed down because Dennis the Menace and Bart Simpson broke in wielding silly string and water pistols and nobody could come up with a decent solution to the problem.  ”Let’s just close the forum!”  What kind of a solution is that?  Oh well.  Like they say, no great loss… but it’s still a loss.

One user stepped up to create a replacement forum on his own server.  You can find it here:

http://grubbn.org/omgpp

Unforuantely, this alternative forum only has about 70 members in it so far, compared to Ubuntu forums ~67,000 active members (~671,000 registered members).  I’m not saying 67,000 made use out of the soon to be killed Backyard forum, but it was at least convenient for them in the off chance they felt like talking with other fellow Ubuntu fans about something other than Ubuntu.  I’ll never be allowed to post a new thread about my puppy dog, or ask people if they think the economy is going to collapse or poll people on how much longer they think Sarah Palin will be able to go without answering a difficult questions.  These topics are not offensive, and I really appreciated the quality of interaction I got from the Ubuntu community over any one of many random topics.  And now it’s about to be locked up and demolished with nothing to replace it, making Ubuntu Forums a dry, less emotional place to be.  I mean this with all due respect, but I sincerely feel the moderators at Ubuntu Forums has failed the community they govern.  Though their take is that the community failed them! That’s pretty rich, I have to tell you.

For being a puppy of 9 weeks of age, she is pretty well behaved.  It takes patience, but it’s not too hard.  We spent a little time with the rest of the litter and picked her because she was the most healthy looking and because her temper was very mellow by comparison to every other dog around.  It’s events like adopting a dog with such potential that makes you do things a little different through your day.  It’s probably not too dissimilar to raising a kid… except it’s quite a bit cheaper.  It’s still just as fun an exercice of sorts. It’s like a form mediation by working your patience to the point where you build greater and greater tolerance for silly behavior. Speaking of silly behavior, the Vice-Presidential debates will be next Thursday, October the 2nd, so be sure to set your Tivo’s and home-made DVR’s to record that highly anticipated SNL spoof.

It’s hard to say just how long I’ve been waiting for this phone to come out.  Scheduled to be on sale just in time for the holidays (can’t we agree that Halloween is twice as fun as Christmas?), this phone is dead set on absolutely killing the iPhone.  I mean, just look at it!  It’s got a freaking keyboard (read: “Tactile Response” you iPhone suckers)!!  What’s even better is that IT RUNS ANDROID LINUX!  An open-source cell phone?  Get outta here!!  And it’s only going to cost $179?  You may proceed to salivate.

Now I could try and write up a bunch of original content describing all of the super cool features this phone will carry with it right out of the box, but other websites have already done this.  Why waste my time?  So for starts, check out this Gizmodo article: Android’s 10 most exciting apps.  With this being an open-source platform, there is no telling how many more cool FREE applications will be developed after the phone hits shelves.  You can pre-order it right now at T-Mobile.com.

There will be a few minor drawbacks about this device.  For starts, it’s vendor locked with T-Mobile.  And at the moment, not all of T-Mobile’s coverage areas provide 3G Internet speeds (3G coverage maps are available on T-Mobile’s website so you can check and see for yourself).  They are also planing on limiting your download speeds after you’ve sucked up a whole gigabyte of data per month (do you really need to download a whole gigabyte of data while you’re away from your computer?).  This will likely change in the future as more users join T-Mobile and provide them with the extra funds needed to expand their networks and relax bandwidth limitations. (Update: T-mobile has killed the bandwidth limit).

Any further complaints you see about it on the net are likely being generated by jealous iPhone customers who are stuck on an expensive contract with AT&T (this much seems obvious).  But if you’re willing to spend time arm wrestling with AT&T, there is a way to cancel your contract without paying the Early Termination Fee.  You can watch an informative video about doing this here.

Bob Church is the father of my girlfriend Kristin.  He will be celebrating his 61st birthday today and with quite a circus of friends and family around him (including my own parents and sisters).  We are all up here in Moberly, Missouri and it will be quite a day to remember (I brought the camera for the parts of the day I’m unable to remember due to alcohol consumption).  Bob has been diagnosed with multiple forms of cancer and has been on chemotherapy for the last 2 months. It has been a very difficult time for all of us who know him. The above picture was taken by me back in July while he, his daughters and I played a game of Spades.

His true passion, second to his family of course, is writing.  As mentioned before (and linked permanently to the left in my “blogroll”), he has quite a blog full of brilliant short stories, humorous tall tales and exquisite poetry that you can find here:

http://not-quite-right-bubba.blogspot.com/

If you didn’t visit it before, I encourage you to do so right now and leave him your best comments and birthday wishes.  And while you’re there, you might want to purchase a copy of this magazine that Bob has been published in:

Trust me, it’s worth the money.

An anonymous person, using nothing more than Google, Wikipedia and the “I forgot my password” questionnaire on Yahoo! Mail’s website was all it took.  Simple questions like, “What’s your birthday?” and “What’s your zip code” are examples.  A slightly more difficult question was, “Where did you meet your spouse?”, which took a little digging and some minor trial and error.  After about 45 minutes (according to the original poster), the account was compromised, the password changed to “popcorn” and then posted on 4chan’s /b/ forum for others to login to and confirm as being real.

So now everybody feels obligated to find someone to blame for this breach of security/violation of privacy.  Of course we could point blame at a nameless, faceless person who isn’t admittedly affiliated with any political party… but what’s the point?  You either know who the person is or you don’t and there’s even a chance they don’t even live in the United States (making it difficult to impossible to enforce the law).  In the meantime, we should start by noting that the questions that the attacker had to answer were rather easy, and that they were selected by Palin herself when the account was created.  Considering the fact that when the account was created she was already involved in politics (which mostly involves increasing your celebrity status), she should have thought to select more difficult, personal questions for the purposes of recovering a lost password.

The incident does bring up something broader:  Those of us who use the Internet for social purposes often leave behind a paper trail of fun facts that might be found with something as simple as a Google search.  I shouldn’t have to go on any further to tell you what info you probably shouldn’t post about yourself in a blog or forum somewhere.  Nor should I have to tell you, much less a government official, what questions should be selected during registration in the event you lose your password (of course, most people who are in the government have their own government hosted e-mail accounts that are subject to much stricter security policies… apparently Alaska didn’t get the memo).

So now you know how it happened and how it could happen to you if you ever plan to become famous or just have some half-assed blog like this one that almost nobody reads (except for Google’s robots).  We should be glad the emails that have leaked didn’t contain anything sensitive to national security (then again, you think she’s ever had access to such information?), and I’m betting Palin is literally counting her blessings for that very reason right now.  Not just because she lucked out on having her emails stolen by strangers located in who knows what country, but also because she can notch this up as legitimate experience with regard to national security (it’s practically a step up from claiming you know all about foreign policy because you can see Russia from your house).

Update:  An article detailing where the law stands on all of this can be found here:

DOJ View on Email Privacy May Hamper Prosecution of Palin Hackers

I should also throw out the ever so hypothetical rhetorical question:  Why was having this email account necessary in the first place?

A little anecdote about this church

While I was there, I found their bulletin board where they have notices posted for upcoming events in the parish.  And of course there was one there for the garage sale:

You’ll notice above it is a seperate invitation to join Topeka Habitat for Humanity and donate time or money to their cause.  I then glanced over to the left of the bulletin board and saw this:

I was rather flattered to see this graphic because it happens to be the one I made for their website a while ago.

The sad thing is that I don’t maintain that website anymore, but it’s good to know that it’s being used and appreciated.  It doesn’t look like any modifications have been made to it since handing the reigns over to another local web developer, but I doubt that’s his fault (it wouldn’t be polite to elaborate).  Anyway, the graphic was made in Gimp using the Supernova effect… it was really quite easy.  I think I’ll redo it just for fun (because I have a half hour to kill).

Click above for a 1024×768 wallpaper I just made.

Seemingly by surprise to most Internet users, Google has launched a release of a new Internet web browser dubbed Google Chrome.  I have been using it for about five minutes on my super slow computer at work (it only has 256 megs of ram in the damn thing) and the first thing I’ve noticed with Chrome is that it is freaking FAST!  No joke.  My first instinct was to take a look at the task manager in Windows to see how much memory Chrome was actually using, and what I found was a little puzzling.  There was only one web browser window open, but 4 seperate instances of the Chrome.exe process running.  Interesting… So I decided to start digging into why it’s so fast, and what the deal was with these multiple instances.  Here’s what I learned:

If you do a search for Google Chrome, you’ll discover a little comic book that was put together by Google to help illustrate what they had in mind when they first started designing this browser and how it should function differently from other popular browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.  The most telling is on page 3:  ”When we started this project, the Gears Guys were saying that one of the problems with browsers is that they’re inherently single-threaded.  For example, once you have Javascript executing, it’s going to keep going, and the browser can’t do anything else until Javascript returns control to the browser.  So developers write APIs that are asyncronous — and every now and then the browser locks up because Javascript is hung up on something.”

In plain english, the way other browsers currently function is about as efficient as an HR department in a hospital.  The chain of programs (or people, if you continue the hospital analogy) is long and weak in that if one link fails, the whole thing snaps and everybody puts their arms in the air to say, “Not my fault.  Tough shit.”   The way Chrome funtions instead is to create multiple processes for all the different tabs as well as additional processes (such as Javascript, or other web plugins) that run seperately, and basicly decentralize everything.  This adds a great deal of speed and stability to loading web pages and running web applications.  It will also help reduce memory bloat that comes from lots of long term use of a web browser, because you can allocate different processes their own memory space.

One of my favorite features is probably something you’ll grow to take for granted: the New Tab Page, seen above.  When ever you open a new tab, it is an intential act persuant to going some place on the Internet.  The tab page is dynamically created based upon your browsing behavior.  Your 9 favorite websites appear with thumbnail previews of each one, for instance.  So after a while, it really becomes YOUR browser.  Which might not sound great to someone who’s trying to keep their birthday gift shopping or porn addiction a secret.  That’s why there’s Incognito Mode!

Another cool feature is the way pop-ups are managed and blocked.  If something is trying to pop-up, you’ll only see a little notification at the bottom of the window, and if it’s something you want, you just drag it up and out.

Anyway, I’d love to write more about this but I’m waiting for an important call that’s going to take me a while and wanted to get something written about this exciting new web browser.  I think it’s going to have a big impact on the way web browser function and we’ll likely see Firefox and eventually Internet Explorer.  The only drawback about this browser that I’ve found so far (other than the fact that they can’t “sandbox” plugins to a lower security level…nobody can yet) is the fact that it’s for Windows only.  There are also some websites with minor functionalities that don’t seem to work just yet (Java, not Javascript, comes to mind).  I am sure that will change rapidly though, as the browser is open-source…which means it will likely be ported over to just about every OS you can imagine.  Until then, I highly recommend this browser to Windows users.

Above is a picture of the campsite my friend James and I set up for the annual ABATE biker rally.  It’s been a few years since I was last out there and it’s good to know little has changed about the things that happen at that huge party.  I’d post more pictures on here, but I’d have to censor them.  And I have quite a collection from just one night of clicking.

I’ll be following up with a few comments that were left on my blog while I was away… so, uh… to kill a little time, watch this completely unrelated video of a simulation of the earth being smashed by a 500km wide asteroid!

The concert went well, but it seemed like they went out of their way to give you the impression that the vocal audio was always bad, but in truth, Bob Dylan is not a great singer these days.  Sure, he’s got the energy and the notes, but it’s like his mouth is full of cotton balls.  I’m sorry if that offends you, but my girlfriend is the most die hard Bob Dylan fan on the damned planet and even she told me in advanced that I wouldn’t understand a thing he’s saying up there on stage.  It was like Eddie Murphy’s impersonation of James Brown.  Still, he had a damn sweet hat on.  And these 35 dollar T-shirts are pretty fucking cool.

Anyway, I just wanted to check in with you all and let you know that I’m going to be OUT for the rest of the weekend.  I’m heading up to the ABATE biker rally at Lake Perry.  Maybe I’ll see you out there.  I’ll be campin’ somewhere.  Hope nobody’s computer crashes or I’ll have to cut into all the fun I’m having. 

Coming Soon…

It’s a man shaped computer….robot….thing.  I doubt it’ll do your laundry or cook your dinner but at least it won’t come walking into your bedroom at night asking to borrow money or your wife or something.  But then again, who knows what this thing can do for an asking price of $475.  Maybe it tried to assassinate its creator and they’re trying to pawn it before it gets another shot.  Let the buyer beware.

If you live in Topeka and feel like buying this thing, you’ll find it here.

I recently gave the lowest bid to the KABVI to build them a custom PC.  It’s the first quad-core system I’ve built, and also sports a very bad ass SLI-ready nVidia motherboard (capable of accepting up to three video cards in SLI mode).  Plus it has that cool piano black case.  Though this wasn’t built to be a gaming system (though it truth, it is capable…I should ask if I can barrow it and play Crysis).  It was built to be fast, familiar and stable, which is why it’s running Windows XP and not Vista.  It’s great to know you can still buy OEM licenses for SP3.  So thumbs up, Microsoft!

The PC was set up to function as a networked server.  I installed wireless adapters in two other PCs and maped shortcuts to a shared folder on the central PC that the other two can move files to.  I also donated a laser printer, a nice HP Laserjet 1200 that was given to me by another client of mine.

Here is the obligatory photo of the guts:

It even has a floppy drive with flash memory card readers built in.  Bling bling!

Anyway, it was a fun build.  First time I actually had to attach the heat sink with a backplate and screw pins.  (Yeah, it’s an Intel system).  I think the power supply might have weighed just as much as the case.  And the 22-inch widescreen LCD they had me plug it into was pretty sweet too.

My use of the word “novelty” (as well as a lot of the inspiration for these posts) comes from the late Terence McKenna.  Terence described and quantified novelty as newness, density of complexification and dynamic change as opposed to static habituation.  Others, most notably Ray Kurzweil, have echoed and expanded upon this idea a great deal (albeit on more of a scientific/mathematical basis instead of McKenna’s cosmological perspective).  There is plenty to be said about this steady and predictable trend of technological advancements in particular, which is where Kurzweil roots a majority of his observations and predictions (while McKenna takes on a more broad perspective).  Here’s a video of Ray Kurzweil talking about some of his predictions for the future of technology at a TED conference to help set the mood:

In a more broad sense, everything from the telescopic complexification of plasma into different forms of matter, to the birth and rapid acceleration of computer technology, are examples of an accelerating increase in novelty throughout history.  So is the birth of the Internet and the explosion of information it continues to deliver to us and make increasingly easier to access.  As is our ever increasing and eventual co-dependence upon it the Internet as we move closer to creating a mental symbiosis with it.  That is to say that we will eventually come to depend upon the Internet just as much as it currently depends on us for its existence and relevancy, and that our dependence on it is accelerating.

So what is “The Great Singularity”?   McKenna had a few different theories, the most interesting to me being the possible invention of a time travel, which would effectively cause the future collapse into the present and we would be immersed into a timeless “hyperspace”.  Kurzweil takes on a more technical prediction of things to come with no consideration for such a radical leap, basing his predictions mostly on math in a similar fashion to the way Gordon E. Moore estimated the anticipated speed and cost of computer processors in the future.

Personally, I feel the underestimated wild card in this deck is Artificial Intelligence.  I say underestimated because I feel that it will arrive a little sooner than Kurzweil anticipates and the impact it will have will probably represent something greater than your soon-to-be-daily paradigm shifting technological breakthrough.  We make small breakthroughs of increasing significance all the time it seems, taking them for granted. But A.I. really won’t be worth much to us until it’s smart enough to improve itself without aid.  There’s a lot of groundwork to yet be laid, and the foundation is the Internet itself.  A quote from McKenna that simplifies it all is, “The future is mental.”  And if you give some slack to his notion of time travel, it could just as well be some other form of paradigm shifting technology that would stand to be as equally jaw dropping.  Imagine how predictions about the future might be if one day such a thing as a sentient, self-advancing computer-based supraintelligence actually existed.

The Internet is like an embryo in a state of gestation, developing at our own hands until it ultimately births Artificial Intelligence.  But it’s not completely artificial because its source of information, its genetic construction if you will, is a product of our own human minds and experiences.  So in a very real sense, the Internet and our mental selves are gradually becoming one and the same.

I came across a TED video yesterday that got me back into mood of writing about this kind of stuff.  It was a talk given by Kevin Kelly, who is the executive editor of Wired Magazine.  In it, he points out that the capabilities of Internet technology as it exists today were once thought to be totally unfeasible just 5000 days ago.  And that in truth, we have seen it grow into something truly impressive in a very short span of time, achieving some of our wildest dreams (yet we are not impressed).  There is no reason to believe this process of development is anywhere close to being finished.

I’ve been using T-Mobile for about the last two years now.  The last phone I had was a Motorola V360.  My current phone is a K1, otherwise known as a KRZR (see below).  Now, the chances that you have either of these two phones are slim.  However, the odds that your cell phone supports J2ME (Java Micro Edition) applications are pretty good.  If you’ve ever gone to play a game on your phone and have been shown the “Powered By Java” splash screen, then you can be pretty sure your phone is running J2ME.

For quite a long time, I’ve relied on needing a PC nearby to be able to browse the Internet, or more importantly, check my business e-mail.  About two weeks ago I started searching around for a possible way of checking my e-mail from my phone, and hopefully be able to write messages too.  I would have paid money just to get an app like this on my phone.  Fortunately, I stumbled across a FREE app called MovaMail (below) which allows me to check my IMAP/SMTP account.  And while I was searching, I came across Opera Mini (above).  I found these apps (and hundreds of others) at GetJar.com.  Both of these apps are free and the only other requirement is that your phone has Internet access.  It is recommended that you sign up and pay the extra 5 or 6 dollars a month for the Unlimited MobileWeb Service (or equivelent from your own cellular provider).

Okay, let’s get these apps installed!

The first step is to visit GetJar.com and browse through their massive collection of applications that you can download from their site.  The file extention of these apps is *.jar, although there are sometimes *.jad files.  I am not sure what the difference between these two file types are, but I’ve leaned more towards using *.jar files.  If one doesn’t work for you, try the other and cross your fingers.

For example purposes, visit this link to view GetJar’s download page for the Opera Mini web browser application.  Click on the link they have shown for the jar file, and then save it to your computer in a easy to access location (like your Desktop).

The next step is to set your phone’s USB mode to “Memory Card” if it’s not already set to that, and then plug it in.  This will cause your phone to mount as an external storage device with it’s own drive letter.  Typically this is intended to be used for transfering pictures, videos and audio/ringtones to and from your phone.  But we’re going to do something more…

NOTE TO WINDOWS USERS: The contents of your phones’ memory card include several hidden files and folders, so that when you initially plug your phone in, you will only see the “Mobile” folder, and within it, three other folders (Pictures, Video and Audio).  In order to get all of the files to display, click (at the top of your file browser) Tools>Folder Options.  Then click on the View tab.  You should see the following:

You will want to make sure that “Show hidden files and folders” is selected AND UNCHECK “Hide protected operating system files” (as shown above).  This will make all of the files and folders on your cell phone visible.  Just be careful not to delete anything by accident (or you might “brick” your phone).

So now we can see everything.  Here’s what the contents look like:

The folder we will want to focus on is the “kjava” folder.  Double-click on it to open it up.  Inside there will likely be a lot of other files and a few folders.  No need to explore it, simply leave the folder open and find the Jar file you just downloaded.  Copy and paste (or drag and drop, which ever you prefer) the jar file you downloaded into this folder.  Once the file is finished copying, you’ll have to unmount/remove your phone by doing the following:

Once you’ve unmounted the phone, you can disconnect the USB cable.  Now, open your phone and go to the “Fun & Apps” section, where you would normally go to play a video game.  When you get here, you’ll see the regular list of apps you are already familiar with.  There is a shortcut at the bottom of this menu that says “[Install New]“.  Click on this, and you’ll see the name of the app (the jar file) that you just copied from your computer to your phone.  Select it from the list.  You may get a message that says, “This app is not signed.  Install anyway?”  Select Yes.

Once it’s finished installing, you’ll be asked if you would like to run it.  Feel free to try out your new Opera Mini web browser right away if you’d like.  While using Opera Mini (or any other application that requests Internet access) you will likely see a message saying “Use data network?”, with a URL shown, and the options:  “Yes, Always Ask.”  “No, Ask Later.”  and “No, Never Grant Access.”  This is effectively your phones firewall and java security settings just making sure that the application you’re using is supposed to be allowed access to the web.

There are a ton of apps (and games) available on GetJar.com that you can download, install and experiment with on your own time using the same installation procedure described above.  Though you should be warned that some apps do not work with all phones.

If you’re technically savvy, you might want to visit modmymoto.com.  Here you’ll find several forums pertaining to many different types of cellphones and discover other neat hacks you can do to your phone.  Just keep in mind that you should be very careful when attempting to modify the software your cell phone runs on.  As mentioned before, it can be easy to accidentally brick your phone.

Have fun!

The fun begins at about 11 a.m., but you should try to arrive a little early.  Advanced registration is preferred.  The entry fee is $65 per person and covers for your green fees, golf cart, food (Chili’s restaurant will be providing fajitas!) and beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic).  Teams of four will compete for prizes!  Some of the prizes up for grabs include golf bags, coolers, camping chairs, and much more.  I will personally be giving away one hour of free on-site tech support to each member of the team who ranks first place at the end of the tournament.  So don’t miss out!!!

So my life in general and business has never been better.  My girlfriend and I are going to begin living alone together FINALLY and our relationship is fantastic.  Don’t tell her this, but I’m gonna ask her to marry me one of these days (gotta save up some money for a bad ass engagement ring first.  I want to make it a big surprise).  Though, her father began chemotherapy last week and it comes with its rough days.  My hope is those rough days don’t increase… The possibility of an early death in the family echoes in the back of everyones mind, but it is important not to dwell on such thoughts.  Doing so is a drain on energy better spent thinking about the positive here and now.  Besides, miracles DO happen.  I’m a firm believer of that.

So… just a moment ago, I came across a link to a site that I feel deep empathy for…

The website is a photographic essay by Philip Toledano of he and his father as they spend time together.  I don’t know much more background detail, but from the looks of it, a new photo is added day by day.  It will make you stop and think about life and likely bring at least one tear to your eye.  Click on the picture above to visit the site.  If it’s down, try again later.  It’s being hammered right now by Digg.com users who are flocking to see the pictures and read their captions.  I was simply lucky enough to catch it before the servers were slammed.

As far as trends in technology lately… well, there’s probably plenty of stuff I could rave about but nothing much has really caught my eye enough to make me want to write something about it.  And I’ve been rather lazy the last couple of weeks.  To be honest, I’ve been a little apathetic.  And then, as so predicted by Joseph Campbell in that first Mythos video I saw, I’ve begun to sort of disengage myself from the rest of the current events in the world.  As much as I would love to possibly alienate you with my own political satire, I’ll spare you.  I really have a lot of other more important things to focus on for the time being…

As mentioned in my previous blog a couple weeks ago or so, my girlfriends’ father had been diagnosed with colon cancer.  Soon after I got to Missouri a discussion with an oncologist had took place, and the prognosis he gave was much more dreadful than what we were hoping for.  His cancer has spread to his lungs, and chemotherapy has been scheduled to begin next week.  His spirit and mood have remained high, odd as it may seem to some who otherwise might feel great despair and depression, if not anger.  But I perceive him to be living, in some aspects, the best days of his life as he proceeds to carefully squeeze the last few drops of it, savoring it with a grand smile.  It is actually hard to tell just how much there is left for him to enjoy, which is just the way things should be in life.  Disturbing prognoses be damned.

And of course there is plenty of room for optimism and hope.  I’m looking foward to future visits to help support him and the family that I am also a part of.  I’m also looking forward to reading more of his blogs.  By the way, if you consider yourself to be a literary buff who appreciates extensive vocabulary and vividness in the stories you read, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog.

The command you type in terminal to recompile your Virtualbox kernel headers is:

• /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

So I did it just for fun, and I added a sudo in front of the command for good measure too.  Then I pressed enter and gasped 30 seconds later:

…I’m already done?… Wow, that was fast!

Well, there you have it.  Virtualbox is apparently a real pain in the ass to use (not really).  It turns out you have to type a command into the terminal window after all, and then press the enter key once!  You might need to invest in a sweatband for your forehead before going through that ordeal [/sarcasm].  The good news for VMware Server fans is that there’s a similar command that does about the equivalent:

• sudo vmware-config.pl -default

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to copy and paste in the results of what you’d see after typing that command in here to show you.  You’ve seen that bloody mess all too often, if you’re a seasoned VMware user.  And if you are a seasoned user you should know the implications of using that -default option given the extensive myriad of questions asked.  So hopefully, the defaults work for you.

…..

On an unreleated note, my girlfriend’s father was diagnosed with a form of intestinal cancer yesterday.  I’ll be leaving for Missouri tomorrow night…  Please think of him, pray for him.

Now I should give credit where it is due.  VMware Server is still a powerful virtual machine solution with a ton of functionality packed into it.  But it seems to be geared towards advanced users who enjoy wasting time in terminal windows because their software breaks on them all the time.  Anyway, Virtualbox is a LOT better than VMware in this department.  In the time that I’ve used it, I’ve never had to do anything special after a kernel update. It just keeps on working. No special commands needed… at least that I’ve seen so far in the last couple month of testing, through 3 kernel updates.  It’s still kicking, but it is yet to seen what will happen when 8.10 comes out.  I suspect it will not cause a problem.

Okay, so how do I install VBox?

First, visit this link.  From here, you’ll be able to download a self-installing deb file for your version of Ubuntu.  There are other distro-specific versions available for download (such as SUSE, Debian, Red-Hat, Fedora, etc) but I can only go into installing the software in Ubuntu.  But in most cases, I’d bet this guide will work for you even if you’re not using Ubuntu.

Ok, so you have your deb file downloaded.  Double-click on it, then click “Install Package”.  After this, the application will be installed and you’ll find a new icon in your Applications>System Tools menu. But first, you will now need to add your user account to the vboxusers group.  The quickest way to do this is click Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  From within terminal, type

• sudo adduser $USER vboxusers

and then press enter.  Leave the terminal window open.  You are done with installing and setting up Virtualbox… almost.  You will now need to make some changes to get USB working.  This involves editing 3 configuration text files.  So let’s get started.  Still in Terminal, type

• sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh

This will open the mountdevsubfs.sh file in your Text Editor.  While this file is open, look for these lines:

# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
#mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
#domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
#ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
#mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

On these bottom four lines, remove the # signs so it looks like this:

# Magic to make /proc/bus/usb work
#
mkdir -p /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs
domount usbfs “” /dev/bus/usb/.usbfs -obusmode=0700,devmode=0600,listmode=0644
ln -s .usbfs/devices /dev/bus/usb/devices
mount –rbind /dev/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb

Now save the file and you’ll be sent back to the terminal window.  For some people, that’s all you have to do.  If you restart your PC and run Virtualbox, but still have problems getting your USB devices to mount, we have two more files to edit.  But first, we need to find the Group ID number for the vboxusers group.  This can by done by typing the following command into terminal:

• grep vbox /etc/group

This will give you a result similar to:  vboxusers:x:118:username

In the above example, 118 is the group ID number for the vboxusers group.  Your number will likely be different.  Jot your own number down for future reference.

Now on to editing the remaining two files.  Type this into terminal: 

• sudo gedit /etc/fstab

In this file, you will want to paste in the following text at the bottom:

## usbfs is the USB group in fstab file:
none /proc/bus/usb usbfs devgid=118,devmode=664 0 0

Note the part that says “devgid=118″.  Change the 118 to match the number you wrote down just a second ago.  It must match your group ID for vboxusers.  Save and close this file.

We have one last file to edit.  Type this into terminal:

• sudo gedit /etc/init.d/mountkernfs.sh

Inside of this file, there is a line that says “# Mount spufs, if Cell Broadband processor is detected”.  You will want to insert the following text ABOVE that line:

## Mount the usbfs for use with Virtual Box
domount usbfs usbdevfs /proc/bus/usb -onoexec,nosuid,nodev,devgid=118,devmode=664

Again, you will want to change the 118 to match your vboxusers group ID number.

Once all of this is done, you will need to restart your PC.  Granted, this isn’t the easiest looking app to install, but it is easier to use and install and maintain than VMware Server in my opinion.  Enjoy!

I was taking a break by visiting a favorite site of mine, www.ted.com and I came across a rather (in my opinion) profound video about classical music.  It is an entertaining 20 minutes out of your day that will perhaps leave you thinking about more than just music, but also living a generous and passionate life.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

They told me to go to the main page search button and type movie maker (not moviemaker!).

I tried that. The site was pathetically slow but after 6 seconds of waiting up it came.

I thought for sure now I would see a button to just go do the download.

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

You can read the entire text of this e-mail by following this link.

Alan Pope is well known in the Ubuntu Linux community for his screencasts.  A collection of them can be found at http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/.  All of his screencasts can be streamed from Google Video, as well as downloaded in MPEG-4 and OGG  format.  The one you will likely want to check out when it comes to modifying your computers login screen, desktop background, fonts, color scheme/theme can be found here:

http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/Customising_Ubuntu_Desktop

The video covers:

• Changing Wallpapers
• Changing Screensavers
• Panel Properties (Location/Auto-hide/Background)
• Changing/Adding Desktop Themes
• Adding/Moving Launcher Shortcuts to your Panel/Desktop
• Modifying Menu Layouts
• Adding Applets to your Panels
• Modifying your About Me user info
• Customizing your Login screen layouts/themes
• Using Multiple Workspaces

The video makes use of http://art.gnome.org/ for it’s demonstration of downloading wallpapers and themes, but another noteworthy site you should check for such things is http://www.gnome-look.org/.  My personal favorite website for wallpapers is InterfaceLift Wallpapers.

A couple of things this video does not cover (which I think it should) is Compiz Fusion (the software behind Ubuntu’s special effects, such as wobbly windows, action animations, etc).  But in Alan Pope’s defense, the video was based upon Ubuntu 6.10 which did not include Beryl or Compiz by default.  I’ll write a seperate blog about customizing Compiz in the near future.

The video also does not cover the installation and use of a dockbar (such as AWN or Cairo Dock).  I happen to have already written a tutorial about Cairo Dock if you’d like to make you’re Ubuntu desktop look more like a Mac.

Well I leave it to you.  Have fun customizing!

A very long time ago, computers didn’t have mice, icons or fancy graphics.  Instead of an Operating System with a Graphical User Interface, there was the Command Line Interface.  With it, you would issue commands to your computer in a text only environment that is not seen so often these days.  But many computer technicians, especially Linux geeks, consider it to be one of the best ways to interact with the PC for certain kinds of tasks.  Though there is a little bit of a learning curve about it new users shy away from .  So I’m going to try and flatten that curve with an introduction to the Terminal window for beginners.

Understanding the Command Line

To help get a better feel for the Terminal, you should open one up right now and follow along with this guide.  To do this (in Ubuntu) click Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  Once you do, a new window will appear with a command prompt and a blinking cursor.  The prompt typically looks like this:

username@hostname:~$

The username is your username, the hostname is the name of your computer.  The tilde symbol “~” is shorthand for “your home folder”.  And the dollar sign indicates that you are currently operating under a kind of limited privilege mode (if you were running terminal with Root level privileges, the $ would be a #.  More on that later).   Following all of these things is a blinking cursor, which is your cue to begin typing a command into the Terminal window.

In the above screenshot, we have our Nautilus file manager to the left as well as a small terminal window on top of it where I’ve typed in the commands “cd Documents”, followed by an “ls” command,  pressing Enter after each.  If you’ll notice, the “dear ubuntu forum moderators.odt” file is shown in both the terminal window as well as the file browser.  It’s the exact same file, and I used those two commands in Terminal to “browse” to the folder containing that file and list the contents of the folder.  So we have two commands here that we can talk about briefly:

cd – Change Directory (e.g., “cd Documents”)
ls – List current folder contents.

When you first start Terminal, you are usually placed in your Home Folder (which is indicated by the ~ (tilde) symbol).  If you type ls and press enter, you’ll see all of the files and folder contained in your Home Folder.  Try to practice navigating from your home folder to some other folder using the cd command.  NOTE:  All Linux commands are Case-Sensitive! Once you’ve navigated into a folder, or perhaps into a folder within another folder, you can go “backwards” to the parent directory by typing “cd ..”

Exercise 1:  cd and ls

1. Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal
2. Type ls to view the contents of your Home Folder
3. Type cd Documents and press Enter to navigate into the Documents folder.
4. Type ls to see the files (if you have any) listed.  Then type cd .. and press enter to return to your home folder.

Ok, how about a few more commands?

As shown above, the cat command can be used to create new files, but it can also be used to append text from one or more files to the end of another file… but we’re not going to get that advanced.  We just want to create a new file and play with it using other terminal commands.

cat – Create new files, combine text files and display them
cp – Copy
rm – Delete/Remove

Using these commands, we’re going to create a text file, copy it, then delete the first copy.

Exercise 2:  cat, cp and rm

1. Open terminal, and browse to the Documents folder by typing cd Documents, and press Enter
2. Create a new text file by typing cat > foo.txt and press Enter.
   
3. You’ll be sent to a blank line just below the command prompt.  You can type whatever you want, starting a new line each time you hit Enter.  It’s a basic text editor.  When you’re finished typing, you can save and exit by pressing CTRL-D.
4. Type ls to see the new file in the directory.  To display it’s contents, you can type cat foo.txt.
5. Copy the file by typing cp foo.txt foo2.txt.  Type ls again to see the new second file.
6. Delete the first file by typing rm foo.txt, and then type ls again to see the change you made.

There are other commands out there besides cat (such as touch) that can be used to create new files, but we’re trying to keep this short and simple.

Now lets create a file, then a new folder, and move the file into that folder.  We’ll do this with the mkdir, mv and ./ commands.  The ./ command in particular is interesting — it basically stands for “the current directory you are in”.  Sound redundant, right?  Here’s why you need to use it:  There are many commands in the Linux system that can be run from any directory, such as the ones we’ve been using (cat is an example).  These commands reside in a location of the computer that’s been designated to be available at the terminal no matter what folder you reside in.

So say you created a computer program called “cat”, but had nothing to do with text files, and more to do with the feline animal.  If you simply typed “cat”, Linux would assume you meant the cat program we used to create a text file, and not yours.  By adding the ./ in front, it forces Linux to focus on that local folder you happen to be in.

Exercise 3:  mkdir, mv and the ./ delimiter

1. Open terminal, and cd into you Documents folder.
2. Type cat > foo2.txt, press enter, type some text, then CTRL-D to save and exit cat.
3. Type mkdir foocopyfolder to create a new folder.  You can type ls after this to see it.
4. Type mv foo2.txt ./foocopyfolder/ to move the file into foocopyfolder
5. Type ls to see that the file is now missing, then cd foocopyfolder, and then ls one more time to see the recently moved file.

Other Useful Commands

By now, you should already be familiar with the basics of the terminal.  Here are some other commands you can experiment with:

rmdir – Remove Directory
sudo – This is typically inserted in front of any regular command that requires root level privileges in order to do.  You can think “Super User Do” to help you remember how it’s spelled and what it does.  For example, if you wanted to execute a command that required root privilages (such as installing a program) you would type “sudo apt-get install vlc”.  Remember, the terminal windows is Case-Sensitive.
locate – a useful index-based file search utility
lspci – Lists PCI devices in your computer (used for technical troubleshooting)
lsusb – Similar to lspci, but for USB devices
apt-get – This is used very often to install, remove and update software.  An example of this command would look like:  sudo apt-get install vncviewer.  Note the sudo in front.

The Manual Command

Now, a lot more could be said about these commands.  If you ever want to read all you can read about any one command, you can do that with the man command (which is short for Manual), followed by the command you’re interested in reading about.  For example, if I wanted to read about all the different options for the ls command, I would type man ls.  When viewing a manual for a command in terminal, you can use the up and down arrows to scroll, and then when you’re done reading, you need to press the Colon key : followed by the q key.  This will take you back to the Terminal window.

That’s all I am going to write about the Terminal for today.  The three very simple exercises above should have you feeling just a little more comfortable with the Terminal and navigating around your file system.  Here are a couple tips though, in case you get lost:

cd / – takes you to your root directory
cd ~/ – takes you to your Home Folder.

And just so you know, your Home Folder is actually located in /home/yourusername/.

There are a lot of great guides out there that go into a lot more detail that I’m willing to do here, so check Google to see what you can find.  Here’s one that I think is pretty clear and concise that you should take a look at if you intend to learn more about the command line.

I just finished working for 13 days in a row, with the last of those days being the same as a concert I was lucky to attend.  Sigur Rós is a band from Iceland that plays a lot of mellow tunes.  I couldn’t believe how friendly the crowd at this show was. Very kind, very soft spoken.  I actually bumped into two people who I hadn’t seen since I graduated from high school in 2001 (though I expected one, thanks to that crazy Facebook news ticker). The show started with a fantastic opening act: One of the background trombone players (Helgi Jonsson) was given the opportunity to come out and play several songs on his guitar as well as one of the organs on stage.  If you didn’t know any better, you would have almost sworn that it was actually Thom Yorke of Radiohead in a wig.  The guys voice and playing was incredible.

The number of musicians on stage peeked near the end of the main ticket, with something close to 3 keyboard/xylophone players, 4 violinist, 5 brass, probably 3 guitarist (including the lead vocalist)…. I might be off a little on the numbers, but it was a spectacular show!  Part of me regrets leaving at the next to last song, but it was pouring rain, my girlfriend had very little sleep the previous night and she had another nearly sleepless night around the corner.  Time was of the essence.

Here is the song they started their set off with.  It is called “Svefn g englar”, which means “Sleepwalkers” in English.  Enjoy!

I was looking around and also discovered they have a movie out, called Heima.  Here’s one of the trailers for it.  The climax in the song near the end gave me chills.

So that I don’t spend too much time writing this particular announcement, here’s a list of topics I intend to write about in the very near future:

• Terminal for Beginners
  • We’re going to take a look at the Terminal in Linux.  This is very similar to the Command Prompt found in DOS/Windows.  We’ll take a look at some of the most common commands used here, as well as some neat tricks and shortcuts you might fall in love with.
• Customizing Ubuntu’s Appearance
  • This is actually a topic that I said I wanted to do quite a while ago, but kind of let things slip.  In this topic, we’re going to take a look at gnome-look.org’s collection of desktop themes, as well as look at ways to change your login screens’ appearance.
• Ubuntu Application Reviews
  • For the first time ever, I’m going to begin writing reviews about different applications found in Ubuntu.  My hope is to bring attention to applications that are good, but not very well known yet.
• Gimp Tutorials
  • Gimp is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop which is actually quite a powerful tool for being free.  I use it to create or modify all of the graphics on my website as well as promo images that you probably haven’t seen before.  We’ll take a look at simple things like cropping, scaling, rotation, a LOT of the tools in the tool box, a few filters, and whatever else pops up along the way.  It’ll be a lot of fun!
• Web Design Tips
  • I often get compliments about my website’s clean looking design.  I have to admit that a majority of the site was the result of a template that I stole out of Dreamweaver, but all of the work I’ve put into it since then has turned it into something very uniquely mine.  In at least one blog, I will write some tips for web design based upon the things I think my website does right (as well as a few things I think my site does wrong).

If you’re new, you might want to subscribe to my RSS feed. The easiest way to do this (in Firefox) is to click Bookmarks>Subscribe to this page.  A new special kind of bookmark will be added to your bookmarks collection.  When you click on it, all my posts will fan open and you can select the one you want to read.  What a time saver!

Stay tuned.

Before you go and call me obsessive compulsive, I’ll have you know it took me at least an hour and a half to clean all the junk and dust off of my desk for this picture.  You’ll notice in the lower right corner that I’m using my mouse that my girlfriend also bought me for our one year anniversary!  I love that woman

Another idea I had of writing up storyboards and scripts for short promotional videos I’d like to make came into mind as well.  One idea that has been on the back burner for a little while now is a new Ubuntu Linux video for the FAQ, which would showcase Ubuntu 8.04.  It is a low priority to me for the time being, mostly because new users can’t see much of a difference between 8.04 and 7.10 in a short video.  What I’d like to focus on first is a video that demonstrates Virtual Dave.  And hopefully after that another video that will focus on my made-to-order Ubuntu Linux PCs.  And then finally something more along the lines of a very clever, funny commercial (it’s already been written, but won’t be shot for a while).

Ok, time to relax.

Clearly, this user is not running Windows XP but Ubuntu Linux.  Yet with their pop-up blocker disabled in Firefox 3, a malicious website presents a window that mimics a “real” warning.  But it’s actually a trap.  This is probably the most common reason viruses find their way into Windows systems — by exploiting a users lack of expertise and susceptibility to intimidation on a technical level.  So fair warning to you Windows users out there.  Fortunately for our Linux user, he’ll just laugh and close this window.  If you’re a Windows user and you see an alert like this, you should close it too (but run a virus scan using something like AVG immediately afterwords).

Step 1:

Visit this link and copy/paste the correct line of text (depending on your version of Ubuntu) into a terminal window to add the third-party repositories to your software sources list:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#Adding the Repositories

Step 2:

Visit this link and download the appropriate deb file for your systems architecture (i386 or AMD64):

http://packages.medibuntu.org/intrepid/realplayer.html

That’s pretty much it!  Enjoy!

Here be old, out of date instructions with timeless joke: 

You probably remember Real Media Player from back in the hay days of the middle and late 1990s while browsing the Internet using Netscape Navigator (at least I was) on a dial-up connection.  Well it seems Real is still alive and kicking.  Just recently, I was shocked when I discovered that a torrent I had downloaded actually contained files in Real format.  I really thought everybody had gotten with the times by now and switched over to Divx/xvid codecs.  Then again, Real Media was originally intended to be a format that could be streamed over a network, and not downloaded first to be played later.  Which means if you really do remember actually using Real Media for anything in the 90s, it was probably from a video chat with a stripper.

Bandwidth was not the only thing squeezed in the 90s (ba-dum ching!).

Let’s get on with this post, shall we?

There are guides out there that show you how to download the binary executable (a *.bin file) of a Real Media Player installer, aimed towards multiple versions of Linux, but this requires you to open that dastardly terminal window and type a bunch of greek.  Instead, you’d probably like a deb file that you can just double-click on and be done with it.  Well, I’ve found one originally posted here on Ubuntu Forums.  You can download the file here from this link and either run the file right out, or save it to your desktop first and double-click on it to get the ball rolling.

Once its installed, you’ll find a new shortcut for it in Applications>Sound and Video>Real Player 11.

But you might encounter an error; something along the lines of “cannot execute child process (realplay), file or directory does not exist”… I’m paraphrasing.

If this happens, here’s how you fix it:

System>Preferences>Main Menu

Select the Sound & Video category on the left side, then Right-Click on RealPlayer 11 and click “Properties”.  This will open up a little window that looks like this:

In the above picture, the Command: line says “/opt/real/RealPlayer/realplay”.  This is what yours should say, but it might not.  If it doesn’t, make it as I have it, and that should do the trick.  Then click Close twice, and you’re done!

Now, I wonder if CBS’s Big Brother still does the SuperPass deal where you can watch all the contestants live 24/7.  I can still remember the live feed of those babes who fashioned bikini’s out of peanut butter during Season 3…

Well, it turns out the Wii itself is causing quite a bit of mystery.  Spoofing it’s MAC address, I was able to get the agreement page to re-appear on my laptop.  But after shutting Backtrack down and trying again, the Wii still couldn’t gain access to the Internet for some odd reason.

I went ahead and contacted their IT department and within a couple minutes, they had granted the MAC address of the Wii access to the Internet.  Yet it still doesn’t work.  Which… doesn’t exactly surprise me, especially after the IT guy told me I was the first person to attempt to connect a Wii while staying at a Holiday Inn.  We sat on the phone for about 15 minutes testing and testing, power cycling and testing again, but the Wii wasn’t doing anything except giving up.  It would seem that the IT department and myself are both stumped about this.  So for the time being, the spoofing tutorial is useless.  But still, it was a fun experiment.

In the meantime, I’m going to sit down with Google and see if I can find an alternate solution.  If I find one, I’ll be sure to write about it here.

Fortunately she is being put up in nice hotels (which I would imagine is coming out of her bosses bonus checks this year, and that sort of makes me feel a tad bit better about the whole long-distance relationship mini-drama). But there are many days I can’t stay with her, and spending time in a hotel alone can get really boring after a month or two or three (hopefully not four, but I’m a little pessimistic at this point).

Holiday Inn’s WiFi Meets Nintendo Wii

One of the things my girlfriend purchased before this stretch of work was delivered to her was a Nintendo Wii. I showed her at my house how to configure the wireless network connection settings and talked her through it over the phone when the time came. But for some reason, it just wouldn’t connect. By “connect”, I don’t mean wireless association followed by authentication (which, in this case, means nothing because the network does not use encryption). What I mean is, you’re not granted gateway access to external IP addresses until you’ve clicked on a link indicating that you agree to certain legal usage terms. Once you click the “I agree” button, you are then given full access to the Internet.

What the Nintendo Wii is trying to do is phone home (access Nintendo’s servers) immediately after it’s assigned a default gateway with the assumption that the gateway is not blocking traffic to external IP addresses. If it were to ping the gateway, it would likely get a reply. Any other site, nothing. The Wii assumes your router to be working, but the cable modem is broken, so it gives up and asks you to try a different network.

Since I’ve already agreed to a certain group of usage terms I shouldn’t be required to click “agree” again so as to personally access the Internet. But it’s the MAC address that acts as my identity, more like a name-badge, and the MAC on the Wii will be different from the MAC on the laptop. Your MAC address is a hard-coded number used to uniquely identify your wireless networking adapter. No two MAC addresses are said to be the same. So at first, it would seem there’s nothing I can do with the Wii to get it to connect to the Internet… Or is there?

What can be done about this?

There are a couple solutions. The first is to contact customer service and see if they can get their IT guy on the phone. I would then ask him if he could manually add the MAC address of the Wii to their routing tables and grant the device access. For some, this would be the simpler solution… though your mileage may vary. How long do you think it would take? Because I really don’t feel like placing bets on them being immediately available. I’m just telling you right now that the IT people at this particular hotel are not very advanced. The reason I say this is because the channels they picked for their 3 routers are all within the same frequency range (channels 1, 2 and 3) instead of spread out (channels 1, 6 and 11). In other words: They’re not very professional. Bandwidth is being lost because the routers are overlapping each others frequencies, and this is basic wireless network design technique we’re talking about here.

The other solution is to trick their wireless networks into thinking my laptop is the Wii and click “I agree” a second time, and then disconnect. I would do this by changing the MAC address of my wireless adapter. This is what is known as “MAC address spoofing”, the act of using a networking device to appear to be another (not to be confused with a “spoofing attack”, because we’re not going to attack anybody). Not all networking devices can do this. I happen to be using one that contains an Atheros chipset (it’s a D-Link WNA-2330 to be exact), which can be made to do anything I want it to do in the world of Linux. (Another blog I’m going to write in the future about Wireless Adapter hacking is turning my laptop into a Wireless router, and then share my cellphone’s Internet access wirelessly).

The Trick

I intend to use a copy of Backtrack 3 beta to carry out this little experiment. But it’s late, I’m away from home and have to download a fresh ISO and burn it to a disc first before I can try this out. By the way, spoofing a MAC address can be done in Windows, but I’m not going to write about Windows software that does this in here (because I’m lazy. But if you’re really curious, google can help).

In Backtrack (or even Ubuntu if I install the MadWifi drivers, which is not as easy as burning a Backtrack Live CD) the commands to change the MAC are as follows (reference link):

• wlanconfig ath0 destroy

You can use any mac address you like. In this example: 00:11:22:33:44:55

• macchanger -m 00:11:22:33:44:55 wifi0
  
• wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode managed
• ifconfig wifi0 up

After this, I can just use a plain old connection manager to connect to the network.  I could also use this command to do it manually:

• iwconfig ath0 essid [NetworkName] key [WepKeyHere]

Pretty simple. Note though that if your card uses a chipset other than Atheros, you might not be able to do this with your card, and the first command “wlanconfig ath0 destroy” might be slightly different (like “eth1″ for instance), depending on the device name Linux assigns your wireless adapter.

Isn’t this a little extreme?

If by “extreme” you mean “illegal”, the answer is no. Spoofing doesn’t become illegal until you use it in to acquire private information you’re not supposed to have access to (which requires a lot more work anyway). The Nintendo Wii is flawed in that it doesn’t included a web browser with it by default, and even if it were installed, it wouldn’t believe it was actually able to connect to the Internet. Perhaps I’ll send Nintendo a little suggestion so they’ll release a patch in their next update sweep. Though it surprises me that they’ve not encountered this problem, considering they sell Nintendo Wii carrying cases for smug Wii-owners to take their Wii’s to their non-Wii-owning friends’ house so they can show it off over and over… though this probably doesn’t take place in nice Hotels with moderate network security in place. And Nintendo would probably ignore me because they charge people to buy their web browser (you have to be able to download it from their servers anyway), which is required to agree to view Holiday Inn’s agreement page.

So I suppose the next best place to put the blame is on Holiday Inn….and we know that IT guy isn’t in the mood to revamp company policy (and I can’t really think of an easy solution, other than unblocking the MAC). You see, it becomes this dilemma of, “Just how out of my way should I have to go?” If I had a backtrack CD with me right now, I’d hopefully be able to solve this problem in 5 minutes. To me, that’s the opposite of extreme. I’d call it practical (for me). For most people, they’re either stuck with a design flaw in their game console, or hotel Internet policies that were not designed to accommodate these kinds of dumb devices.  Quite a double-bind we have here.

Well, I’ve got some sleep to get… At least they have nice pillows here and the bathroom sink is to die for!

The Business…

I recently got my apology/bribe money from the government and I’ve been looking forward to investing that money into some business related expenses (such as advertising, because it would probably just offend someone to death if I spent it all on silly things made in China).  I’ve also been waiting on a friend of mine to declare whether or not he would be able to participate in a business venture with me, and it turns out he won’t be available.  The ideal role for him would have been project management and accounting (a boring desk job).  If I were him, I would have said no too (but in truth, he really will not have extra time to spare for it).  He’s going to be working a lot of overtime with a new employer this coming year so I’ll have to wait and see if he’ll ever be able to participate with me some time later.

On the bright side I have two other associates ready for work — one a web developer/programmer and the other a graphics artist.  My hope is to combine all of our skills to offer a new slew of online and offline services.  One project we hope to take on very soon is designing a new website for a rural K-8 school; it being the first site that shall utilize content management software.  The goal is to have a powerful interactive website that will allow teachers to administer their own mini-sites for each class, with students also able to put content on the site (provided their stuff is given approval by each respective teacher in advanced).  It is an ambitious project and we’ll have plenty of time over the summer to kick it around the sandbox.  We also intend to create websites in advanced and approach small and medium sized businesses with a site that’s more or less been designed for them.  We’ll also combine this with ready-made advertising packages which can even include original logos we custom design.  Toss in Ubuntu Linux-based office PCs custom built and serviced by me and we’ll have an attractive, versatile selection of tools many businesses will probably be interested in using.

No more CCNA?

A while back, I got into this habit of writing about wanting to get my CCNA networking certification.  I’ve lost the motivation to continue writing about this for the time being, mostly because I think it’s really boring (no, really!).  There are many aspects about computer networking that I love, but there’s also a good chunk that I don’t have a practical use for right now.  I’m not desperately attempting to secure a desk job somewhere so I can map subnets in Microsoft Visio, configure VLANs on serial interfaces, setup ACLs to filter network traffic and perhaps occasionally arm-wrestle with some absurdly obtuse/self-righteous HR department.  Computer networking is not an intimidating field of study and understanding the basics is about as complicated as understanding how the Post Office works.  But Cisco seems a little full of themselves at times.  You’ll know what I mean by this after you’re waist deep in the plethora of rediculous acronyms Cisco is continually pulling out of its ass.  Cheap excuses to procrastinate aside, I’m now more interested in web design and Linux.  The diploma I’ve already got and passing the tests necessary to get it is certification enough for now.

What’s new with Ubuntu?

I’ve been meaning to create a new video to show off Ubuntu 8.04, but very little about it stands out when compared to 7.10 (with exception to performance improvements, which are very noticeable).  One of the most hyped features, Pulse Audio, has turned out to be something of a disappointment (though this is just my opinion).  The decision to include it with 8.04 by default was likely made so as to help get the kinks ironed out before the next major release of Ubuntu in October, which is rumored to be sporting a sexy new theme that will compliment the impressive collection of special effects rendered by Compiz Fusion.  By then, the soon to be developed “glitch-free” version of Pulse Audio should already be in place.

What’s new with Dave?

Believe it or not, I’m reading Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“.  The book takes a deep look at the multitude of mythologies that have existed world wide throughout human history and highlights the similarities between them instead of the superficial differences.  I probably shouldn’t comment on it further until I’ve finished reading (which will probably take quite some time).  Ancient human history is something I’ve been interested in for a few years and the topic of mythology adds an informative and sometimes entertaining layer.  After finishing it, I hope to plow through Julian Jaynes’ “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.

I might as well take the opportunity to first and foremost thank my favorite musician for being nothing less than awesome by doing this.  “The Slip”, a 10 track album, was released on May 5th on nin.com for free.  This probably pisses Metallica off to no end (but I have to say it, and please excuse my french, but f*ck Lars Ulrich and his RIAA bandwagon). I could legally host the entire thing here for you to download if I wanted (since this was released via the CC license), but you can download the whole thing yourself in either 320 Kbps MP3, FLAC loss-less, Apple loss-less and even 24-bit/96 Khz WAVE format from www.nin.com, completely for free.

If you’re looking for a quick sample of what this CD is like, check out this favorite track of mine:

Nine Inch Nails – Head Down (MP3 format)

A good quote to go along with this might be:  Statistics are like a bikini.  What they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital.

Because sharing is caring.

One of my best friends and I are busy with starting a new LLC, and one of the things we’re going to do is build and sell PC’s with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled and customized in advanced for each customer.  So when you get your PC, Compiz will be configured the way you want it to be, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t go into detail about right now.  As such, my priorities are starting to shift and I’ve not really felt like writing a whole lot in here recently, but I will do so more often very shortly.  Sorry if you’ve been waiting for a CCNA post to pop up, but I’ll eventually get around to writing about the Cisco IOS sometime (though it’s dreadfully boring, I have to tell ya).

I have been testing out the Beta version of Ubuntu 8.04 for roughly the past two weeks and put an end to it last night by removing it and replacing it with Ubuntu 8.04 Release Candidate, a preview version of the official release.  A lot of performance improvements have been made to this latest edition of my favorite operating system.  Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Open Office 2.4 are included with Ubuntu 8.04 by default.  Firefox in particular has made major memory usage improvements which translates into faster load times for the user.  And overall, Hardy Heron users report snappier performance.

A new feature called Pulse Audio is being ushered in with Ubuntu 8.04 which stands to bring ease to sound card configuration and make obsolete certain hardware limitations of some cards.  Pulse Audio is a sound server and you can do a lot of cool stuff with it, such as set one computer up to accept sound from another computer over a network.  You could imagine having a Home Theater PC receiving sound from a wireless laptop in the same room.  And it is actually surprisingly easy to configure that scenario I just made up.

There are still a couple of small drawbacks about Pulse Audio that I must mention:

• Pulse Audio has not yet integrated any sort of EQ into its mixer, so you can’t adjust bass or treble on your speakers with it just yet.
• Pulse Audio does not support surround sound channel level adjustment just yet, so only your two front stereo speakers will work for now.

For some people, this isn’t much of a big deal.  Not everybody has a surround sound system connected to their computer, and two speakers is all they could ever ask for.  But for people like me, it’s a bit of a disappointment.  Though… they had to implement it at some point.  So I’ll stop crying about it for now.  I am sure additional mixers will soon be integrated in with Pulse Audio.  In most cases, the technical problems it will solve outweighs its weaknesses.

Wubi – What is it?

Wubi is a new installer that is part of the Ubuntu Live CD.  Wubi allows Windows user to install Ubuntu on their system in a manor similar to installing any other program.

To start Ubuntu after installing, you restart your computer and select “Ubuntu”.  If you want to boot back into Windows, you restart and select Windows.  If you’d like to remove Wubi/Ubuntu from your computer, you can go into Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs, and simply uninstall it.  Now that’s easy!

These are two of the biggest advancements made outside of Ubuntu’s already impressive boost to system wide performance and stability.  All of which are preparation for a dramatic face-lift set to take place when 8.10 is released in October.

This note just hit Digg’s front page a short moment ago. I thought I’d share it with you all.

Forgive me, Linux community, for I have sinned! [dramatic pause... sound of thunder in the distance] But please, do not fret or pity me, my friend. For I have been saved. Behold! My new great Icon:

Ok, dogma jokes aside: If you have Ubuntu, or pretty much ANY distribution of Linux, INSTALL THIS APP! Would you like to have a few thousand Internet radio stations in HUNDREDS of different genres at your finger tips? Well that’s just ONE feature of many that make up Amarok. Here are some others that really stand out:

• Synchronizing, retrieving, playing, or uploading music to the following digital music players: iPod, iriver iFP, Creative NOMAD, Creative ZEN, MTP, Rio Karma and USB devices with VFAT (generic MP3 players) support.
• Creating and editing play-lists, including smart and dynamic playlists. The dynamic play-lists can use such information as the “score” given to a song by an Amarok script, and the playcount which is stored with the song.
• Playing media files in various formats including but not limited to (depending on the setup) FLAC, Ogg, MP3, AAC, WAV, Windows Media Audio, Apple Lossless, WavPack, TTA and Musepack. Amarok does not play digital music files embedded with DRM.
• Last.fm support, including submitting played tracks (including those played on some digital music players) to Last.fm, retrieving similar artists, and playing Last.fm streams.
• Version 2 (in the works right now) will support iTunes Online Music Store, as well as support Windows and Mac OS.
• Thousands of free Internet radio stations, presorted in over 285+ musical (and spoken word) genres. WOW!

I feel sorry for you Windows and Mac users. You have been forsaken….for now. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer for your musical savior to enlighten you, when version 2 is released. Unfortunately, it’s only in its first alpha phase, so it will be several months before a final release (or even a stable beta) can be expected. But keep your eyes peeled. This is a wonderful application!

To install Amarok in Ubuntu

Click Applications>Add/Remove. Then search for “Amarok”, check off the box next to the search result “Amarok”, and then click the Apply button. You’re done! Install takes just a few minutes (depending on your Internet connection and download capabilities).

The program is pretty easy to get used to. Unfortunately, I’m not in much of a position to give an full review of the program. Being as I myself just “rediscovered my music” with this app, I don’t have much more to say about it other than the MASSIVE collection of radio stations already included with its play-list collection is absolutely jaw dropping. There must have been over 40 stations listed in the Oldies genre alone! Now that’s insane. Even for the Internet.

Ok. Nuff said. Download, Install, Enjoy!

To install Amarok in Other Linux Distros, you can check out one of the links below.

Kubuntu	openSUSE	Fedora
Gentoo	Arch	Ark Linux
Debian	Mandriva Linux	PCLinuxOS
	Other (FreeBSD, Yoper, etc.)

A connectionless connection is analogous to sending a letter via First Class mail. You drop a letter off at the post office with the trust that they will be able to deliver it to the destination, but you are not given any other automatic notification about the status of the letter or whether or not it arrived. UDP is most often used for these types of connections. The header of a UDP packet contains the bare minimum amount of information to save on bandwidth. UDP is generally the protocol used in transmitting voice and video across a network. This is because there is no time to re-send lost packets when listening to someone or watching a video in real time. Error correction (if any is to be used) depends on higher layers to detect and send requests for retransmission.

It is important to note that while two computers can talk back and forth to each other using UDP, they are still working in a connection-less fashion.

A connection-oriented protocol such as TCP use many more tools to ensure packet delivery, and is analogous to sending via Certified Mail. With certified mail, you are given a receipt that says when a packet has successfully arrived at it’s destination. The header of a TCP packet contains much more information for services that operate at Layer 4, like flow control for instance.

The first thing that happens with TCP is a three-way handshake. One computer says to the destination computer (via a SYN packet), “Can I talk to you?” The destination computer replies back with a SYN/ACK packet, “Can I talk to you? And yeah, you can talk to me.” Finally the first computer replies to the second computers question with another ACK packet that says, “Yes, you can talk to me.” The purpose of this is to ensure bi-directional communication is possible between the two nodes. A conversation is closed with one FIN packet and one ACK packet being sent to the receiving end, and the receiving end responding with an ACK packet.

Let’s say the first computer (we’ll call N1) is sending three packets of data to N2. Each of these packets will have a sequence number assigned to them by Layer 4, correlated to the number of bytes sent in each packet. Let’s say first packet arrives at the destination with 1024 bytes of data. The sequence number for this packet will be 1024. The receiving end will then send back an ACK packet with an incremented acknowledgment number based upon the sequence number of the last packet it received. So the ACK number it sends back in this case is 1025. To the sender, an ACK number of 1025 means “I have received all bytes before 1025 and I expect my next packet to be seq 1025″. This is called Forward Acknowledgment, and the receiving end could send back ACK packets for every packet it receives. But that would eat up a lot of bandwidth.

So what we have to help keep overhead down is something called a delayed acknowledgment. An example of a delayed ACK is when the three packets arrived at the receiving end, and the receiving end responds with one ACK 3073 packet (1024 + 1024 + 1024 + 1). This tells the receiving computer, I’ve gotten all data up to byte 3072, I expect 3073 to be next.” The number of packets that can be received before an ACK packet is sent back to the sender can vary due to things like congestion windowing, explained below.

Now lets say that for some reason, the network device on the receiving end was so busy, it could only handle the first 2 of three incoming packets. Since the buffer is now full, and it cannot receive more data for now, it will send back an ACK of 2049 (1024 + 1024 + 1) with a Window size of zero. This basically tells the sending end to wait until it gets another ACK 2049 with a Window greater than 0.  A Window is a value set in the TCP header and it is indicative of the receiving ends’ data acceptance capabilities.

N2 isn’t the only device that may become overwhelmed by incoming traffic. Routers in between the two computers may also be choked by heavy traffic, and cause buffers to become full, and packets to be dropped as a result. A process called slow-start is used to help “feel the network out”. Basically, the sending side starts with one packet, gets an ACK, then sends twice the data it did last time, gets the ACK for that, doubles the data again, and this goes on and on until the ACK the sender gets back indicates that the capabilities of the networking equipment from end to end have been maxed out. This is why, when you start downloading a file from a web server, it typically starts of slow for a second or two, climbs higher, until reaching some sort of average data rate.

The TCP header also utilizes length and checksum fields. If there is a discrepancy between data being sent and either the length or the checksum, the bad packet can be resent by decrementing the ACK number back to the last known good packet. The sender won’t know the packet was corrupted. It will just think it never got there in the first place and resend the bad packet.

Sequence numbers are also used to reorder data back together for the higher layers.

I’m sure I’m leaving something out, but the important thing is that you understand the difference between connectionless and connection-oriented protocols. Future CCNA posts will concentrate on a great deal on the Cisco Internetwork Operating System. Fun fun!

Cairo Dock comes with a lot of really cool looking themes too.  I went ahead and took screenshots of all of them to show you.  But first, how to install this program.

To install Cairo Dock:

Visit this website.  (Note:  If you are running Firefox 3, you will be prompted to make a certificate exception before you can view the site).  You’ll be presented with a page that looks something like this:

Note the two links I’ve highlighted in red.  You need to download both of those deb files, and save them to your desktop.  Once they are there, double-click on the main cairo-dock deb file to install the base program, then after it’s finished installing, double-click on the plugins deb file to install the neat extras.

You’re done with the installation.

To run Cairo-Dock you can find a shortcut to it in your Applications>System menu.  Try cairo-dock out to see if it runs well on your system (as this program is dependent on Compiz in order to look nice and transparent like glass).  To play with the cairo-dock settings you just right-click on the dock bar and you’ll get some menus that you can explore on your own.  Nothing too technical.  The “Manage Themes” menu option will allow you to change the docks appearance and behavior to preset themes.

How to auto-load Cairo Dock:

Once you’re familiar with the dock and decide you’d like to use it regularly, you can remove your other task bar just by right clicking on it and clicking “Remove Panel”.  I don’t think you’ll miss it, but that’s just my opinion.

To auto-load cairo-dock at login, goto System>Preferences>Sessions.

You’ll be shown a new window listing programs that auto run at login.  All you need to do is add cairo-dock to the list by clicking the “Add” button.

Once you click add, name your item “Cairo Dock” and in the command box type “cairo-dock” without the quotes.  You can leave the comments field blank.  Then click OK.  That’s it!  Now when you login in, Cairo Dock will autorun for you.

As mentioned before, I took screenshots of all the themes that are included with Cairo.  Well, here they are.  Enjoy!

Azur

Colbalt

Djoole

Glattering

I Cairo

Mac OS X

Tapisvert

Ubuntu

Verde

Wood

“Default”

I believe I now have bragging rights in the computer world (especially the Linux world).  It’s a shame she had to work tonight, but we’ll be going out for drinks shortly to relax, you can be sure of that

And if having such a super cool girlfriend doesn’t give me bragging rights of some kind in the computer world…well…. turns out I also had time to rip the guts out of my dirty old computer today (which I haven’t cleaned in years) and put all of it back together inside of a very cool looking shell (which happened to be sitting on my floor for over a year doing nothing):

There we go.  I had that sticker laying around here too.  Sweet…

So I’ve unplugged almost everything you could possibly call a computer at my place, and am now hunkered in my girlfriend’s bedroom at her apartment, running on lithium ion and T-Mobile cellular Internet access… I’m still adapting to this place. And I’m about to run out of power. I could go off on a rant… but it’d be pointless.

To pass the time by, I’ll probably crack the blinds open a bit so I can watch the lightning. It can be pretty impressive. And if that doesn’t keep me up, my girlfriends roommates’ noisy friends probably will.

First layer 2, the Data Link Layer.

Strait from Wikipedia:

Logical Link Control Sublayer

The uppermost sublayer is Logical Link Control (LLC). This sublayer multiplexes protocols running atop the data link layer, and optionally provides flow control, acknowledgment, and error recovery. The LLC provides addressing and control of the data link. It specifies which mechanisms are to be used for addressing stations over the transmission medium and for controlling the data exchanged between the originator and recipient machines.

Media Access Control Sublayer

The sublayer below it is Media Access Control (MAC). Sometimes this refers to the sublayer that determines who is allowed to access the media at any one time (usually CSMA/CD). Other times it refers to a frame structure with MAC addresses inside. There are generally two forms of media access control: distributed and centralized. Both of these may be compared to communication between people:

• In a network made up of people speaking, i.e. a conversation, we look for clues from our fellow talkers to see if any of them appear to be about to speak. If two people speak at the same time, they will back off and begin a long and elaborate game of saying “no, you first”.

The Media Access Control sublayer also determines where one frame of data ends and the next one starts. In a snail-mail network, each letter is one frame of data, and one can tell where it begins and ends because it is inside an envelope. One might also specify that a letter will begin with a phrase like “Dear Sir”, and ends with a phrase like “Yours faithfully”.

————–

Direct communication between a router and a PC, or a PC and another PC, uses MAC addresses for communication. Also used is CSMA/CD, or Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection. When a packet is about to be sent out on a network the wire is checked for a signal to see if anybody else is transmitting data over the wire. Kind of like the way you look both ways before proceeding past a stop sign on a street.

If another transmission takes place at the same time, the voltage on the line will spike and be detected by all those on the wire. A 32 bit long jam signal is then sent out, and all network devices start the Backoff Algorithm. This basically makes every computer shut up for a random period of time. The first one with the lowest random waiting time interval will then attempt to send data after their waiting period is up. If a client experiences more than 15 failed attempts to transmit data due to collisions, it will proceed to let the upper OSI layers deal with the problem.

These days, almost nobody uses Hubs, and instead use switches and routers. Switches dynamically create dedicated virtual pipes between computers on a network. This way they can send and receive data between each other without worry of a collision occurring. The ability to both send and receive data at the same time is called Full Duplex communication. Half Duplex is where you can send and receive, but only one at a time.

There’s also the ARP request. Basically, if a computer is trying to send data to another computer on a local area network (LAN), it knows what the IP address is, but not the MAC address, it will send out a broadcast ARP request asking for the MAC of the target IP address. The target host will see it’s own IP address with a ? in the target MAC address field, and reply to the source MAC to say, “Hey, my MAC is xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” The source host will then proceed to send data using the targets MAC address. Other hosts on the network, when they hear packets destined for a MAC address other than a broadcast address or their own MAC address, will discard the packet.

———————

Layer 3 – The Network Layer

The purpose of the network layer is mostly to handle end to end transmission of a packet over the Internet…. Here. Think about these terms real quick:

City and Zip = Network IP Address
Street = Host IP
Name = MAC Address

This isn’t absolutely accurate, but you get the idea (I hope). If you can imagine what the Postal Service basicly does, then you can handle the above.

An IP address is made up of 32-bits (one’s and zero’s). This string of numbers is represented to us humans in decimal as 4 seperate octats. An example of a common local IP address is 192.168.1.1 — This address is actually two addresses. Part of it is the Network IP, and the other part is the Host IP. This is determined by the Subnet Mask being used. The default subnet mask for 192.168.1.1 is 255.255.255.0, or “24 bit”. It’s 24 bit because 255.255.255.0 in binary looks like 11111111.11111111.11111111.00000000.

Don’t hurt yourself thinking about this too much right now. Just know that 192.168.1.0 is the Network IP to us, and the .1 at the end of it is the part of the address that pertains to the target computer (host).

The three most common IP address ranges seen are:

• Class A – First Octet of the IP address ranges between 1 – 127 with a default 8-bit (255.0.0.0) subnet mask.
• Class B – 128 – 191 with a default 16-bit (255.255.0.0) subnet mask.
• Class C – 192 – 223 with a default 24-bit (255.255.255.0) subnet mask.

IP Fragmentation is something that occurs when packets of data must traverse a network whose Maximum Transmission Unit is smaller than the size of the packet. Data that is fragmented will stay fragmented into smaller chunks until they all arrive at the destination for reassembly.

That’s all for now.

ISOLINUX: Image Checksum Error, Sorry Boot Failed

I’ve seen people screaming (in ALL CAPS, that is) and pull their hair out (probably) over this error in many linux forums, desperately trying to figure out the cause of this problem and how to solve it. Some people who have encountered it manage to “fix” the problem by burning their ISO files at a slow speed (say, 2x or 4x). I tried that 3 times, but no bueno. I would still get the same error no matter what…except on one accidental occasion this morning where I took one disc I had tossed in the trash the night before, tried it again, and it actually booted… at least to the installer menu. It failed to load much of anything though. So, as you can see, my DVD drive seemed to be acting kind of flaky.

But then I decided to check and see if my BIOS was up to date. Sure enough, it wasn’t. And in addition to that, one of the bugs the latest BIOS version release notes claimed to fix was “Booting from a CD-ROM which is on the same IDE channel as the primary hard drive.” Kooky little bug indeed. After updating my BIOS, Ubuntu 8.04 installed without a single hitch, and I’m happy to report it’s running better than I ever anticipated; much more stable than 7.10 (particularly Compiz, but that’s a separate story). I’ll soon be writing another blog about the new features to be found in 8.04.

So how did I update my BIOS?

Well, for starts I needed a floppy disk…I could have burnt a boot ISO image to a CD (see this guide here if you want to make a CD instead of a floppy), but considering how flaky these Linux ISO boots were going, I didn’t want to chance a checksum error on my BIOS image or anything weird like that. And speaking of my floppy drive, I had to open the case and plug the damn thing back in and blow off some dust on it’s faceplate because I’ve probably only used the thing a couple times in the whole life of the computer. I had disconnected it so my boot time would be a little faster. And I’m sure some of you probably laughed a moment ago saying, “A f—ing boot floppy tutorial? Are you kidding me? What’s a floppy, haw haw haw!” Hey, I know how you feel.

Captain Not-So-Obvious Warning: “Floppy’s are unreliable! Try to use a brand new one if you intend to do this. A corrupt floppy could cause your BIOS image file or flash utility to contain an error, which could disrupt the BIOS flash process, and turn your computer into a paper weight. So be careful, got it? Because I’m not saying it again, damn it!”

The basic steps to make the BIOS update floppy in Ubuntu Linux are:

• Download the FreeDOS floppy disk image from here and save it to your Desktop.
• Right-Click on the FDSTD.144.gz file you just downloaded and select “Extract Here”. A new file, FDOEM.144 will appear on the desktop.
• Open a Terminal window (Applications>Accessories>Terminal) and browse to your Desktop by typing “cd Desktop” (case-sensitive) then hit the Enter Key.
• Insert your floppy disk. Then type in terminal “dd if=FDOEM.144 of=/dev/fd0” — This will write the FDOEM.144 FreeDOS image to your floppy disc, making it bootable.

Now that the basic boot image and files are on the disc, we’ll need to mount it and copy the bios update files to the floppy. To mount the floppy, enter the following two commands into a terminal window:

• sudo mkdir /media/floppy
• mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy

Your floppy disc should now be mounted and have it’s own icon in your Places menu as well as the Desktop. Now we need to copy your new bios files to the floppy. (For example purposes, here’s where my BIOS was downloaded from. Consult your motherboard manufacture’s website for your correct BIOS images).

When you download a BIOS upgrade from your motherboard manufacture, it usually comes in the form of a compressed ZIP file, which contains two files (see above). One is a *.bin file, and the other is a small program that’s made to inject that *.bin file and replace the previous BIOS version. All you have to do is extract these two files, then copy them both to your newly created boot floppy. Once these two files are copied over, you can reboot with the floppy in the drive, and once you’re at your A:> prompt, you can then execute your BIOS upgrade utility.

What else might cause a ISOLINUX Checksum Error?

A corrupt copy of an ISO file can cause a bad checksum error. Re-download the ISO if this is the case and try burning it again. Also remember that you have to burn an ISO file by telling your burning software that you want to “burn an image”. A bad burner could also be the cause of the problem, as is the case with drives that have seen heavy use (I’ve worn a few out myself).

One other possible solution you could try using is a boot-disk image called Smart Boot Manager. This utility boots from a floppy, but then allows you to point to another device on the PC to boot from. It’s a good utility if your BIOS doesn’t support CD-ROM booting. Unfortunately, when I tried this utility out, it failed to see my CD-ROM device (but in its defense, this was before I upgraded my BIOS, so that probably factored into this little bug).

As a last resort I also tried to create a bootable USB flash drive to install Ubuntu from. Not all PC’s are capable of booting from a USB drive though and as of this writing, I’ve not yet tested this possible feature out on my PC since updating. But you can give it a shot by following this guide.

That’s all for now! After the break, more CCNA posts and a close look at Ubuntu 8.04.

Upgrade from Hardy to Gutsy? That sounds pretty ass backwards. What’s going on here? Ha ha ha, at least I think I’m in a hole… I can tell that some things have updated and it looks like I am actually running 8.04… But certain programs aren’t working. I’ve decided to reinstall Ubuntu and start fresh for a change. So today, I’m going to talk specifically about reinstalling Ubuntu.

Preparing to Reinstall Ubuntu (and how it’s easier than reinstalling Windows)

If you’re a long time Windows user, you’ve probably reinstalled your operating system at least once. The routine you typically go through begins with you backing up all of your music, videos (porn?), documents and personal files. Then boot from your XP installation CD, select the hard drive you want the OS to reside on and format the drive before installing your fresh copy of XP. Then after that, there’s the system update>reboot>update>reboot tango, then reinstalling your third party anti-virus software, firewall, spyware remover, perhaps Firefox and a whole mess of other applications, installing them one at a time… (deep breath) And STILL! after that software is installed, you’ve got to import your e-mail settings and folders, Internet Favorites (Firefox bookmarks), blah blah blah blah blah! Man…that sound like it can be really time consuming (how do you Windows users put up with this nonsense?). There is software out there that will do almost all of this for you automatically, and it’s a little pricey.

How would you do this with Ubuntu? Simple! You just backup your Home Folder.

In Ubuntu, the Home Folder is kind of like the My Documents folder in Windows, but much more. Sure, it holds some of your data files for you but it also contains a bunch of hidden folders that hold personal preferences and settings for every program on your computer. To see what I’m talking about, try the following:

• Open your Home Folder (Places>Home Folder)
• Press CTRL-H to reveal Hidden Files

Inside your Home Folder, you’ll see many folders that begin with a period. For example, there is a folder for Evolution called “.evolution”. There is a folder for Firefox called “.mozilla”. If I wanted to backup the preferences for just those two applications, all I would have to do is copy those two folders to a backup drive, and after reinstalling Ubuntu, copy those two folders back into my new Home Folder. Really, that’s all you have to do!

The other great thing that you’ll be able to do that Windows users can’t do is install multiple applications at once using either Add/Remove or Synaptic Package Manager. You’ll also get updates for every piece of software on your computer installed automatically with the update manager all at once too. All of these features found in Ubuntu Linux are a huge time saver, especially when compared to how much time you could spend reinstalling XP and securing it.

And they say Linux is complicated…

Tip: It’s probably best to keep backup-restore copies of your home folder in alignment with your version number. Meaning, what I’m about to do (copy an Ubuntu version 7.10 home folder over top of my 8.04 Beta home folder) may be a bad idea. I’ll let you know tomorrow, after I’ve installed a fresh copy of Hardy Heron.

—–

A client of mine recently wiped his computer clean when they accidentally initiated a destructive recovery via the F10 key during POST. This caused their hard drive to be formated and their OS to be reinstalled as it was when it was originally installed at the factory. The lost files on the system were not recoverable, and the only alternative would be to have an advanced data forensics lab extract the old data off, the cost of which could go up as high as a couple thousand dollars.

There are some simple things you should get in the habit of doing if you want to decrease your odds of facing such a horrid situation as the one above:

Unplug your PC when there is lightning outside

I shouldn’t have to tell people this, but some of you uber-nerds out there think that the bigger their basement-computer-bedroom-cave-hermit dwelling is, the more invincible they are. It’s not a matter of probability of being struck, but probability of surviving a lightning strike unscathed. Like the Black Knight from Monty Python.

Don’t let the price tag on that expensive Uninterrupted Power Supply fool you. Its purpose isn’t to safe-guard you from a lightning strike, but to sustain power to your PC in the event of an unexpected outage and to compensate for brownouts and power spikes. Lightning can still penetrate it and make its way to your computer. Once there, it’s up in the air how much damage it might inflict, and hard to diagnose the extent of damage after the fact. Every time I’ve seen a system that’s been hit by lightning, I’ve ended up having to tell people to buy a new computer, because so many parts were damaged in a split second.

Do what most people do during severe weather: Watch TV till the power goes out, grab a radio and flash light, salvage the remaining beer from the unpowered refrigerator, and hope for the best when you regain consciousness in the morning. Or whatever floats your boat.  If you have an Internet addiction like I do, use a wireless device like a laptop or a cell phone to get your info fix.

Backup to an external storage device

Here’s what I’ve got pictured above from left to right:

• An external USB hard drive. Advantages: Cheap for price per megabyte, easy to setup and use. Disadvantages: Subject to failure from old age after several years of use (see your warranty), and sometimes bulky (depends on how cheap you are).
• A USB Flash Drive. Advantages: Small, handy, convenient, instant plug-and-play capable (usually). Disadvantages: Must be replaced after about 250 uses, easy to misplace and lose (get a nice 4 dollar lanyard like I did). Costly if you have lots of data to backup.
• A cell phone with a MicroSD card. Same as the USB flash drive, but slower. The advantage is that it’s in your phone, and you probably aren’t as likely to misplace that thing.
• Network Attached Storage. Network attached storage is basically a “computer-less” hard drive that attaches to your local network (router) and shares hard drive space to other computers on the network. Advantage: Highest fault tolerance (there are multiple copies of files spread across hard drives, so if one drive fails, the file is not lost). Disadvantage: Expensive.

You can also backup data to external CD’s or DVD’s and keep them in a dark place. Doing so will keep your data safe for a long time. But it’s good to shed old storage media after several years of data sitting on them and move data to a fresher medium that is less likely to suddenly flake out unexpectedly.

You can also use software to automate backing data up. A good one is Amanda Open Source Backup. I’ll write more about it sometime in the future. But for now, you should consider using one of the external devices above and practice good habits to protect your computer and your documents from being lost.

The sound card manufacturers response to this act has caused an uproar, as it appears they do not want users to modify the drivers in such a way as to make them…what’s the word?….FUNCTIONAL!?

Responses from users have varied…

Here’s a great link if you would like to read more about all this in great detail.

7. Application (Programs, such as a web browser, or chat client
6. Presentation (Data Formatting)
5. Session (Distinguishes individual sessions of communication; port numbers)
4. Transport (Splits outbound data into chunks called packets; responsible for end-to-end connectivity)
3. Network (Logical addressing, TCP/IP)
2. Data-Link (MAC addresses, CSMA/CD, LLC, Binary transcoding)
1. Physical (01101101)

Think of the very top layer (the application layer) as the actual programs you use on your computer, and the very bottom layer being the physical means (electricity, light, radiowaves, etc.). The image below helps to demonstrate the encapsulation process that takes place as data passes down through the 7 layers:

Let’s pretend I’m running a piece of chat software and talking to someone else through the Internet (I’m on the left of the above chart, and my chat buddy is System 2 on the right). I type something, press Enter, and what I type begins a journey down the series of layers. From the Application layer, my text passes through the Presentation layer which formats my text into ASCII characters (or whatever the application I’m using prefers) and passes it down to the Session layer. The session layer assigns a number to distinguish this individual (brief) data transmission from others. A small chunk of data is then appended to the front of the containing this session number tag (called a port number).

Layer 4 on down are considered the “lower network layers.” …and to be honest, I’m too lazy to write anymore about it. I’ll be focusing on the lower three layers more closely in the next blog. Use the links at the top for much more useful reading. (By the way, these CCNA posts are more or less for me later when I take the exam, so please excuse the poor quality of my notes).  In the end, the data the is received at the physical layer of system two is sent back up, and layer by layer, each encapsulated chunk is pealed off until finally reaching the top and presenting the text I typed on my computer on System 2′s monitor.

Up next:  A closer look at the Data-Link Layer, where we’ll talk about MAC addresses, the ARP protocol and Half/Full Duplex.

What if you wanted to add a new function to this menu? I’m going to show you how to add a neat, simple file encryption function to this menu. After doing this, you’ll know how to find and add your own scripts in the future. (Data encryption, by the way, is the act of encoding a file with a secure password, making the file impossible to opened without that password. It is useful for situations that require extra security on key files).

Nautilus scripts are abound on the Internet, but a good place to find a bunch is www.gnome-look.org.

Along the left side of their website is a menu full of cool stuff we’ll be taking a look at in future blogs. Cool stuff like splash screens, login window themes… a bunch of stuff. But we’re going to stick with only talking about Nautilus scripts for now. If you click on the Nautilus scripts link, you’ll be taken to an index containing several dozens people have submitted to the site. I prefer to sort the listing with the highest rated shown first, but you can explore if you’d like. Here’s a direct link to the page for the encryption script we’re going to install.

From this page, click the download link and save the file to your desktop.

Once the file is on your desktop, you can minimize or close your browser to get it out of your way.

Now do the following:

1. Click Places>Home Folder
2. With your home folder open, hit CTRL-H to reveal hidden files and folders.
3. Find a folder called “.gnome2” and double click on it. (Note the period at the beginning of the file name. Periods at the beginning of filenames denote hidden files in Linux).
4. Then double click on “nautilus-scripts” folder.

Now, drag and drop the file you just downloaded (it should still be sitting on your desktop) into the nautilus-scripts folder (you can also use copy and paste). Once you have the downloaded file in your nautilus-scripts folder, right-click on the file and select “Extract here”.

You’re done. No really. You’re really done! The script is now installed.

How to use this encryption script:

To use this particular script, you right-click on a file or group of files, and you’ll see that your menu now has a new “Scripts” section, and select the encrypt/decrypt script.

You’ll be asked to apply a password to your encrypted files so that only you will be able to decrypt them later. The script then encrypts the file and creates a new file with a *.gpg file name extension. This is your encrypted file. To decrypt, you simply right click on the *.gpg file and select the decrypt script, and then enter the same password you typed when you encrypted the file.

There are many more scripts and even collections of scripts available on gnome-looks.org. A majority of them are all installed using the same method described above. You simply have to extract the contents of the zip/tar archive into your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts folder. (Tip for newbies: When you see a file path begin with “~/”, its a shortcut for “home folder of currently logged on user”. For instance, if you opened a terminal window and typed “cd ~/” at any time, you’d be taken to your home folder).

Here’s a collection of scripts you can install right now if you’re looking for a lot of neat bells and whistles. But I encourage you to look around and see what neat tools you can dig up. If you install them, here’s what you’re script menu will look like.

Took me about 30 seconds to download and install all of them. And now you can too!

Later on, we’ll take a closer look at some of the other sections listed on the left-hand menu on gnome-looks.org. Have fun!

Automatix, a third-party program used for installing a select few popular software titles and video drivers in Ubuntu, has passed. The developers of this installer, more or less, have decided to go their own separate ways. If you ask me, I think they stopped because the purpose it served has more or less been replaced by official Ubuntu support.

When I first started using Ubuntu about a year ago, I used Automatix to install my nVidia proprietary drivers, Google Earth, Skype, Flash, DVD playback, even VMware-Server, among other things (come to think of it, I even installed Beryl with it). Today, installing all of these things has gotten much much easier. Most of these items can be installed via the Add/Remove applications applet, or Synaptic and if your comfortable with the terminal good old “sudo apt-get install fill in the blank” works great too for most things. Compiz has replaced Beryl and is included with Ubuntu by default now, video card drivers are handled fairly well by the Restricted Drivers manager… There isn’t much out there these days that Automatix can help people out with.

Sorry to see you go, Automatix! But you’re job here is done. Rest in peace. At least I won’t forget you.

For the 2 or 3 of you out there who are actually reading this and are keeping up with the horribly short CCNA series, it’ll be back (enjoy the break). I’d rather write about Ubuntu stuff during the weekdays anyways.

If you’re looking for a way to kill time, and have a spare computer in the house, you might consider downloading the Beta release of Ubuntu 8.04…

So, yesterday after losing over half of what I wrote AGAIN, I copied and pasted my text to a word file first before producing that damn 403 error again. I reinstalled my whole blog twice, and the same error was being produced by that specific text. I didn’t have a problem posting other test blogs, or that other super long one I put up yesterday.

Anyway, enough ranting. Without further a due, here’s a link to the word file I wrote my notes into. Topics touched on are Advanced ACL’s and the Cisco Discovery Protocol.

Now….back to the mystery that is my day of trying to remember where I put that f—ing thumb drive!! Don’t you just hate it when you lose tiny stuff like that?

Here’s some good reading though:

• Backing up and restoring an IOS image file
• Cisco IOS access lists: 10 things you should know
• Q and A:  Wildcard Masks in ACL’s

1. Physical – (Cables, radio waves, binary 1′s and 0′s, etc).
2. Data Link – (Switch/Bridge devices/MAC address)
3. Network – (Routers)

Routers are the devices which are given the most focus. Here is the back of an example router:

The look of a router will vary greatly, but it’s function and purpose is essentially the same: Route IP traffic, as well as other management stuff we’ll discuss later.

Within the router is a Command Line Interface called the Cisco IOS. The traditional method used to access this operating system is to attach a rollover cable to the routers console port and the other end to a serial port on a PC. Then, using a terminal emulator like Hyper Terminal (included with Windows for free) to establish a serial connection. These settings need to be correct in order for the connection to work:

• Baud – 9600
• Databits – 8
• Parity – None
• Stop Bits – 1

The Aux port on a router can be setup to accept incoming connections from external devices like a phone modem, allowing for remote administration. Virtual Terminal ports can also be configured, allowing the administrator to set up any of the Ethernet ports on the router to accept incoming remote administrator telnet or SSH sessions.

When you establish a console session with a router, you begin in “user mode”, and you are very limited on what commands the router can accept from you. To escalate your privileges, you type “enable” and press enter. A password prompt can be configured later to ask for a password when this command is entered. A password can also be placed over the user mode as well, to prevent access by unauthorized users.

Tab-Completion of commands is supported, as well as ? inquires. If you type “con?” and press enter, the possible commands that begin with “con” will be displayed. If you type “config ?” sub commands that can be sent to config will be shown. This is handy if you forget your commands.

When a router first powers on, it goes through a Power On Self Test by loading a small ROM chip. This mode seeks out an IOS image file, which is the actual OS. The OS is usually stored on Flash memory.

To configure the router, you have to type “enable” to switch into Privlaged mode, then type “config term”. Then you can begin to configure other interfaces (more on that later).

Once you’re done with changing your configuration, you can save it to your startup config file by typing “copy run start”. You can also erase your config by typing “erase start”.

That’s all for now. More on the way.

Let me explain a little more. I used to work for a factory that manufactures garage doors. I worked their for nearly 4 years, starting as a temp and working my way up to staff trainer in under 2 years. Then, one day the training department I was in was downsized. They tried to cover up what they were doing by slotting all trainers who were in soon-to-be-eliminated positions into available department lead positions and told them it was only going to be temporary. I was told that I would be in charge of the warehouse. The WAREHOUSE! Telling 10 other forklift operators what to do and cutting off my personal time even more (preventing me from going to school) didn’t sound like something I was just going to casually let them do to me; I didn’t feel like working 50 or 60 hours a week. So I told them I would rather demote myself than work in a position I didn’t feel interested in fulfilling. They obliged, and my pay was cut by about 3 dollars an hour. I had decided at that point I wasn’t going to work in a garage door factory for the rest of my life, and immediately began investigating their tuition reimbursement program…

I graduated from Kaw Area Technical School about 2 months after leaving that place, continuing to work on the weekends for the data center. And for me, that was enough to survive and pay the bills. I have had ambitions about starting my own tech support business, and as such I kinda slacked off when it came to having a desire to pay the 150 some dollars to take the final CCNA exam. I had already gotten a tech job in a good place with a good boss, and was happy basically taking it easy for a while. I partially felt that if I had kept in step with some other classmates after graduation that I might end up charging my way into being employed for more of the same types of people I despised when working at that garage door factory, which would also conflict with my desire to be completely self employed someday. I would tell myself, “If I’m my own boss, who cares what’s on my resume.” Kinda naive of me, but hey, live and let live. I’m only 25; I’ve got some time on my hands….

Recently, I’ve been churning up my desire to nail that CCNA certification to my wall, as well as go beyond it. CCNP is a must and I’ve also become interested in seeing what there is to get out of a CISSP certification. But that’s way down the road.

I am going to crash through the entire CCNA curriculum tonight, tomorrow evening and through the weekend, and report my progress here. I also intend to write a very skeleton sort of description of many concepts learned. I’ll then take the test, pass and post about my success here for you to read. This shouldn’t be very difficult for me, since most of the networking concepts taught are second nature to me these days.

So stay tuned. You’re going to get schooled in computer networking, and learn a few useful things you could use in the future. I’ll try to make it fun for ya too.

• A Look at Windows Vista Service Pack 1
• A Look at Windows XP Service Pack 3
• A Preview of Ubuntu Linux 8.04
  • Pulse Audio – What is it, how it’s gonna make your life easier and how you could go wild with it’s capabilities if you have a wireless network in your home.
• Ubuntu HOWTO: Install Windows after installing Ubuntu using Gparted and Ubuntu Live CDs
• Ubuntu HOWTO: Install Nautilus Scripts
• A review of Firefox 3.
• An update about the 700 Mhz bandwidth FCC auction.
• An ambitious barebones review of the CCNA curriculum (what?!)

That’s all for now!

• Portal (via Steam)
• All the Half Life games (via Steam)
• World of Warcraft
• Max Payne 2
• Command And Conquer 3
• About 40 or 50 more to pick from…

Granted, the very latest and most high-end games out there like Crysis don’t run on WINE well, but the same thing was also said about the above titles at some point. So Crysis may very well find its way to the Ubuntu desktop in the near future. Though due to the current baby/bathwater tossing contest going on at Microsoft (regarding Crysis access to DirectX 10 in Vista; or XP if you hacked it)… Sorry, I was about to go off on another rant about how much I hate Vendor Lockin business models.

Downloading Play on Linux is as simple as downloading the deb file and then running it to install the program. Once installed and run, you’re given a very simple menu:

To install software, you simply click on the Install button, and select the software you’re wanting to install from a list. It works in a similar fashion to WINE-Doors. I used this program to install Steam, which allowed me to spend some money on:

So I went ahead and threw Valve Software $20 to download Portal via Steam, despite the fact those assholes canceled my previous account because I stopped using it for a year. After a little bit of experimentation to see how high I could get my frame rate, I settled for the defaults it had originally selected for my video card and hardware setup. (This was on my laptop, mind you. It’s a 2.8 Ghz Pentium 4 with 768 MB RAM, and a GeForce 5600 Go with 128 MB video memory…. pretty crappy video card by todays standards; probably only worth 30 or 40 bucks).

I experimented with GNOME failsafe because I wanted to see if game performance would improve with Compiz Fusion disabled. Surprisingly for me, Compiz had very little impact on the frame rate of the game, which held average at about 20 to 25 fps. Though it would dip down low at certain parts of the game because of the nature of the game (rendering portal loops can really take a lot of GPU overhead).

All in all, I was quite impressed with how smooth the install of both Steam and Portal went. I did encounter a bug after attempting to load Portal again after having used and closed it. But restarting the PC seems to be the temporary solution to that little problem. Otherwise the game runs perfect, as do many other games. Another one I tested out recently was Warcraft 3, but I didn’t do much more than load the first level and attempt to join a multiplayer game. But it works, and you should try it out if you’re bored looking for something to help kill time. For extra credit, play your favorite game in front of a Windows gamer, and brag about the fact that your OS is free of a price tag and viruses. He’ll pretend to miss your point, when in truth, he’s oozing with jealousy.

All the details you need are at the above link!

This is the Grub menu. It appears on boot to ask you which operating system you would like to boot. By default, Ubuntu (the latest kernel) is selected. If you’re a former Windows user who is just starting to get their feet wet in Ubuntu, you may not want Ubuntu to be the default OS that is selected in this menu when you first boot your PC. You might also want to do things like change the color scheme or add a graphical background behind the menu, adjust the timer, etc. An easy program to do this with is called QGRUBEditor.

To download and install QGRUBEditor, do the following:

• Download the QGRUBEditor Deb Installer Package here: Ubuntu download (Debian Package (2.5.0)
• Save the *.deb file to your desktop and then run it by double clicking on it.

The above window will appear when you run the deb file. Click the Install Package button in the upper-right hand corner…

The term “unauthenticated” means “Software that is not officially supported by Canonical, and that you will have to take up any technical issues you encounter with this software to its own developers.” That may sound just a little bad, but don’t worry. The software has been well tested and is not malicious. Click Yes when you see the above box appear.

Once you have QGRUBEditor installed, you can run it from Applications>System>QGRUBEditor. Here’s what the Interface looks like:

CAUTION! - Take extra care to not screw anything up in here. Messing with this thing is a little like messing with the registry in Windows XP. Fortunately, there is a backup button at the top that you can click on before you start making any changes. If you make an accidental change that you didn’t want, you can click a Restore button which will revert everything back to the way it was when you started.

You’ll notice that the top half looks pretty similar to that Grub menu we’re familiar with. You can do things here like change the order of the listing, as well as remove or add entries. Now let’s take a peek at the GRUB Settings tab (at the bottom):

There are a lot more settings you can change in here, such as the default OS. Most of the settings found in here are pretty self-explanatory:

• Fallback Entry: The OS that loads if the default is unable to for some reason
• Timout: Number of seconds the Grub menu will be displayed before auto-selecting the default OS.
• Password: Places a password on your grub menu to prevent manual editing by unauthorized users.
• Colors: Menu background and text colors.
• Splash Image: An option background image (visit this link to browse boot splash screens you can download and use).

When you are all done adjusting settings, all you have to do to save your changes is close the program. Restart your computer and check out your changes! In the event you screwed your grub up, you can restore it using an Ubuntu Live CD. Here is a guide for how to do this.

With the right kind of tweaking, you can make your grub look pretty slick:

Have fun!

Alright, meow. I’ve recently added a new category called “HOWTO: Ubuntu” to the list of keywords I can file my blog entries into. I will be sorting previous blogs relating to Ubuntu that are not tutorial-oriented into the “Ubuntu” category, and separate them entirely from blog entires that are more fitting for the “HOWTO: Ubuntu category.”

1. Setting up your wired Internet Connection.
2. Troubleshooting wired Connections.
3. Setting up your wireless adapter.
4. Installing Firestarter Firewall.

Let’s get started with the first topic.

Internet Connection Setup in Ubuntu (Wired)

Before I go into this detailed technical babble, I want to go over a basic check list for connectivity to the Internet.

• Cable/DSL modem is powered on and is authenticated with your ISP (meaning, the “Cable” or “DSL” light on the front is on solid, and you have a good connection to your ISP).
• Your cable modem is directly attached to your PC Ethernet port via a Cat5 Ethernet cable. If you have more than one PC in your house and you own a router see the next item:
• Your Cable/DSL modem is attached to your router’s up link port via a Cat5 cable, and your PC is attached to one of the routers down link ports.
• Once again: DOUBLE CHECK YOUR PHYSICAL LAYER and make sure everything is correctly connected.

Kind of like this:

The above is the standard connection scheme of a home network. If you have done the above, shoot for the moon and try to open Firefox and visit www.google.com. If it says the page can’t be displayed, try clicking (inside of Firefox) Edit>Preferences and then select the Advanced catagory at the top-far-right, and then click the Network tab (see below).

From there, click on the Settings button within the Connection zone of the window. This window will then appear:

From here, make sure the “Auto-Detect Proxy Settings” radio button is selected (as above). Then hit OK.

Now, close Firefox, restart it and attempt to visit www.google.com again. If it still doesn’t work, read below to troubleshoot your connection:

Connection Troubleshooting
(skip if you’re not having any problems)

Typical Internet users have to have the following equipment in order to get access to the Internet:

1. A modem (Could be dial up, could be DSL, could be cable. All three perform the same basic function: Modulate and demodulate data as it is sent to and received from your Internet Service Provider, as well as assign you one single IP address).
2. An Ethernet Adapter.
3. A Router (required if you have more than one computer in the house and you want them to access the Internet simultaneously).

Another networking device that is similar to a router, but inadequate for Internet connection management between more than one computer, is a Hub. Hubs are devices that do absolutely no routing of traffic with IP address, but instead, can only route traffic based on MAC addresses. Hubs were originally designed for LAN networks that did not need Internet access; only shared access between local, in-house computers. Hubs are also bad for security reasons, since they are nothing more than repeaters that echo all traffic out of every port on the device.

Basic Internet connectivity requires IP address routing capability (a router, in other words), as well as default gateway and DNS addresses to either be known in advanced, or (much more often) auto-configured by the modem/router using DHCP. In Ubuntu, DHCP is enabled on all Ethernet devices by default. This means that when you turn your computer on, it should ask the router (or cable/DSL modem) “What is my IP address, subnet mask, and default gateway supposed to be?” And the router replies and assigns the client PC an unused IP address along with the rest of the requested information. In this way, multiple computers on a LAN can be dynamically assigned IP addresses by the router as they are needed.

So the first thing you should check is if your computer is being assigned an IP address by the router at all. A quick way to do this is to open Applications>Accessories>Terminal, and once it is open, type in “ifconfig” (which is short for Interface Config). The readout will look similar to this:

In the above screenshot, you’ll see interface names listed down the left side (in this case, there are only two shown: eth0 and lo — which stands for “loopback”). These names vary depending on the type of networking device you are using. Another example: if you had more than one Ethernet adapter in your computer, you would likely see the second one listed here as “eth1″.

To the right of “eth0″ we see a lot of information written out for us. The “inet addr:” is your Local IP address. (In the above example, the IP address assigned to the computer is 192.168.73.129). If you have an address here, then that means your router/modem properly assigned you an address while booting your PC. If you don’t see an ip address here, you can attempt to force your router to assign you one by typing in “dhcpcd eth0″ and pressing enter.  (Note: dhcpcd is not installed by default.  To installed it from terminal, type “sudo apt-get install dhcpcd”).

An alternative place to check and see if you are being assigned an IP address is System>Administration>Network Tools applet:

Unlike the ifconfig command, you can only view the IP addressing information for one network device at a time in here. And other than that, you can’t do much here when it comes to setting up your device.

The other place to check your network settings is in System>Administrator>Network. In here, you should select your Ethernet device and make sure it is in “Roaming Mode”, which places the device into DHCP mode.

If you’re still not able to get an IP address assigned to your networking interface then the cause might be a bad cable, the modem/router may need to be reset or your network interface is broken or unsupported (rare). E-mail me if you are still having trouble.

Setting up a wireless adapter

Wireless adapters in the world of Linux have a history of incompatibility looming over them that still makes people hesitant to bother even trying Linux out because it’s thought the probability of their wireless adapter working out of the box is low. That presumption is gradually moving further and further away from the truth, and thanks to Ubuntu’s Restricted Drivers Manager, it’s moving by leaps and bounds.

For starts, check your Update Manager to ensure your system is running with the latest set of drivers and kernel headers, as well as updated software. You can do this by running System>Administrator>Update Manager. The next thing you’ll want to do is check System>Administrator>Restricted Drivers Manager to see if your wireless device uses proprietary binary drivers that need to be enabled. That might sound like a bunch of Greek, but after you open Restricted Drivers Manager, all you have to do is check off any un-checked items, and restart your computer. In most cases your device will work instantly upon reboot.

The next step to getting your wireless device connected to a wireless network is to tell it which one you want to connect to. A program that makes this simple is called WiFi Radar and it allows you to browse the airwaves for nearby access points and authenticate with them if you have the proper encryption key.

The fastest way to install Wifi Radar is to open a Terminal window and type in the following:

• sudo apt-get install wifi-radar

You can now open WiFi Radar by clicking Applications>Internet>WiFi Radar.

Once you have WiFi Radar loaded, all you have to do select the WiFi Network you would like to connect to from a list of detected networks, click connect, and then type in any necessary WEP/WPA encryption passwords. I would strongly recommend you configure your router to use WPA encryption, as WEP is an old, obsolete encryption method which can be hacked in a matter of minutes. WPA is much stronger.

SPECIAL NOTE ON WIRELESS LAPTOPS: If you have a laptop with a wireless adapter built in, check your BIOS settings to make sure the device is enabled when the computer is first turned on, and that the ability to switch it on and off can be done by the operating system, and not by the user. A friend of mine once brought me a Dell Dimensions 1300 and we couldn’t figure out why his wireless adapter was being detected, but no wireless networks were being displayed for us to select from. I was stumped when I first came across this problem, but after changing the BIOS settings as noted above, I had no problems with it after that. In most cases, wireless devices on some laptops can be controlled by what’s called a soft-switch, usually a keyboard combination like Functionkey-F2, a media button or a physical switch to enable and disable the card.

I can’t go into much detail about setting up your wireless router, but I can give you a check list of things to do to help you set it up and secure it. Configuring these settings into your router will be up to you, so consult with the manual of your router to find out how you can configure it manually. In most cases, you have to type “192.168.1.1″ or a similar IP address into the address bar in a web browser like Firefox, and then enter the default Admin password.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when setting up your wireless network:

• Use WPA encryption if possible, and not WEP.
• Consider adding MAC address filters to prevent unwanted users from attaching to your router.
• Once you have your wireless adapter configured to connect to your wireless network correctly, disable ESSID broadcasting.
• Change the routers Administrator password. For added security, make it something different from your WPA encryption password.
• Write your WPA and Admin passwords down on a post-it note and stick it to the bottom of your router. (This sounds self-defeating in terms of security, but if a person can physically touch your router and you don’t want them messing with it, you should find a better place to put it. Because all they have to do to give you a headache is press the reset button).

Installing and Running Firestarter Firewall Software

Firestarter is an effective, lightweight and easy to use firewall administration program that allows you to monitor active connections between your computer and others, set access rules and otherwise help make your system more secure. Firestarter also allows you to easily setup Internet Connection Sharing if you have multiple networking devices available.

To install Firestarter, type the following into terminal:

• sudo apt-get install firestarter

Once installed, you can find this application in your System>Administration menu. The program has documentation located here, including a simple introductory tutorial.  To get it to run when you boot, click System>Preferences>Session. Click on the Add button, then in the “command” line, type “firestarter” all lower-case, and you should also name it firestarter as well. Once you have those two fields populated, click ok, and that’s it!

As always, drop me a comment or e-mail if you have questions or feedback.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how to edit your Grub boot menu so you can change your default OS!

If you like Nine Inch Nails, click this link before reading any further (so you can listen to the album right now while you read a little about it from me).

I’ve been on a pretty good streak writing blogs about Ubuntu Linux lately, but now Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails went and released a new album by surprise. And I say surprise because not even one track of it was being pirated on the Internet before its official release date. Hey, I don’t know about you but I’m impressed by that. In most cases, new CD’s are pirated weeks in advanced by some Joe Shmoe delivery guy with a box cutter and audio ripping software, the files ending up in bittorrent swarms and spoiling the album later on. Perhaps not necessarily spoiling album sales per say, but spoiling it nonetheless.

Nine Inch Nails recently left Interscope Records; Trent Reznor choosing to avoid the red tape of signing any more contracts with another label went solo. Since that time, www.nin.com has added a new remix section to the website, where you can download multi-track versions of NIN songs and remix them to your hearts content, and then upload your mixes to share with the world online. This brand new 36 Instrumental release, entitled Ghosts I-IV, is being distributed under the Creative Commons License, or what some might call “Copyleft.” In short, you are free to copy and distribute the music, remix the music and publish, but only for non-commercial purposes. Because sharing is caring.

I could go on about all the cool little things Reznor had done to piss off his ex-record label (like dropping USB keys containing unreleased tracks into bathrooms at venues where Nine Inch Nails performed live; see: viral marketing). But I’d rather like to say more about the uniqueness in the way Trent chose to distribute and sell this latest album. For comparison, I’d like to criticize Radiohead’s In Rainbows.

In Rainbows was released on the Internet… or at least the first 10 tracks of it, as the physical CD release of it contained an additional 8 more and didn’t come out till a later date. In Rainbows was released for download, at a price of “Whatever you think it’s worth,” letting the fan choose their own price tag for the download. I remember downloading In Rainbows for nothing, and I’m glad I did. I like Radiohead (really!), but had I known in advanced that the Internet release wasn’t actually the whole thing, or that the download was in 160 Kbps MP3 format (mediocre quality), I’d probably wouldn’t have wasted my time waiting for their servers to come back online after the flood of downloads caused them to crash.

Trent Reznor, in the unique position of being a well known musician and also not being slave to a contract, decided to do his first truly solo release just a little differently. And I like the way it was done:

• Free: Download the first 9 tracks
• $5: Download all tracks in either Lossless FLAC, Apple Lossless or 320 Kbps MP3
• $10: Download all tracks as above, and get 2 CD digipack with booklet (shipping in April)
• Element of Surprise!

Now that’s a deal! And a rather clever business model.

There were some more expensive deluxe packages available, including a classy $300 package (above) with Trent Reznor’s handwritten signature (limited to 2500 units). So there’s something for everybody.  You might not like industrial rock music (or whatever they’re labeling the genre these days), but you shouldn’t have any problem appreciating this business model. It’s genius!

UPDATE:  Here’s a better list.  Check it out!

So you went to Ubuntu.com, downloaded the latest Ubuntu Live CD ISO file from their website and burned it to a CD. You booted from that CD, waited for the desktop to appear, and double clicked on the Install icon. 40 minutes later, your hard drive is partitioned and ready to boot Ubuntu for the first time. Congratulations!

But now what?!

As you might have noticed, the desktop and software installed with Ubuntu by default is a bit bland. I’ve written the following guide for two reasons:

• To make installing some popular software a breeze.
• To expose you to different ways software can be installed in Ubuntu (a.k.a., “get your learn on.”)

So we’re going to jazz up our Ubuntu and learn about installing software by doing the following:

1. Running Update Manager.
2. Install Flash, Java, Windows Media Codecs, MS fonts in 4 clicks!
3. Install Compiz Fusion’s Advanced Settings Manager with one more click.
4. Reveal Archive Manager in the Accessories menu.
5. Install Phatch from a *.deb file.
6. Bonus Challenge: Install Google Earth using Terminal

Yeah! We want something more like the above screenshot. And most important of all: we want to get all of this stuff installed with ease. I said EASE! As in ridiculously simple to do. So lets get started!

1.) Run Update Manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

• Tip: To make the rest of this go faster, only pay attention to the bulleted text in bold. Like this right here. [/ Robert DeNiro]

The reason I have listed this first is simple: Typically, Ubuntu ISO images are a tad bit older than the current distribution. Therefore on a fresh install your Linux Kernel is likely out of date along with a lot of other software, and as a result your system may be vulnerable or may not be detecting all of the hardware in your computer. If this is a fresh install, you probably have at least 200 MB worth of updates you will be asked to download and install. If you are not having any hardware compatibility issues right now (as in: everything appears to be working correctly), then you can do this step last (since installing that many updates can take some time).

Running Update manager is about as easy as sitting on your hands, since it automatically checks for updates each time you turn your computer on. However, you can force this process to occur sooner by running it manually:

• Click System>Administration>Update Manager
• Click on the “Check” button to check for updates

If there are updates available, you simply click “Install” to install them. Piece of cake.

*Note: If you’re still having hardware issues after installing all of your updates, you should check in System>Administration>Restricted Drivers Manager to see if there are any devices that need to be enabled.

2.) Install Flash, Java, Win32 Video Codecs, DVD playback (and more) in just four clicks!
Difficultly: Very Easy

Did you think installing all that software is going to take you a half hour? With Ubuntu, installing software is very simple. To get started, do the following:

• Click Applications>Add/Remove…

Now that you have the Add/Remove Software app open, do the following:

• Change the “Show:” drop menu in the upper right corner to “All Available Applications”
• Search for the word “restricted” while the “All” software category is highlighted (should already be by default, as shown below):

• Once the search returns its results, check off the box next to “Ubuntu Restricted Extras”
• Sit tight, and don’t click the Apply Changes button just yet…

Ok, we’re half way done. That probably took you… a minute? Wipe that sweat off your brow, we got Compiz Advanced Settings Manager to install next.

*Notice: It has been brought to my attention that the DVD decoder included with the above mentioned Ubuntu Restricted Extra’s package is inadequate for playback of encrypted DVD’s (the kind you buy from the store). If you encounter such problems with DVD playback, this guide will show you how to install the libdvdcss2 package. Also, you may have heard a rumor that installing this package is illegal. If someone tells you this, refer them to 17 U.S.C. Sec. 1201(f). The binaries to crack the encryption are not illegal if you have a license to the content. (i.e., if you have a legit DVD, you have license to watch it.) After all, the content must be decrypted in order to make the content usable.

3.) Install Compiz Advanced Settings manager
Difficultly: Very Easy

Compiz Fusion is included by default with Ubuntu, but its super-advanced control panel is not. Need of this advanced control panel comes up if you are a power user who wants to use the 3D window management features to the max, which means turning your desktop into a rotating cube, among other things. You can also greatly customize your special effects, animations and window behaviors using this control panel. So let throw it on!

• After you’ve checked off Ubuntu Restricted Extras in the above step, do another search for the word “compiz”

• Check off “Advanced Desktop Effects Settings”
• Click the Apply Changes button in the lower right corner.

Once installed, this advanced control panel can be found in System>Preferences>Advanced Desktop Effects Settings. Your Restricted Ubuntu Extras package will also be installed.

*Notice: You will want to make sure you have visual effects enabled in System>Preferences>Appearence>Visual Effects before using the above control panel you’ve installed.

4. Enable (reveal) your Archive Manager to create zip files.
Difficultly: Very Easy

Some of you might be wondering: How can I create a zip file? The answer is with the included Archive Manager. This tool (for some weird reason) isn’t shown in the Applications>Accessories menu by default. But we can reveal it very easily by doing the following:

• Click System>Preferences>Main Menu
• Click on the Accessories menu in the left panel, then check off the Archive Manager (see below). Then click Close.

That it! Now when you open your accessories menu, you’ll be presented with a new shortcut to your Archive Manager. You can use this utility to create zip files. Keep in mind that it can also create other types of archives, such as tar.gz, so you should specify your desired file type when you create a new archive.

5.) Install Phatch – Batch Photo Management Software
Difficultly: Very Easy

Recently, I was looking around for a program that I could use that would allow me to resize multiple photos at the same time. This is what’s called a “Batch Conversion”. So I found a program called Phatch that does this job very well. To install it, you have to download the deb installer.

• Click here to download the Phatch deb file. Save it to your desktop for now.
• Find the deb file you just downloaded and double click on it.

After you double click on the deb file, this window will appear:

At this point, all you have to do is click the Install button in the upper right-hand corner. Once installed, you’ll be able to find the program in the Applications>Graphics menu.

I would also suggest that when installing programs via deb installer files, to save these deb files to a permanent location before running them. Simply clicking “Run” in Firefox will cause the file to be stored in a temporary cache folder, which could cause your deb file to possibly disappear mid-way through an installation. So saving it to your desktop and double-clicking on the file from there is the preferred method. Once you are done with the deb file, you can delete it.

6.) CHALLENGE – Install Google Earth
Difficultly: Medium

I threw this into the list because I wanted to give you a little exposure to the terminal. Don’t freak out! You’re just going to copy and paste some text so calm your ass down.
First thing you have to do is download Google Earth. To do that, visit this link: http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

After you agree to the license, you’ll be taken to a new page where an automatic download will begin and ask you what you want to do with a file called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. Simply save this file to your Desktop for now.

Next we’ll need to open up a terminal window. A terminal window is similar to DOS in that it is a Command Line Interface. To open Terminal, do the following:

• Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal

When you first open terminal you’ll be given a prompt where you can enter commands. You also will be sitting in your Home Folder. If you type in the letters “ls” (That’s ls, short for the word “list”, in lowercase), you’ll be shown the files and folders in your home folder. Notice that one of them is called “Desktop”. We need to change our directory so we can run our GoogleEarthLinux.bin file. To do this:

• Type “cd Desktop” (no quotes) and hit enter.

In the world of Linux, everything is case-sensitive, so be sure to capitalize the word “Desktop” in the above command. This command will bring you to your desktop. If you type “ls” again and hit enter, you’ll see the files which reside on your desktop right now. Listed in it somewhere should be the bin file you just downloaded.

Now for the magic!

• In terminal, type: “sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin” (no quotes) and hit enter.

After you press enter, the following window will appear, and begin to install Google Earth for you:

Shortly after the above screen appears, you’ll get another one that says the program successfully installed. You’ll then be given the option to run Google Earth right away. If you don’t want to, you can just click Quit, and start it later by going to Applications>Internet>Google Earth.

Well, that wraps up this little list. There are plenty of other applications out there worth installing, such as Pidgin, Audacity, Avidemux and many more. Most of these programs can be installed using the Add/Remove applet which we used to install our Ubuntu Restricted Extras with. Simply searching for the program will likely produce a result that you can simply check off install with a couple clicks. Sure beats the hell out of looking through a filing cabnet for a software CD or a serial number (see: Windows software).

Oh yeah, one more thing. You can’t have a bad ass operating system without a bad ass wallpaper to go with it:

http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper/index.php?sort=ratings

And here’s another great link for some wallpapers:

http://abduzeedo.com/20-beautiful-hdr-pictures?=main

Have fun with your Ubuntu!

The way Ubuntu Brainstorm works is simple: You can join in by submitting your own ideas about what you think should change or be slightly modified about the current Ubuntu operating system, and then other people can vote for or against your submitted ideas. It works much like Digg does as a social bookmarking website, where users submit multitudes of different things, and the popularity contest begins.

Some good suggestions have already been made, and it is clear that one of the strongest drives held by many of the participants is to find ways to make the OS increasing simpler for new users. One of the most recent suggestions I liked was to get rid of that dreaded GRUB menu and replace it with something more pleasant looking, and less intimidating. There are many other suggestions present on the site. And best of all, you don’t have to be a developer or know a thing about computer programming to make an impressionable suggestion.

So if you’re an Ubuntu user, check this site out and join in helping to make Ubuntu the best OS in the world: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

Here’s the dumb idea I just submitted: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/338/

Every single homeless person in the city will be given a life-long phone number and voicemail, should they choose to accept it, NBC11′s Lisa Bernard said.

Google is partnering with San Francisco to provide the service to homeless individuals and to shelters and agencies so they can distribute the numbers to their clients.

The announcement was made at a Project Homeless Connect event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Wednesday.

A homeless person will be able to call in for his or her messages from any phone.

The move by the city and the company would allow someone to be able to fill out a job application, which asks for a call back number.

It will allow clinics to share test results.

Mayor Gavin Newsom and Google said they want to empower people.

“How do you communicate as a homeless individual? ” Newsom asked. “How do you expect your life to turn around if you can’t even get information or if someone can’t even get in touch with you?”

“It just seems exactly like any other voice mail,” said Craig Walker, senior project manager of Google. “There’s no stigma attached to it that ‘hey this is a temporary thing’ or ‘this is an 800 number.’ It’s really just a local number owned by the user.”

One man who used to be homeless said the right message can raise the spirit.

“Having your family, friends and loved ones being able to say ‘here I’m thinking about you, I love you, I want you to know you’re mine, and I miss you,’ can have a monumental change in one’s behavior.”

“Providing phone and messaging capabilities and access to vital healthcare is an extraordinary step forward in the city’s commitment to a comprehensive approach to addressing the needs of this vulnerable community,” Newsom said.

“We’re firm believers in the power of technology to improve the daily lives of individuals and communities as a whole, and we recognize that access to phone and voicemail services is one way that Google can help San Francisco’s homeless stay connected with family, friends, social workers, health care providers, and potential employers,” Walker said.

Walker said the program was ready to start right away.

Original article: http://www.nbc11.com/news/15429799/detail.html

So, here we go in short and simple form:

1. Switch your phones USB mode to Data Connection (this is usually on Memory Card mode by default). Connect your phone to your computer after this has been configured correctly.
2. Install wvdial by opening a terminal window (click on Applications>Accessories>Terminal) and then type in “sudo apt-get install wvdial“.
3. Now that your phone is attached to your computer and wvidial is installed, type “sudo wvdialconf” into terminal, and press enter.

The wvdialconf is a useful utility that I failed to use or mention in my previous guide. The wvdialconf utility will probe your computer for modem devices, and upon finding your cell phone and verifying it to be such a device, will test its capabilities. Running this command with “sudo” in front of it will allow the program to create it’s own template configuration file based upon your phones capabilities.

wvdialconf will return you to the terminal prompt once it is completed. The next thing you will need to do is modify the configuration file it just created slightly. To do this, type “sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf” into terminal and press enter.

Once it opens, it will probably look something like this:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
; Phone = <Target Phone Number>
ISDN = 0
; Username = <Your Login Name>
Init1 = ATZ
; Password = <Your Password>
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

The above configuration file was what was automatically generated by wvdialconf for me after it probed my Motorola K1, so it may look different for you. Note that the Modem = /dev/ttyACM0 as shown above may be detected differently on your PC, especially if you have attached it to your computer/laptop via a wireless bluetooth connection.

If you have a T-Mobile phone, you will want to modify and save the config file so it looks more like this (I”ve highlighted the most important changes in red):

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = *99#
ISDN = 0
Username = user
Init1 = ATZ
Password = pass
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

Be sure to remove the semi-colon’s in front of the Username / Password lines. T-mobile authenticates it’s users by their phone number (and likely their phones mac address, so a username and password is not required from them. I’ve had no problem using the username “user” and the password “pass” with T-Mobile’s servers).

If you have a Sprint phone, you will want to modify the file so it looks like this:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = #777
ISDN = 0
Username = {your phone number}@sprintpcs.com
Init1 = ATZ
Password = {your four digit access code}
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = Yes
ISDN = 0

In addition, you will want to do a sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers in a terminal window and add the following two lines to the file:

lcp-echo-failure 0
lcp-echo-interval 0

If you have a Verizon Wireless device, you will want to make your config file look more like this:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = #777
ISDN = 0
Username = {your phone number}@vzw3g.com
Init1 = ATZ
Password = vzw
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

—–

Once you have modified the configuration file correctly and saved it, you can close it and return to the terminal window. From now on, after your cell phone is connected, all you have to do to initiate the dialing sequence is type “wvdial” into a terminal window and press enter. Closing the terminal window, or hitting CTRL-C while it is open, will terminate your connection.

Like the sprint device, I also don’t have a verizon device handy for testing to see how well the above guide will work. But it is a big step in the right direction for most people. If you use this guide above and have trouble, please contact so we can seek out a better method for your prefered device. I would love to know of your experience with trying this on your computer.

Good luck!

“Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times”

I’ve been trying this software out for just a few hours and can tell a big difference in my system performance.

Installing and using this software is very easy. Simply open a terminal window, and type in the following:

sudo apt-get install preload

That’s it!

The program will automatically start and run after installation and begin monitoring your computer usage habits. The only weird thing about it is that the first time I restarted my computer, it logged off of X momentarily before logging back into my account for just a breif moment before finally restarting the computer for real. This was it’s way of learning what the system loads by default at login, so that the next time around will be faster.

My system hasn’t seen anything but performance increases since then, and I’d highly recomend you try it out. If you ever want to remove preload, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get remove preload

Though I am quite satisfied with the boost in performance it’s given me.

The author of preload has published a verbose (see boring) document that goes into a lot of detail about how the program works (involves a lot of crazy looking math problems). You can download it here. For the rest of us who like things simple, here’s a graph:

Enjoy your faster Linux box!

The new website, to be located at www.topekabahitat.org, may not be online just yet, but here’s a screen shot for you to look at and salivate over until the real thing is put online sometime later today.

The template design comes courtesy of NTT designs, a site referenced to me at ubuntuforums.org.

The photo gallery is still a work in progress and is not online yet but will be soon. We plan to have an interactive map (hopefully I’ll be able to get the Google Maps API under my belt to achieve this) and use it as an index of previous and current builds, linking to a home page of sorts for individual houses. Again, a work in progress, we’re kickin ideas around.

Ok… now back to my book about Python…

Compiz Fusion, for those of you who don’t know, is a Window Manager that is included by default with Ubuntu Linux and many other distributions of Linux. Using your computer 3D graphics card, it renders your desktop in a more lively environment, giving you wobbly windows, dazzling special effect animations, and much more ability to customize the aesthetic look and feel of your computer to your hearts content.

Recently, the developers behind Compiz Fusion have started to take the concept of “head-tracking” into consideration of its feature set. This would give the user an even more mesmerizing and lifelike view of the desktop. Rather than talk about what could be done, I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks. And if you watch the video below to the end, you’ll not need any further fuel for that imagination to go wild.

1. Buy Windows Vista for a couple hundred dollars — more after hardware upgrades to support Vista’s heaving girth and blubber — so you can continue to sit down to do exactly what you used to do with Windows XP: Browse the web, play games, write novels, download videos and other common tasks like scanning for viruses and spyware.
2. Buy a Mac, participating in an even more frequent (costlier) upgrade pow-wow… but you’ll look trendy while doing it. You’ll get to browse the web, play (a few) games, write haiku’s for your legacy-sounding text-to-speech software, listen to iTunes and other common tasks like reminiscing over I’m a Mac commercials and standing in line for 24 hours to buy a freggin’ cell phone.
3. Decide not to upgrade to Vista at all, eventually exposing your XP system to new security exploits that will never, ever, ever see a repair patch written for them. The lease is up… Perhaps you need something new but you don’t wanna pay anything for it?
4. Switch to Linux, forget about viruses, spyware, bloat-ware or software costing you time and money.

And so comes the question: What the f— is Linux? Linux is open-source software. It is a product that is the sum total of decades of volunteer collaboration made by millions of computer programmers world wide, and is one of the most refined, stable operating systems in existence today. Because it’s open-source, it’s considered public domain. You practically already own your own copy. It can be downloaded, burned, shared, installed on as many PCs as you wish for free.

Is Linux Right For You?

Well, it was right for me. I switched over just a year ago, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Here are the applications I use regularly on my installation of Ubuntu Linux:

Firefox – Web Browsing
Evolution – E-mail
Audacity – Sound editing
Avidemux – Video editing
DeVeDe – Convert AVI to DVD
Gimp – Edit photos; similar to Photoshop
Open Office – Microsoft Office Replacement (can open and save in Microsoft format too)
VMware – Run a Windows XP virtual machine inside a window
Google Earth – View maps of the world and of outer space!
Pidgin – Allows me to chat on Yahoo IM, and about 15 others like AOL or MSN
Skype - Make phone calls around the world
Photoshop – Just kidding, I haven’t installed it, but I could and so could you.
Games – I don’t play games too much, but I recently installed Quake 4 and it runs like a charm. Though I could throw in some Warcraft 3 or WoW if I wanted to. More classic Windows games are on the way.
Much more…

The bottom line is that Linux is an available option to you that is free of charge and of obligation. And switching over to it will afford you the advantage of never having to feel chained to Microsoft’s vendor lock-in (or Mac’s vendor lock-in). You’ll also find yourself not upgrading your PC’s hardware for a few more years, as the use of system resources is much more efficient than Vista’s. And when support for your version of Linux is expired, you can just upgrade to the next version free of charge. So now if you actually need a hardware upgrade, you’ll have the extra dough to do so.

So how do we make this easy? Instead of using just Wine by itself, we’re going to use a program that takes care of installing Wine AND installing/configuring the Windows software you want to install. This program is called Wine-Doors, and it works similarly to Synaptic Package Manager, or the simpler Add/Remove software applet found in Ubuntu Linux.

To install this software in Ubuntu, all you have to do is download this deb file (be sure to SAVE IT to your desktop or some place more permanent) and then double-click on it to run it. Wine-Doors will then install with just a couple clicks of the mouse. Once Wine-Doors is installed, you can delete the deb file.

I tried this software out recently and was able to install things like Internet Explorer 6, Quicktime, DirectX 9, Steam (Valve Software), and a whole lot more. (By the way, SHAME on Valve for disabling my account because I didn’t log into it for a year. I paid them 60 bucks for my silver copy of Half-Life2 and they just yanked it and every other game I paid for because I didn’t feel like playing video games. What cruel punishment!)

Before I end this, I just wanted to mention that a recent update of Wine just came out, enabling testers and developers to get Adobe Photoshop to run on top of Ubuntu! This will no doubt be integrated into Wine-Doors very soon. I should also quickly remind everyone that Wine is continually progressing, so there are a large number of apps out there that Wine can’t run stable just yet. In the mean time, you can use Wine-Doors to download apps that have been tested a great deal and show high stability. Now if they could only get Adobe After Effects to work on it, I’d never need to use Windows for anything again…

(Note: This blog was appended on Feb. 23, 2008. Information for Sprint phones was added as well as a minor modification to the wvdial.conf for T-Mobile phones example have been made).

I recently took on the challenge of getting an old PC up and running with Xubuntu 7.10. My father recently purchased the T-Mobile Internet package, which allows him to connect his computer to unlimited mobile Internet for $20 a month. Setting this up proved to be easier than I anticipated.

1. The first thing you need to do is change the USB configuration in your phone. On my phone (a Motorola K1) and many other T-Mobile phones, you have to make your default USB connection a data connection. By default, most phones are configured to be in “Memory Card” mode.
2. Next, you need to install a piece of software in Ubuntu called “wvdial“. To do this, click on Applications>Accessories>Terminal. Once your terminal window is open, type in the following: sudo apt-get install wvdial
3. Edit your wvdial.conf file. Type sudo gedit /etc/wvdial.conf in a terminal window to do this.

Once you have your wvdial.conf file open, paste in the following text over all the contents of the file:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com"
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = *99***1#
Password = pass
Username = user
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800

Take note of the “ttyACM0″ part. This may not be the same on your PC. To find out what yours is, attach your phone to your PC, and then type the following into the terminal:

$ dmesg | fgrep acm

You should see something like this returned in the output:

[ 9168.949496] cdc_acm 2-3:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device

This ACM device is your phone, and it is now an accessible piece of hardware. For wvdial to use it, you must make sure the above configuration file points wvdial to the right device name. If the above dmesg output produces a different ttyACM#, change it accordingly to match your PC. (Note, if you don’t get any dmesg results at all, try typing this in first: sudo modprobe cdc_acm).

After your wvdial.conf file is created and you’re sure your Modem = /dev/tty line is correct, save the file and close gedit. Then simply run wvdial from the terminal:

$ wvdial

Wvdial will then access your phone as it is directed to do so by the wvdial.conf file, and essentially dial T-mobiles Internet Service Provider. No real username or password is required for this, so leave the user/pass in the above config file as it is written. You’ll see some output on the screen that looks like this:

user@user-desktop:~$ wvdial
WvDial<*1>: WvDial: Internet dialer version 1.56
WvModem<*1>: Cannot get information for serial port.
WvDial<*1>: Initializing modem.
WvDial<*1>: Sending: AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”wap.voicestream.com”
WvDial Modem<*1>: AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”wap.voicestream.com”
WvDial Modem<*1>: OK
WvDial<*1>: Modem initialized.
WvDial<*1>: Sending: ATDT*99#
WvDial<*1>: Waiting for carrier.
WvDial Modem<*1>: ATDT*99#
WvDial Modem<*1>: CONNECT
WvDial<*1>: Carrier detected. Waiting for prompt.

At this point, the program will pause as it handshakes and establishes a connection using PPP. After about 10 or 20 seconds, the output will continue on and look similar to this:

WvDial<Notice>: Don’t know what to do! Starting pppd and hoping for the best.
WvDial<Notice>: Starting pppd at Thu Jan 17 17:50:28 2008
WvDial<Err>: Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/pap-secrets: Permission denied
WvDial<Err>: –> PAP (Password Authentication Protocol) may be flaky.
WvDial<Err>: Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/chap-secrets: Permission denied
WvDial<Err>: –> CHAP (Challenge Handshake) may be flaky.
WvDial<Notice>: Pid of pppd: 13530
WvDial<*1>: Using interface ppp0
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: local IP address 10.38.225.200
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: remote IP address 192.168.100.101
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: primary DNS address 66.94.9.120
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]
WvDial<*1>: secondary DNS address 66.94.25.120
WvDial<*1>: pppd: ?06][08]?06][08]??[06][08]

Congrats! You are now connected to the Internet using your cellphone. And all you have to do to establish a connection is open a terminal window and type wvdial.

To end your connection, you can simply close the terminal window containing the above mess, or hit CTRL-C while the terminal window is open. So be careful and don’t close the window by accident, or your connection will be dropped and you’ll have to run wvdial all over again. Oh, the agony of typing that one command over again!!

Anyway, enjoy your T-Mobile Wireless Internet connection! You should see a steady downstream of about 20 to 30 KB per second, which is about 5 times faster than dial up. And it’s unlimited! It’s not DSL or Cable, but that’s still not a bad deal for 20 bucks a month.

Additional Information for Sprint users:

You may need to make your wvdial.conf file look more like this to get your phone to work:

[Dialer Defaults]
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Phone = #777
ISDN = 0
Username = NONE
Init1 = ATZ
Password = NONE
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
Baud = 460800
Auto DNS = 1
Stupid Mode = 1

In addition, you will want to do a sudo gedit /etc/ppp/peers in a terminal window and add the following two lines to the file:

lcp-echo-failure 0
lcp-echo-interval 0

I do not have a Sprint phone, but according to this guide it is confirm to work on a Sprint Samsung MM-920.

One of my own goals with the redesign of this website is to maximize donation money to the organization. There are a lot of neat things that could be done to make that happen. I’ll be sitting down with a pencil and paper to come up with some design ideas soon, and probably look through some templates. And fortunately a lot of the material/content for the website is already there. Improvements could include separating the grouping of menu links into two separate sets, one set residing in a ever constant footer at the bottom of all pages. Every page needs some sort of “DONATE” button that stands out but isn’t offensive looking. If there are ever fund drives that take place, I’d like some kind of meter or chart that monitors total funds donated. It gives visitors something to watch as they help to make the total donation amounts grow.

I also would like to assist the build crews who actually put their time in to make these houses. There’s a lot of stuff around my house I need to have fixed, so I’ll see how much of this stuff I can learn…and whatever I can’t learn, I’ll know who to bribe for a good deal on carpeting. They call that “Networking.” Being as business is slow and I’ve got a lot of free time on my hands, I’ll probably be able to put in a lot of hours helping put a house up. And thanks to my lovely girlfriend, I have a nice camera to take pictures and video of the construction work, to be later added to the website and even Youtube.

Now…short of hosting a workshop, something I might propose is to see if we can offer people the ability to make donations, not just for sheet rock, carpet, tools, and all that goes into building an entire house, but why not also set aside a small category to donate towards a computer. A computer which I could build for…say…$300 or less new. Something close to that, probably. Heh, you can actually buy new Linux PC’s from Wal-Mart for that price right now, so it’s easily achievable. Or perhaps simply accept old computers as donations and refurbish them by installing a new OS and maybe spending a couple bucks on a RAM upgrade or something cheap like that. Then give the PCs to the new family/occupants of these community built houses. You might even be able to get Cox to donate a year of free high-speed Internet access, if they’re afforded sponsorship credit for it. Though this is just my idea; they might not go for it. We’ll see…

Anyway, I’ll be having some fun with this project and write updates about it as things progress.

There are general reasons why all computer users should insist on free software. It gives users the freedom to control their own computers—with proprietary software, the computer does what the software owner wants it to do, not what the software user wants it to do. Free software also gives users the freedom to cooperate with each other, to lead an upright life. These reasons apply to schools as they do to everyone.

But there are special reasons that apply to schools. They are the subject of this article.

First, free software can save the schools money. Even in the richest countries, schools are short of money. Free software gives schools, like other users, the freedom to copy and redistribute the software, so the school system can make copies for all the computers they have. In poor countries, this can help close the digital divide.

This obvious reason, while important, is rather shallow. And proprietary software developers can eliminate this disadvantage by donating copies to the schools. (Watch out!—a school that accepts this offer may have to pay for future upgrades.) So let’s look at the deeper reasons.

School should teach students ways of life that will benefit society as a whole. They should promote the use of free software just as they promote recycling. If schools teach students free software, then the students will use free software after they graduate. This will help society as a whole escape from being dominated (and gouged) by megacorporations. Those corporations offer free samples to schools for the same reason tobacco companies distribute free cigarettes: to get children addicted (1). They will not give discounts to these students once they grow up and graduate.

Free software permits students to learn how software works. When students reach their teens, some of them want to learn everything there is to know about their computer system and its software. That is the age when people who will be good programmers should learn it. To learn to write software well, students need to read a lot of code and write a lot of code. They need to read and understand real programs that people really use. They will be intensely curious to read the source code of the programs that they use every day.

Proprietary software rejects their thirst for knowledge: it says, “The knowledge you want is a secret—learning is forbidden!” Free software encourages everyone to learn. The free software community rejects the “priesthood of technology”, which keeps the general public in ignorance of how technology works; we encourage students of any age and situation to read the source code and learn as much as they want to know. Schools that use free software will enable gifted programming students to advance.

The next reason for using free software in schools is on an even deeper level. We expect schools to teach students basic facts, and useful skills, but that is not their whole job. The most fundamental mission of schools is to teach people to be good citizens and good neighbors—to cooperate with others who need their help. In the area of computers, this means teaching them to share software. Elementary schools, above all, should tell their pupils, “If you bring software to school, you must share it with the other children.” Of course, the school must practice what it preaches: all the software installed by the school should be available for students to copy, take home, and redistribute further.

Teaching the students to use free software, and to participate in the free software community, is a hands-on civics lesson. It also teaches students the role model of public service rather than that of tycoons. All levels of school should use free software.

1. RJ Reynolds tobacco company was fined $15m in 2002 for handing out free samples of cigarettes at events attended by children. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/features/health/tobaccotrial/usa.htm.

Copyright © 2003 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.

(Note: Contains adult language).

You can download a DVD quality version of this film at this site.

In addition to this is the fact that Google is also deeply involved with the development of their own line of cellular phones, set to run a Linux based operating system called Android. Analysts watching these events unfold suggest Google will make the phones available for use to customers of four major cellular carriers in the US: T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, operating on already existent frequencies. But I think Google has something up its sleeve…

A Wild Theory

It’s too far away to tell exactly when the first real Google cell phone will be released… which makes things difficult for me because what Google has in mind is a little dependent upon a couple loose events. But, we’ll just have to assume that the first of two events to take place will be the unveiling of their very own cell phone (plus separate Operating System, Android), followed by whatever they do with that 700 MHz radio frequency range, (assuming they actually win at the auction). It is a strong possibility. So let’s assume for now that they will.

Now, let’s go a few years into the future, and “everybody” has their Google phones with their GPS tracking and bar-code scanners and credit-card integration and all that other cool Japaneses madness. Everybody is probably on a contract with their respective service providers, but then one day that contract is going to expire. What will Google be up to around that time? Well…what if they have a new infrastructure comprised of fiber optic backbones and the 700 MHz radio frequency range. With it, they would have the ability to not only provide their own cell phone service, but also wireless Internet service. They’ve done it before on a smaller scale and a different radio frequency. And with the license rights from the FCC, there would be little to stop them in way of using their newly purchased bandwidth to provide a whole new plethora of wireless services to their customers. Best of all? Google may possibly provide services for free in the long run.

So what do we have so far?

• Google has likely purchased fiber optic backbone in and since 2005, and may purchase more if needed.
• Google has interests in providing free public Internet access.
• Google is bidding on the 700 MHz range, likely will acquire it (at least partially, if not entirely).
• Google is working on a new open-source cell phone operating system called Android, and has revealed plans to debut their own line of cell phones with this operating system.
• Google knows how to make a lot of money from scratch.

Well, not exactly scratch. Google makes money through advertisements. Starting with their famous search engine, Google presents “sponsored links” and such that people click on, which affords Google with a commission. Google wants to integrate this sly advertising model into their own mobile devices. Imagine having FREE cell phone or Internet access simply because you use Google. You’re viewing of ads alone is enough to pay for what Google has to pay to bring you access, but you’ll likely do more for them by clicking on ads they present to you.

In the mean time, we will see the Google phone likely make a big impact in the market for intelligent phones and the like. And in the background, Google may be prepping their newly purchased radio frequency range and fiber backbone that your Google phone may be able to get access to once their wireless towers are in place. So people using Sprint via contract may be offered a cheap alternative by Google, and not have to purchase any new hardware in order to use it. Perhaps they won’t even need to purchase anything. Imagine seeing an alert pop-up on your phone one day that says, “Hey, guess what? You can get free cell phone service from Google in 30 days, when you’re contract with Sprint (or whoever) is scheduled to expire! Congratulations!”

Well…just a Wild Theory.

Such flaws exist for a variety of reasons. The most prominent reason involves advertisers or special interest groups who pay the owners of news publications to run ads. For example, if a news paper has an account with Nike, but decides to run a story which reflects negatively on Nike’s use of child labor in the Dominican Republic, the news paper faces the possibility of Nike retracting that advertising account and taking their money somewhere else. In addition, such news publication companies also have their own obligation to keep a tight lid on negative criticism against the internal business activities of their owners. NBC is owned by General Electric, which has been known in the past to be not so environmentally friendly. Naturally, you probably didn’t see NBC saying much about GE being obligated to clean PCB contamination on a 40 mile stretch of the Hudson River a few years ago. A more recent example might be CNN’s negative criticism of Michael Moore’s movie Sicko, while CNN was/is simultaneously receiving large amounts of advertising dollars from pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly or Pfizer. These are just a few examples. (On the Internet: A recent controversy over the firing of an editor who worked for Gamespot.com resulted in a widespread boycott of the website by many of it’s regular visitors after it was suspected that he was fired for giving a poor review to a game which Gamespot was paid well by Eidos to advertise on its website).

Another flaw which I personally detest about television news in particular is its linearity; the progression from one story to another with a selection of stories that you didn’t actually select. You are forced to sit down and watch whatever the media tells you is important that day. There is little if any interactivity or feedback available from other viewers that you can read in real-time, and again, time constraints severely limit the depth of coverage on any given topic in the first place.

With such conflicts between commercial interests and public interests, it can be debated that the mainstream media we’ve been raised to admire and respect might not be representing the public it purports to be serving as best as it could. Granted, no form of media is flawless and it is ultimately the responsibility of the viewer to triangulate multiple news sources and judge reality for themselves. But it’s difficult to do when the traditional news sources skew their coverage of reality because they are more interested in taking money from advertisers instead of volunteer to fulfill any sort of moral obligations on behalf of the viewers.

The good news is that there is change on the horizon, and it greatly involves the Internet. I’d like to focus on one particular website for a moment which I’ve been a fan of for a little over a year. That website is Digg.com.

Digg is a community-driven social bookmarking website. The way it works is simple:

1. Digg users submit links to web pages containing something interesting (such as a news story, youtube video or a picture).
2. Other Digg users are able to view the link, and if they like it, can “Digg it” (essentially, vote for it).
3. If the diversity of users who digg a story is wide, it will hit the front page sooner. And if the number of those digs take off after hitting the front page, it’ll end up in the top-ten list for a short period of time.

If a user submits a link to something inaccurate or obscene, other users can vote to bury the submitted story.

I am not bringing Digg up to promote it exclusively. There are other websites out there that function in very similar fashion, such as Reddit.com. The point of all this is that the popularity of Digg and other such sites has been increasing and similar clone websites have been creeping up to cater to different audiences. Why are such websites gaining in popularity? Well, primarily because of the ability for the public (the users) to rank the importance, legitimacy or popularity of any given item submitted, and feel more participatory in the process of bringing important things to the attention of others. This is much different than sitting down to watch the 6 o’clock news to listen to 10 or 15 stories you have no say in selecting, nor have any idea how much other viewers/readers actually care about any given subject.

With social bookmarking websites, the source of the news stories is more open. You could call it open-source news, much in the same way that Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia, or Linux being an open source operating system. Another term used to describe this kind of productivity model is “crowdsourcing.”

The next ingredient you can add into this is the blogosphere. Granted, a majority of blogs out there are opinion oriented, but quality of these opinions can be taken into account before a person diggs or votes in favor of a blog. Another factor you can take in is Youtube, or more specifically, freelance video news coverage of public events not closely covered or even looked at by the mainstream media. A few people actually do this professionally, but more often than not, cell phones are being used to document events in public places. The quality of these types of small video cameras is getting better, and having a video of something controversial instead of just writing about it can make all the difference. I think one thing we’re going to see during the presidential elections in 2008 are the use of cell phones to root out flaws in electronic voting systems or people potentially cheating, and stuff like that.

In the future, the mainstream media will still have a role to play. But as the popularity of such community driven methods of news reporting evolve and become more popular, mainstream media will find itself in fierce competition and under constant surveillance by the public (as is the current trend on Digg right now).

So with the aim of providing you with something practical, I’ve come up with a short list of things for you to check and consider when it comes to computer performance on a Windows system.

1. If your copy of Norton Internet Security/Antivirus is expired, DON’T RENEW IT! In fact, uninstall it as soon as possible. While Norton is a well known name, it has also become well known for not doing what it’s supposed to do at times, and more importantly, it slows your system down greatly. Instead of using Norton Anti-Virus, try AVG Free. It doesn’t cost anything, and CNET gave it 5 stars. It is a lightweight software that won’t bog your computer down when you first turn it on. For a firewall, consider using Zone Alarm, or the firewall that is built into Windows itself.

2. Skip Vista:

If you own XP, and are considering upgrading to Vista, DON’T DO IT! Vista, for lack of a better word, sucks. It is LITERALLY the slowest operating system on the planet, and you’ll find yourself wondering what you spent 200 dollars or more for in the first place. If you were looking for eye candy, consider switching to Ubuntu Linux. Otherwise, stick with Windows XP. Compared to Vista, it’s everything Vista said it could be, but a lot faster. XP is in line to get a 3rd service pack released shortly, and will be supported for a few more years to come. Get your money’s worth, and don’t spend more on a product you want but don’t need.

3. Switch to FireFox: I suggest this mostly because Firefox has a better reputation for being the web browser that is more stable as well as more secure. Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, RSS management, and version 3 right around the corner. You don’t have to replace Internet Explorer, but it would be good to expose yourself to an alternative once in a while so you know what is available out there.

4. Disable any programs that you don’t need at boot time: If you’re the kind of person who has Yahoo Messenger, the Weatherbug, third-party task bars (“toolbars”) that you almost never use or need, or any number of other such software loading when you first start Windows, seek a way to disable it. For users who are a little better than Novice, try running “msconfig”. In it, you’ll find a “startup” tab, which you can sort through and uncheck any application you don’t want to have load right off the bat. You aren’t uninstalling anything doing this, just disabling it from loading at first boot. This will help your system start faster. Another thing you can try is opening your control panel and using the Add/Remove Programs applet to uninstall software you don’t use.

5. Consider upgrading your system memory: If you’ve done all of the above, and your system still runs sluggishly, perhaps you need a memory upgrade. If you’re running XP, I would recommend no less than 512 megs of ram, or at least a 1 gigabyte if your a hardcore gamer. This will help your system boot faster and run more smoothly over all. The less ram you have, the more work your hard drive has to do, and that extra waiting time can really add up.

To attest to how efficient I keep my own Windows machines, I have a 366 Mhz laptop with less than 200 megabytes of ram running XP. Sticking with AVG as my virus scanner from day one has always kept me protected and my system running smoothly. Albeit, not the fastest machine in the world, but it is still plenty capable of browsing most Internet websites, doing word processing, and a few other common tasks. If XP can run “acceptably” on a system that old, your should be able to do the same or better with the 5 tips listed here.

In part one, I briefly talked about the seemingly coincidental similarity between the exponentially increasing complexity of reality in general and the ever quickening development and advancement of electronic technologies (among many other things not mentioned). The Universe (as far as we can tell) began with a sluggish pace that took billions of years of time to go by before molecules could form, later whole solar systems, then life itself, and now the advanced technologies that our own minds have given birth to. So too has the progression of these technologies started off at a sluggish pace with inventions like the wheel thousands of years ago, and then things snowballed from there on. Though the wheel probably wasn’t mans first paradigm-shifting invention. It was more likely to be the club, or some form of weapon used for either hunting or self defense.

So where are all of these technologies going? A more intriguing question might be: Do they have a single unifying purpose? Do the last several thousands of years of technological ingenuity represent a process equivalent to laying a foundation for something greater? Is there some common goal down the road that technology is helping to bring us towards? Scientists of old (or rather, those who are advocates of metaphysical naturalism or accidentalism… in other words, people who prefer to remove awe and wonder out of reality and turn everything into shades of gray; opponents of teleology) would like you to think that there could be no such thing. That the past 13 or 14 some billion years, and the formation of galaxies, our solar system and life as we know it is all a grand accident. An accidentalist would say that you have eyes not because you needed to see, but because you accidentally evolved them into being over the course of several millions of years and your species survived as a result. On the other hand, teleologist would suggest that a species evolved eyes in order to achieve an underlying desire to see and further adapt to its environment.

It is pretty interesting debate…until you notice that the accidentalist argument doesn’t take things such as creativity, the imagination and free will into account. You don’t accidentally invent something purposelessly with no goal in mind. You don’t do or think of anything without some form of goal in mind. I would find it difficult to argue that the computer was invented accidentally. The computer was invented as a result of what you might call “corrective feedback.” That is to say the short comings of a previous technology (or the genetics of a particular life form) were corrected (advanced) with the invention of a better technology based off of the previous generation, or by the combination of two complimentary technologies (or two survival oriented strains of DNA). An early example of this dates back to the addition of a governor being added to the steam engine. Another example might be the changing of skin color as a result of how much sunlight several generations of a particular group of humans are exposed to. Do you get a tan by accident?

Let’s take this notion of teleology, run with it and suggest that the universe and everything in it is goal oriented. It gets really interesting when you apply this philosophy to biology alone and presume the progression of evolution to have a goal of some sort. So what’s the goal of evolution and has it been reached yet? In short, I don’t think the goal has been reached. Some might say the mere existence of the human race seems achievement enough. After all, we are the most intelligent species on this planet if not the whole universe (as far as we have been able to detect). No other species has surpassed us in ability to invent and create new technologies. But this view presumes humans to be the perfected product of evolution at its finite best. Do you think the human race represents the perfected finality of biological evolution? You can’t answer that before attempting to figure out why we evolved into what we are in the first place.

This is where I briefly talk about this “conquest of dimensionality.” What do I mean by that? Well, if you go way back into the dawn of simple life, look at what it was capable of perceiving: jack squat. A single celled organisms or slimes stabilized on clay surfaces at most had practically no sense of the environment around it. They were immobile, had no perception of light or space or time. No ability to conceive of the past, present or future. But through evolution, what you see is the development of sensory preceptors (eyes, ears, the classic 5 senses in other words) and organs of locomotion (arms, legs, fins, etc). And then…there’s the human brain. That one mysterious evolutionary development which we still have no idea how to interpret or make sense of. What we do know about it is it’s probably one of the most complex things in all the universe. (And it’s still evolving).

Out of this brain, over the course of thousands of years, we have worked collectively in one form or another to give birth to social systems, technologies, creative ideas, language (very important), so on and so forth. To what end? Nobody knows for certain just yet, but to answer the question about whether or not the goal of biological evolution under the wing of teleology has been achieved would appear to be a plain and clear NO! Why? Because biology (human biology, anyway) appears to be attempting to find a way to co-evolve with machines, if not become machines. (Enter the Twilight Zone theme song). Why? It’s a strategy for survival.

In part 3: The symbiotic relationships of man and machine — past, present and future.

The Early Days of Wireless Networking