Piracy!
Piracy in the digital age – An essay about piracy in the digital age. Is it really that bad?
The WWW is not the internet!
A real geek should know the difference, do you? Learn the difference and stop being a n00b.
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Friday flashback
Posted on April 20, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Today were flashing back to the 90s when $1999 would get you an Amstrad PC with a hard drive! And they will even throw in a printer, literally.
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The easiest way to try different Linux distros
Posted on April 18, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
In the world of Linux there are more flavours than you can poke a stick at. If you are looking at switching to Linux then one of the biggest challenges you will face is finding your favourite flavour of Linux. There are so many flavours to try, it can be intimidating and time consuming. Luckily there are plenty of ways to sample different flavours of Linux, some are easier than others.
The most common way of trying a different flavour of Linux is to burn a live CD. A live CD will let you load Linux into memory from the live CD rather than installing it on your HDD. It’s quicker and easier than dual booting Operating Systems.
But the problem with live CDs is that they are not persistent. That means that any changes you make aren’t remembered, i.e. next time you boot from the CD you will be back at square one. You will have to change settings, install programs etc. again because changes you made will be forgotten when you reboot or shut down your PC. Although this could also be a blessing in disguise for noobs who might be prone to breaking things.
If you need or want persistence you could use Linux in a Virtual Machine which can be slightly harder and take a little longer than burning a CD, but it’s still easier than dual booting and you get persistence.
Another problem with live CDs is that they eat up blank media like a kid eats candy, sure CD/DVD-Rs or CD/DVD-RWs are cheap but they still cost money.
If you have a spare USB flash drive (even if you don’t you can pick one up for less than the cost of a spindle of CD/DVD-Rs) then I’d suggest trying Universal USB Installer “a Live Linux USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive.”. It’s as easy as 1 2 3 to use, it’s relatively noob friendly, although it’s not 100% idiot proof, and takes care of creating the bootable USB flash drive for you.
You select which flavour of Linux you want to try from the drop down menu. If you don’t have the ISO then the program will provide you a link to the home page. If you have the ISO then you point the utility to the ISO, sometimes it’s smart enough to find the ISO itself. Then you tell it the drive letter of your USB flash drive, click create and wait. It will take about 5 minutes after which you will have a fully bootable USB flash drive containing your selected flavour of Linux.
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eBay cash cow
Posted on April 6, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Any real geek usually has some spare parts laying about. I have a spare ASUS M4A785G motherboard with 2 GB of Corsair RAM and a spare TV tuner card.
So what am I going to do with the spare parts? I could try and sell the parts, but I wouldn’t get much for them because they are older parts despite being perfectly good and more than powerful enough for most people. I could leave them to gather dust or I could build the parts up into a new PC.
I opted to use the parts to build a HTPC.
The problem is that the ASUS M4A785G is over 3 years old and 3 years in computer time is equal to 30 human years. When you have a motherboard that is so old it sometimes becomes harder to find parts to suite it.
My ASUS M4A785G is an AMD AM3/AM2+/AM2 board and AM2+/AM2 CPUs were discontinued a long time ago. The only CPU that you can still purchase new is a socket AM3 CPU but even those are getting harder to find.
One of my favourite online computer shops had sold out of their last AM3 CPUs and my other favourite shop only listed an AMD Athlon II X2 260 for $65, but they had no stock. So I decided that maybe I could find it on eBay for the same price or cheaper. [Read more...]
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Aperture: A Triumph of Science
Posted on April 5, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
There are a bunch of Portal films out there. Some are great, some are just mediocre and others, well lets just say they won’t be winning any academy awards.
One short film that deserves an award of some description is Aperture: A Triumph of Science, it was produced by a wonderful collective called SyntheticPH who happen to be working on a new Portal-esque film called Lab Rat, it will tell the story of Doug Rattmann in mixed media and live action.
In the meantime you enjoy the fruits of SyntheticPH’s labour in Aperture: A Triumph of Science.
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8-Bit Google Maps
Posted on April 1, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
If you ever wondered what Google Maps would have been like on the NES? Wonder no longer! Google is producing Google Maps 8-bit for NES. This has to be the coolest thing I have seen all week. Yes this is that it’s real. It’s not a proof of concept picture or animation, hit up Google Maps and click on the quest button to checkout Google Maps in 8-Bit goodness.
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Quote of the day
Posted on March 21, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
From c0axr (Coder of Mass Destruction) on Twitter:
My new favorite hobby is to paste shellcode backdoor payloads to pastebin and title it MS12-020. It’s like cat nip to script kiddies.
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Online shopping – is that really your best price?
Posted on March 20, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Beware of web sites that offer the cheapest price. Always be sceptical of sales and discounts. You are constantly being lied to about price, those sales and discounts that you are being offered probably isn’t the best deal you could be getting. [Read more...]
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10 of the best Lana Del Rey – Video Games remixes
Posted on March 18, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Love it or hate it, Lana Del Rey’s Video Games is a great song, on YouTube 34,984,645 people have viewed the video and of those people 121,138 like the song, compared to 4,719 who dislike it. If we are going to believe the numbers then yeah it’s a good song.
If you search “Lana Del Rey – Video Games” on Sound Cloud you will get 50 pages of results. Some of the results have nothing to do with the song, others are really poor covers/remixes, and occasionally you will come across a good remix. These are my top 10 picks in no particular order:
A nice laid back chilled out down beat remix
[Read more...]
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Why HTPCs rock
Posted on March 12, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Most typical entertainment set-ups usually consist of a set-top box (unless the TV is fairly new, I haven’t seen a new TVs that doesn’t have a built in TV tuner), a DVD or Blu-ray player, maybe an Amp and some sort of network media player like a Boxee Box, possibly a PVR or DVD recorder. That’s a lot of devices, remotes, and tangled cables (cable spaghetti anyone?) cluttering up your entertainment space.
All of those separate devices make it a pain to do something simple like watch TV. You have to turn on the TV, then turn on the set-top box if your TV doesn’t have a built in TV tuner, and if you have an Amp then you have to turn that on too. It seems a bit ridiculous just to watch TV, it’s more complicated than it should be.
Sure you could get a universal remote to replace your other remotes to make things a little easier, but you still have a bunch of different devices and tangled cable spaghetti. How cables get tangled while they sit there and don’t move is beyond me. There must be a messy cable tangling monster out there that visits in the dead of the night and messes up the cables and gets them all tangled. But I digress.
A better, and arguably the best, solution for a lot of people is a Home Theatre Personal Computer, or HTPC.
To prove that a HTPC is the best solution I’ll show you how one HTPC can replace multiple devices and do all of the things that those individual devices used to do. [Read more...]
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Mari0 has been released!
Posted on March 4, 2012 by Jingles | No Comments
Mari0… released… so excited! So much awesome! Can’t stop playing! More later.
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I'm Jingles, I'm like the Keith Miller of geeks, i.e. an all rounder, I'm a web scientist, an A+ certified (it means I'm not a “noob”) computer technician, and this is my blog. I'm your curator of all things awesome, cool and geeky on and off the net. More...
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