I got back to college yesterday night. While I flew home, I came back on a Peter Pan bus. It was pretty nice because there weren't any inane weight restrictions and there certainly weren't any security checks of any kind. I just got on the bus and went on my way. Plus, the tickets were pretty reasonable (considering that it was pretty nice inside the bus): $25 per leg.Until the TSA lets up on this ridiculous security theater (there, I said it), this is how I'll probably travel from now on for these distances (if someone doesn't drive me). (Of course,...
Monday, 29 November 2010
I want to apologize for not having posted this yesterday as usual. I was traveling back to college (more on that in an upcoming post) and didn't have computer access all day.There were quite a few comments on posts this week, so I won't repost all of them. Adafruit Bears Fruit for MicrosoftIn response to my question about why Microsoft seemed so defensive, an anonymous reader had this to say: "Because Microsoft stir hackers' defiance whenever they say they have protected their products. For Microsoft, it was just saying "I challenge you to hack...
Friday, 26 November 2010
Two days ago, I helped a friend (whose identity I will not reveal here) perform a Linux Mint installation on her computer. That computer had Microsoft Windows 7 on it which was becoming extremely slow and unreliable by her own count. Because of this, she was willing to try something new. She doesn't really do much aside from web browsing and document creation; hence, I figured that something like Linux Mint would be perfect for her.I let her try out what she would use most before installing, and she seemed happy with it; even during the installation...
Thursday, 25 November 2010
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! I hope you all are able to spend it with family, friends, and other loved ones; I've come home from college for the weekend.On a related note, I did have to go through the new security procedures and I got the grope. That said, though I am still a bit wary of the whole thing, I'm happy to report that the security person was extremely polite, professional, hygienic (changing gloves before examining me), and didn't actually go directly over my nether regions, so not once did I feel truly uncomfortable in the process.Once...
Wednesday, 24 November 2010
This just in, folks: Ubuntu is about to become (Susan Linton, OStatic) a rolling release distribution! SWEET!Of course, this means no more weird numbering system, and no more silly "[adjective]-[animal]" names...or does it? Mark Shuttleworth does say that like any other rolling release distribution, Ubuntu will release ISOs periodically for people who are installing for the first time as well as for people who need to reinstall Ubuntu for whatever reason.I'm not too happy about the move to Unity, and I'm cautiously optimistic about the move to...
Tuesday, 23 November 2010
Several days ago, open-source hardware company Adafruit offered a "bounty" of $3000 for the first person to hack Microsoft's Kinect (formerly Project Natal) device. For those of you who don't know, Kinect was originally just an add-on hardware accessory for the Microsoft XBOX 360 allowing for motion sensing of one's full body (as opposed to using an external device, like the Wiimote in Nintendo's Wii). However, companies like Adafruit saw the additional value in a product like this, and Adafruit offered a cash prize for whoever could first release...
Sunday, 21 November 2010
I remember seeing a couple comments spread out over reviews I've done in the past asking why I don't do my reviews now through actual live media. Well, the reason was that with my new laptop, for the longest time I thought that USB booting was a lost cause; furthermore, I didn't want to waste the few blank CDs and DVDs I had (and still have) on random distributions.Well, I'm happy to report that I can in fact boot from USB on my laptop (and in fact, I'm writing this from a Linux Mint "Debian" 201009 GNOME live USB), and for this I need to apologize...
This past week, only one post garnered comments.Review: GNU/Linux Utopia 20101211 (Idea by Manuel)Manuel had this to say about it: "Thanks for review i agree in a lot of things, i think is coming a newer version soon, anyway it's slackware, whats in minds no dependencies control, no language selector, no user selector, if normally i use Debian/Ubuntu with apt-get and similars slackware looks strangeTip:For add user: type en in the bash :adduserWe working in a tutorial and screencasts.Thanks fro review, nice job! thanks!"On the other hand, an...
Saturday, 20 November 2010
Das U-Blog now has 0x100 (the hexadecimal number 100, equal to 256 in the standard decimal system) posts! Yay!That aside, I've been having some issues with my cell phone. I'm not talking about call, build, sound, or photography quality; I'm talking about a feature called "City ID". When I first got the phone, whenever I made or received calls, I could see not only the name and number of the person in question but also that person's location (and I believe this is based on the location where the phone is first activated, not the real-time location)....
Friday, 19 November 2010
Yesterday I got to see an advanced screening of this movie with many other MIT students. It was a lot of fun, though there were a couple mishaps regarding getting there (for some reason handicap-accessible taxis can't be counted on to arrive at a specific time, according to one company), but that's all fine now.The movie? It was great! The only thing I will say is that the director overdid the relationship between Harry and Hermione (because in the book that was solely a figment of Ron's imaginatio...
Tuesday, 16 November 2010
I was reading an article in the New York Times about the proposed overhaul of the New York City taxi fleet; all of the finalists in the selection process are minivans targeted at small business owners (Ford Transit Connect, Nissan NV200, and Turkish company Karsan's entry). Just for fun, I searched all three on Wikipedia (and got no results for the last one). While reading the article about the first, I saw that it goes through a rather ridiculous shipping/manufacturing process just to avoid the "chicken tax". I then clicked that article.Apparently,...
Sunday, 14 November 2010
GNU/Linux Utopia Main ScreenReader Manuel kindly asked me to write a review of a distribution he has created called GNU/Linux Utopia, and I am doing that right now. Available on SourceForge, it is a feature-packed Slackware (64-bit)-based distribution tailored for Spanish-language users. As I do not know Spanish, it was interesting for me to see just how well I can navigate a (literally) foreign environment using only what I already know about Linux...
There weren't too many comments this week, and they were spread out over different posts, so I'll repost most of them.Ease: An Elementary Presentation ApplicationIn response to Ease not working at all, an anonymous commenter said, "You should be at "Ease" to put it in the trash where it belongs...".Airport Traveling GripesAn anonymous reader had this to say: "This new full-body scan/procedure was really started by the failed Christmas attack of last year, not the cargo plane attempt. As you know, the attacker hid the explosives in his underwear,...
Saturday, 13 November 2010
In a week and a half, I will be heading back home by airplane for the Thanksgiving holidays. Thus, I will have to deal with all the truly ridiculous "security" measures at the airport that are being talked about today.(Side note: there's a really nice xkcd comic about this as well, discussing how inconsistent it is to confiscate small liquid containers yet allow laptop batteries to go through.)Anyway, there seems to be a real backlash (Derek Kravitz, Washington Post) against the new super-restrictive rules regarding full-body frisks and scanners;...
Friday, 12 November 2010
There are a couple of things I want to say before beginning with the real content of this post. First of all, I want to apologize for not having written a post for a few days. That said, I did warn at the beginning of this semester that my work may make me busy enough to be unable to write a post, and that's exactly what happened in these few days. Furthermore, it will likely happen again soon, as I anticipate being fairly busy this weekend and next week.Second, this is not a Debian version that I wanted to test for the sake of testing it; my ultimate...
Monday, 8 November 2010
GNOME Office has always had a pretty good word processor (Abiword) and a great spreadsheet program (Gnumeric). Abiword is fine for most things, though it can't fully support exporting documents in Microsoft formats (though it says that older versions of Microsoft Office Word did the same as well) and it doesn't support all macros. Gnumeric is great for statistical analysis, speed, and having every single feature present in Microsoft Excel (save a few). What GNOME Office has always lacked, though, is a presentation program. Sure, Evince could always...
Sunday, 7 November 2010
There were a few posts this past week that got comments, so I'll go through most of them.Seriously? Vegan Chicken Wings?Reader T_Beermonster had this, among other things, to say: "I suspect that a large part of the pseudo-meat boom is down to the fact that for most non-vegetarians cooking for the lone vegetarian (aka awkward person) is an annoyance and an afterthought. I know that most of my family when cooking for my wife will just fall into the lazy practice of cooking the same thing but with faux-meat. Obviously it tastes revolting but...
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Last week, I commented on how many Linux users are turned off by Canonical's seemingly unilateral decisions with regard to the development Ubuntu, the latest (at that time) example of which has been the decision to ship the Unity DE as the default even in the desktop edition, even though it's clear that even the standard netbook version of Unity needs a lot of work. Well, a lot of news outlets have reported that Canonical is going even further with this and that it wants to completely ditch the X/11 Windowing System.Wow. That's a pretty bold move....
Friday, 5 November 2010
An anonymous reader had asked for the template used in this blog. First I'm going to list out the basics from Template Designer. (All colors are given using their 6-digit hexadecimal code.) Follow the jump to see the full template.The base template used is the "Simple" Blogger template (provided by Blogger). There is no background image.The body layout has a main area and a sidebar split into two smaller sidebars a bit down the page. The blog is 1000 pixels wide, and the right sidebar is 320 pixels wide.The font used throughout the blog is Droid...
Thursday, 4 November 2010
For the record, I'm not saying that parodies themselves are declining in quality — far from it. If anything, they've just been getting better and better. No, what I mean is that advertising agencies and record labels are trying to put an end to parodies by claiming that obvious parodies (like the parody of a Lady Gaga song and the parody of a lobbying group's political ad, both covered on TechDirt here and here) don't qualify as parodies because they use the original soundtrack/video footage, meaning that they violate the restrictions on derivative...
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
I see on sites like MakeTechEasier, Dedoimedo, and others that promote Linux articles that say that Linux shouldn't necessarily be promoted for any inherent security advantage over Microsoft Windows because browsing safely can prevent any problems from appearing. This also means that there's no need for antivirus software on Microsoft Windows because safe browsing habits alone will prevent viruses and other malware from appearing. I have two issues with this.For one, on Linux, while it's common sense to exercise safe browsing habits anyway (i.e....
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
There are a couple of qualifications to "Debian". In fact, this isn't really a general guide for Debian itself, but it's more for Linux Mint "Debian". In any case, because Linux Mint "Debian" is pointed towards the Testing repositories by default, for standard Debian, the procedure will still be similar anyway.I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that the latest versions of Fresh OS are up on my SourceForge site. Yay! These are the download...
Monday, 1 November 2010
I remember in elementary school I got a lot of questions from people (when I told them that I am vegetarian) how I could possibly survive without meat. Although those questions have since subsided, I now wonder whether some people can survive without meat after becoming vegetarian. (Please understand that this is not meant to evangelize about any benefits vegetarianism has over omnivorous eating [redundant?]. If you eat meat, I have no problem with it; I have my own reasons for remaining a vegetarian.)Case in point: our dining hall's vegetarian...
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