June 30, 2007 by dragon_788.

Yeah, Grinder reminded me its been over a month since I last posted so I figured since I was killing time anyways I’d see about posting up a sweet software program I found today in my quest to get Remote Desktop working over SSH because my router decided to block the RDP port unexpected today. I found Bitvise’s Tunnelier and I’m not ashamed to say I’m going to buy a copy of the expanded version even though the free one has all the features I’d ever need. They make it so simple to get up and running that it almost makes me want to cry, especially since I’ve researched the “hard way” and had that running once or twice before. That just makes me appreciate the simple and straightforward interface they present all the more. The best part is previously I was using the remote desktop connection to connect to a PC that had an SSH client installed simply because I didn’t want to mess with the headache of reconfiguring a new one in Vista with who knows what kind of compatibility. Tunnelier installed and ran with no modifications and no issues whatsoever, kudos guys.

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May 28, 2007 by dragon_788.

Anyone who has experienced the joy of streaming a movie in XBMC from a Windows or Linux Samba/SMB share knows just how awesome it is to have a movie that’s spread across 40-odd rar files play seamlessly and allow seeking within the file so you never really lose your place and are never forced to rewatch the first half 3 times because your router hiccuped or the machine you were streaming from rebooted. The solution for VLC doesn’t allow the seeking yet, but it has the seamless play down to a “t”. I’ve always wondered about whether this was possible and the developer who implemented it for XBMC said it could be done, but he had spent so much time doing it he wasn’t going to attempt a PC port anytime soon.

That said, we all need to give major props to Sparks, of the Videolan Forums. He has managed to throw together some code that allows seamless streaming of multipart RARs, even from a network share. I had found this information a few weeks back but didn’t have a chance to test it, last night I finally took the time to try it out and I have to say, I was VERY impressed. You can find his program in the forum thread here and be sure to copy the info on the 2nd page for creating a .reg file so you can play a folder containing multipart movies straight from the right click menu.

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May 27, 2007 by dragon_788.

I just reinstalled my “server” machine with Ubuntu and after having a few issues with too many disks in the system I have a stable system and most of my favorite apps. I’ve grown used to having Beryl and all its pretty effects that can also enhance productivity at my fingertips. Thinking it was as simple as installing a few packages I forgot that I’d probably hafta change my driver and the settings on it slightly. After that first abortive attempt I searched Google for “beryl ubuntu feisty” and wham-O the first two results were exactly what I was looking for. Since I have an nVidia card I chose the 2nd one linked here. It allowed me to copy and paste a few lines and run them and after the X server restart I was golden and using Beryl. Now to tweak it the way I like it….

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May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

A while back a friend of mine showed me a really sweet Linux command line interface called Yakuake, he found it in a screenshot on the kde-look.org site and we both thought it was a really great idea. The gist of it is instead of having the console (Linux term for CLI [command line interface]) take up an entire window you can have it “docked” to the top of the screen and only have it drop down when you need it, very similar to the effect if you hit ~ (tilde) in most fps/RPG games for the PC. This is nice so you can keep a root console available but not immediately visible for those times you are working on stuff that requires the privileges but not the window open the whole time. Its slightly more secure than using kdesu and having it save the password and I’ve read of one instance where a person scripted closing a root session after 15 minutes of inactivity for even more security.

My main goal with this post is to let those who like the idea of a easily accessible console but also want to be able to see what’s behind it for command references or whatever. I tried Yakuake under Ubuntu and Sabayon and I noticed Ubuntu has some nice themes included with the package and a couple are “transparent” but its only a meta-transparency, it simply takes a capture of your wallpaper and puts it behind the console to make it appear transparent, Sabayon doesn’t have these themes included by default. I searched for a while on the net for a solution but it appears that KDE won’t fully support transparency in Konsole (the base KDE package that Yakuake is built on) until KDE4 is out (its still in alpha currently). I was somewhat disappointed as KDE3.5.7 came out just a few days ago and with KDE4 being in alpha it may be months before its officially out. That’s why I was excited when I found this post, it tells how to enable a “real” transparency for Yakuake using Beryl (the lovely XGL effects window manager). You just open up the Beryl Manager, go to Window Management, then Set Window Attribs by various criteria, expand the Window Opacity option and click the plus sign to add a new criteria, in the option window select Window Title from the dropdown, and type Yakuake in the text box or if you have Yakuake open click the Grab button and click on the Yakuake window title bar. Move the slider to about 75(%) and click OK and you are ready to make your Yakuake truly transparent. Check the checkbox in front of the Set Window Attribs by various criteria option in the left pane and you should now have a transparent drop down console.

I didn’t attempt the 2nd fix which involved patching the source code, the reason being that I installed Yakuake through portage and/or apt-get so I didn’t really have a chance to apply the patch before the fact. Hopefully KDE4 comes soon with support for full tranparencies so we can have an ultra sexy Linux desktop beyond the amazing effects of Beryl/Compiz and XGL, which if you haven’t seen yet you should definitely search YouTube for some clips.

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May 26, 2007 by dragon_788.

To start off this series I’ll give you some background. I’m a geek, a major nerd, a massive egghead, a social introvert and any other descriptive term you can give to someone of a technologically skilled background. You wouldn’t know it to look at me though, other than the laptop/tablet PC that’s almost like an extension of my arm, when primped and polished I almost look like a normal person. Because I’m such a huge geek most of my friends and family like to razz on me for the various dorky things I do (and no I don’t mean acting like a ‘whale’ penis [Wikipedia informed me that the reference to whales make be a folk myth, so let’s stop the misinformation here]).

One day while I was hanging out at a local computer shop (the haven of geeks everywhere) one of my good friends started hassling me about finding a girlfriend (I wasn’t in a relationship at the time) and so I spent a lot of my time on/near or working with computers. As a result he began spouting off my “perfect woman” as a combination of high end parts of the time. The original configuration has escaped as a fleeting memory but the gist of it was “a chick with two huge blazing fast/hot PROCESSORS requiring some massive HEATSINKS for cover, a couple huge HARD DRIVES so she’d never forget a thing, a GIG or two of RAM so she could crunch the shopping list while making dinner, a screaming GRAPHICS CARD so she could always show her best side, a large LCD SCREEN so I could enjoy the view, a GIGABIT ETHERNET port for me to interface, and various other accouterments as her “bling”. His wife was almost rolling on the floor and the owner of the shop and his wife couldn’t stop laughing, I just shot them a sheepish grin and suggested something along the lines of she’d need a beefy POWER SUPPLY if she was going to keep up with all the things she’d be tasked with. We all had a good laugh and they still give me crap from time to time about it, even though we can’t remember half the hardware my dream “babe” had in her.

The point of the story is that we often personify the equipment we use from day to day, boats are often female as are cars, trucks I’d assume to be male but I’ve never looked under their bed to see what secrets they are hiding, and bits of technology are invariably infested with gremlins, whatever sex they might be. People often laugh or give me a strange look when I tell them a computer of mine (which often has a name) is acting up or being grouchy, yet at the same time it gives them a new way to look at their computer, even if it doesn’t have feelings sometimes our possessions reflect the owner. This series is going to be my take on various services, I’m going to try and keep from limiting myself so I’ll start off with common services run from ports/sockets on a PC, but I’ll try to expand into other areas as well. Stay tuned for the next edition of Services Personified and feel free to give me suggestions for services I should cover.

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May 25, 2007 by dragon_788.

I too suffered from the dreaded and dreadful experience of walking away from my laptop for a short moment, just long enough for the laptop to enter standby because I had it unplugged at the time, then when I got back and tried to resume it the mouse would move but I couldn’t type in my password or do anything else and clicking on the Switch user button just blanked the screen. I’d end up having to hard power off the laptop and lose anything I had been working on. I only had Vista installed for a couple weeks and was almost ready to toss it back out the window. I ended up searching the web for HOURS only to end up finding that not many people had found a successful solution. The most promising lead seemed to be a post listing a few hotfixes alledged to fix the issue. I checked through all of them and had run across a couple before but hadn’t been able to find them. The post listed a site to check for that offers hotfixes that Microsoft normally doesn’t give out other than through phone support. I grabbed these in a site for the “unofficial Vista SP1 (aka Service Pack). The ones that worked for me were http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929909 and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928135. I have a Gateway CX210X tablet with an Intel 945 based chipset which clued me into the first item, and the second one sounded promising, one (or both) of them fixed it but I installed both at once so I’m not sure which was the magic bullet.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

Its the Optimus Maximus. I read about these a while back and when they were estimating a street price of $200 and I was all for it. Even $300 wouldn’t have seemed absurd, but $1564.37? That’s outta my league unless I start a business and write it off for taxes.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

In an interesting and environmentally friendly move Dell is apparently selling trees to offset the pollution caused by the production of electricity to power their products.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, and the writer of the original article apparently hasn’t either, but I know a few people that probably wouldn’t die if they didn’t see the light of X for 24 hours. Do you think you could be productive without a full and rich GUI? Judging from this article I think I could make an attempt, although I might miss some of the annoying ads when browsing the web.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

Trolling Digg today I found a nifty little hardware article. Apparently some students at WPI have created a mouse that’s worn on your finger. It works similarly to GPS by using multiple receivers to track the position of the mouse on your finger. Check out the full article here.

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