21. Apr 2008 
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Hardy has a bunch of new software packages, here are some interesting finds:
- an OS X “dock” like taskbar that is actually a taskbar not just a launchbar called avant-window-navigator + screenlets for a Mac OS style “dashboard”, both for Gnome. Personally, not really a fan of either but I included a screenshot below anyway (because they look nice).
- Midori, another GTK/WebKit based web browser. In lieu of epiphany-webkit, use this. The short review: crashed in 10 minutes, slow scrolling compared to Firefox3 but snappy load times and responsive interface aside from scrolling. Promising but not there yet.
- pcb-gtk in Hardy for laying out PCBs supports standard formats like Gerber. Played with it briefly. Clean, seems to be pretty organized. It has rat’s nest support and some autorouting menu options but I suspect it’ll want you to do most of it by hand. Can’t find a web page for it. It’s part of gEDA I think. Short review: about as pleasant as Eagle to use but more confidence inspiring. Have not tried the automatic routing yet. No documentation.
- spectools for using the Wi-spy USB spectrum analyzer
- Last and maybe least depending on who you ask, twitux the twitter client for the GNOME desktop. Short review: needs work. Either the close button or minimize button should be able to minimize to tray. Needs word wrapping. Needs context menus.
20. Apr 2008 0 comments
john@Elmer ~ % history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
78 sudo
39 ls
33 cd
20 apt-cache
19 vim
18 ssh
17 find
16 less
16 fg
15 python
Accounting for sudo, this could be a lot uglier trust me:
history|perl -MData::Dumper -e ‘while(<>){split /\s+/; $h{$_[2] =~ /sudo/ ? $_[3] : $_[2]}++} print join “\n”, map { “$h{$_} $_” } keys %h’|sort -rn|head
39 ls
36 vim
33 cd
23 apt-get
20 apt-cache
18 ssh
18 aticonfig
17 find
16 less
15 python
19. Apr 2008 0 comments
This is the Nokturnal Journal Weekend Point Post. It also gets an image: this lucky guy’s shacky-house on top of some big hill in my hometown in the Philippines. It looks pretty dilipidated but actually he’s got a nice view, a big water tank and fresh air. He’s doing ok.
- Guy’s custom enclosure for macbook pro with dead screen. He took two pieces of acrylic, bolted the innards of a macbook pro into one, bolted the other one on top, laid some perforated steel sheet in the crack and fooled the lid sensor to make it all work. It came out sexy looking.
- PCBs for $2.50/sq inch. Normal cost for a custom PCB run for example at PCBexpress is about $200 for 5-10 boards without silkscreening. I haven’t tried these guys yet but it sounds fantastic for the price.
- iPod Touch mod adds a mic so that the thing can function as a VoIP client. They also want to create a joystick for the thing to make playing games better. I tried to find out if the touch ipods have any GPIO but all I could find were pin-outs of the ipod dock connector which does not have anything like GPIO.
18. Apr 2008 0 comments
The 8.04 RC was supposed to have come out yesterday or the day before. I dist-upgraded earlier today and it’s been good so far. There are 32 new packages since I upgraded so it seems fixes are still being committed.
Some statistics:
Just barely down the list (<10 packages in), I’ve already found two weird ones:
JuggleMaster is a siteswap animator. A siteswap is a textual representation for patterns one can juggle (using balls, clubs, etc.). It is mainly useful for understanding specific siteswaps by animating them (including multiplexing). Other uses may include watching patterns without understanding the notation behind them.
Adanaxis is fast-moving first person shooter set in deep space, where the fundamentals of space itself are changed. By adding another dimension to space this game provides an environment with movement in four directions and six planes of rotation. Initially the game explains the 4D control system via a graphical sequence, before moving on to 30 levels of gameplay with numerous enemy, ally, weapon and mission types. Features include simulated 4D texturing, mouse and joystick control, and original music. Screenshots, movies and further information are available at http://www.mushware.com/.
15. Apr 2008 0 comments
I used to have a Macbook and at the time I used a piece of software called iBank to keep track of my spending. Since switching I have neglected to keep track of spending for want of a Linux equivalent. I recently found something called Homebank for GNOME that looks promising but it’s still needs work. One crucial bit is that modifying categories requires several clicks and the same hotkeys are bound to a few different fields so it’s just a big PIA.
So I took a look into running OS X in a virtual machine; after all, it’s just x86 software isn’t it? Well, it runs in VMware for me but it pegs the CPU at 100% and it’s overall too slow to use. While looking for a fix for this condition (haven’t found one), I came across pc_efi* that lets one run OS X unmodified on a regular garden variety PC. I’m now fairly tempted to build a whitebox to run iBank and Lightroom** on. One can be gotten for about $500 incl a brand new LCD… but before that, I’ll be trying it on my T60 with a spare disk I have lying about.
* This is the software that was/is most likely behind that company that briefly existed to sell you an “OpenMac” before the Apple Legal SEAL team made them disappear. (UPDATE: they still exist, and they’re apparently going to challenge the Apple EULA in court.)
** Another application area that’s unaddressed on Linux: there’s something called “lightzone” but it doesn’t flow as nicely as lightroom. (And it’s written in Java = automatically bad.)
(Postscript) I have got a copy of Leopard running on a USB disk connected to my T60. It’s much faster than I remember it being but that could be due to “freshness”. Many things don’t work: 3D, video playing, suspend, volume buttons, wireless… Still, it’s not bad.
14. Apr 2008 0 comments
Isn’t this cool, I can include flickr images! I am just so cool.
13. Apr 2008 2 comments
What the hell is this? Can one ad be more annoying?
Link
13. Apr 2008 0 comments
Sometime ago I upgraded to Hardy Heron and as a consequence I broke wireless in a minor way: it worked fine until I came out of suspend; then network manager would ignore it, even though the card clearly still existed according to the kernel. It was also named wlan0_rename. (I could also sort of fix things by restarting dbus.)
Yesterday I fixed the resume behavior by commenting out this line in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net-rules
#SUBSYSTEM==”net”, DRIVERS==”?*”, ATTRS{address}==”00:13:02:69:78:20″, NAME=”eth1″
13. Apr 2008 0 comments
This brand new blog should give me an outlet for all those words silently oozing out various orifices of mine. Stay tuned, it’s going to get better.
