Monday 04 July 2005 at 8:28 pm
Mostly newbie Unix stuff but still some useful tips -
OS X Unix Tutorials.
Windows 2000 being put on life-support as of June 30th -
Last Rites for W2K.
Windows software to allow you to 'backup' your DVD's -
DVDShrink. Also allows you to strip off region encoding and re-record the DVD as region free.
Useful
SGI Pinouts.
Software for Cobalt hardware over at
PKGMaster.
As seen on
slashdot -
Windows Software: Ugly, Boring & Uninspired.
Saturday 02 July 2005 at 10:54 am
OK OK I'll try my hand at more informative Post Titles...
An excellent review of the latest 'definitive' Velvet Underground compilation -
Velvet Underground Gold.
Article on
Easy Windows Scripting. The Helpomatic and Scriptomatic tools look like they warrant further investigation.
John Gruber (aka Daring Fireball) covers the latest
iPod line-up change and explains why Apples iPod competitors don't really understand why the iPod is doing so well.
Over at DrunkenBlog there is
Part 3 in a series covering peoples ongoing quest to understand Apples switch to x86. On a related note this
Engadget post covers IBM's late claim that they could deliver the chips Apple were after - which begs the question of "if they can, why didn't they ?"
In a quest to find a half-decent DVD Burning application I came across two excellent freeware packages which do the job with minimal fuss (*rant on* which can't be said of Iomegas excerable Hotburn software - how can a vendors own software not see its hardware? *rant off*)-
Deepburner and
CDBurnerXP.
Humour -
Excellent corporate signage to use in your workplace
Rugby -
Theres plenty of
Red Lions shirts in
town today for the
big game. Should be an
awesome match.
Tuesday 28 June 2005 at 9:47 pm
DrunkenBlog hosts two long articles on the issues surrounding Apples move to Intels x86 arch -
Part 1 and
Part 2. Discusses the unclean nature of OS X's current 64bit-ness as well as endian problems.
DVD -
MacTheRipper and
Handbrake are two useful OS X tools to rip DVD's to disk.
MacTheRipper also removes region encoding and it will rip a DVD even though Apples DVD Player refuses to play it due to a different region code.
Simple command line tool to manipulate images -
Sip. Also some useful OS X command line tips over at
Acmetech - for example start a GUI app liike this
open -a /Applications/TextEdit.app
Tiny database -
Stash is a small (20kb) command line database useful for maintaining simple lists.
NFS -
How to handle NFS mounts on OS X. Shame you need a new NIS map for the NetInfo automount database. Why couldn't Apple just use a normal amd or autofs map ?
Cool -
The Art of Science.
Tuesday 28 June 2005 at 9:14 pm
As seen on slashdot -
Castle Infinity has been resurrected as a free multi-user game environment.
Nothing special in this
article on running Oracle on Linux apart from the short section on using
PartitionImage to clone a server. The mention of HP-UX in the article still makes me shudder though ...
Fonts -
A survey of twenty typefaces.
Nice article on
DShield - a distributed IDS (Intrusion Detection System). Interesting stats such as the
Top 10 Targeted Ports and the
Top 10 'Offenders'.
Wednesday 22 June 2005 at 5:53 pm
This is cool -
hacking a cheap WiFi IM gadget with Linux and then using it to display what the
Sony Aibo 'sees' via its camera.
A simple but horribly useful Windows command line too -
RenTS will rename and timestamp a file - handy for rotating log files.
Amit Singh provides a flash based presentation of the
OS X Kernel.
Via
TinyApps - interesting hack:
Boot Windows XP Off a Compact Flash Card.
Unix Security -
1001 Ways to Harden Linux.
Create your own Polaroids from normal images via
The Polaroidonizer.
Useful Windows Admin articles - Sending emails via script, Recovering the Directory Services Restore Password and Subnetting to improve performance.
For the Mac - NeoOffice 1.1 Final has been released. NeoOffice removes the need to have X-windows running and it attempts to make it a more Mac-like application.
Lego - Brick Journal is a magazine devoted to advance Lego projects. The 2001 Starship model on the cover is amazing!
Monday 20 June 2005 at 9:22 pm
Long overdue -
Groundwork. GUI configuration for
Nagios.
Article on server virtualisation to reduce wasting resources -
How Linux Reins in Server Sprawl. I guess the next logical step is that mainframe servers (VMS, iSeries etc) prevent Linux server sprawl. Computing goes full circle
And this type of thing is why OS X is so much more 'fun' when compared to other OS flavours -
DittyBot. Request songs in your iTunes collection via SMS and have them played down the phone to you. Not practical but great fun.
Via Make magazine -
Converting a rotary phone to a rotary cellphone. Turning into a fairly common mod but it would be great to have one of these.
Sun open-sourced their OS via
OpenSolaris. Some nice supporting information over at
Blastwave who do the excellent pkg-get for Solaris. And the first OpenSolaris based distro is out -
Schillix.
Promising music 'zine -
Dusted. Anyone that reviews new
Skullflower can't be bad. Shame they don't have an RSS feed though...
A nice
article which posits the idea that American culture is in fact less violent because of its apetite for visceral violence in entertainment (based on the fuss surrounding Grand Theft Auto 4) and homogenous populations. Whereas Britain actually has a overt violent undercurrent due to the greater variety of cultures and communities mixing together in pubs/clubs and the vicarious thrill of 'slumming it'. Having said that the UK is an infinitely more interesting place than the US (sweeping generalisations aside of course
. Read the
article over at Popmatters and see what you think.
Saturday 18 June 2005 at 11:15 am
Via Ed Brill -
Law Firm switches to iSeries over Windows. Hopefully better than Notes on AIX - we used to have fairly regular crashes of the Domino process (once a month or so). I wonder if Domino is developed across platforms simultaneously or if the Windows version pops out first and then the rest (AIX, Solaris, Linux, iSeries etc) ....
Fantastic -
Tiny Houses. Wonder if anyone makes similar houses in NZ ?
Its finally happened - someones ported
Mac-on-Linux to OSX creating
Mac-on-Mac. You can now run OS X, PPC Linux and MacClassic as a Virtual Machine inside OS X (a la VMWare).
Tempted to switch to
ReadingList to handle my reading list in
Blosxom.
Useful examples of using
Pipes & Filters.
Shown recently at Computex 2005 is the miniscule
Flybook Laptop/Tablet.
Super stylish
Urinals.
Starting to hear a little about
Dave Winers new
Really Simply Groupware / Instant Outliner. It looks like it has a lot of potential based on this
screenshot.
If you like Linux LiveCD's but need an easy way to create them then
MySlax looks pretty neat - its a Windows app to create a live custom Slackware based CD.
Wednesday 23 March 2005 at 2:55 pm
How to
turn an old rotary phone into a modern cellphone.
I wonder when
these things will be armoured and the crane/grappler mount will be fitted with a 20mm chain-gun ?
This product -
Mirrorfolder looks useful as a server/workstation backup tool. Shame its not free but I guess its a step up from the usual nightly rsync or robocopy.
Sunday 20 March 2005 at 09:32 am
New Scientist has an article on
13 things that do not make sense.
The
RepRap Project is a 'Replicating Rapid Prototyper' in other words a device which could theoretically built itself. As also featured in this
Engadget post about a robot created using this device.
Interesting -
30 Secrets of Atari.
Freeware -
TinySpell spellchecks anywhere.
From the same place that brings us orange cheddar -
Quebec margerine must be white.
Monday 21 February 2005 at 8:56 pm
'Magic stuff happens' - why computing methodologies often fall victim to a common problem when
documenting or describing key procedures.
MobilePC has an excellent list of the
Top 100 Gadgets.
Howto -
Firewalling with OpenBSD PF (Packet Filter).
Fascinating - an
Illustrated Guide to Cryptographic Hacking.
Two articles on wood burning heaters and stoves. Kevin Kellys Cool Tools site has some
'One foot wonders' that occupy a minimum of space and are super efficient. Meta-efficient also has an article on
Efficient Wood Burning Stoves.
This looks like a fascinating concept -
The Brain EKP. The demo looks great but I bet it costs an absolute arm and a leg and requires a huge amount of customisation, ongoing support and maintenance. I wonder what the backend tools are like - eg can a normal Sysadmin easily extend the product to other information stores ?
