Chromebooks, introduced in 2011 initially for the Business and Education markets found quick success in schools mainly due to lower cost of purchase and ease of maintenance. Google Classroom released in 2014 raised the proposition even further but it was probably Google's planned obsolescence f...
First, if you don't know what I'm talking about, read this. This post is not an in-depth discussion of what cryptocurrencies are, how they work, or why you might want to care.
If I had stuck with it then I'd be rich now
The first time I tried my hand at mining for cryptocurrency was back in 2...
update 200203 I have since moved this server to an old Dell Optiplex 3020m (Intel i5-4590T 2.0GHz with 8GB Ram) under Ubuntu 18.04 LTS which runs 1.13.2 spigot without issue. The Raspberry Pi was sufficient for 1.12.2 (with occassional lag) but after upgrading to 1.13.2 it was essentially unplay...
I've used dd-wrt on many Linksys WRT54G routers over the years at work and at home. These blue routers, first released in 2002, became classics and in large part because Linksys allowed the open source community to develop replacement firmware for them. The additional capabilities and enhance...
TIL Pixar makes movies in Linux (RedHat and CentOS) and has open sourced their animation software.
https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/USD
Real-Time Graphics in Pixar Film Production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9ikzGQW0ys
update 2024 - some years later I was able to switch back to Linux at work. I'll have to look up when I did and see if I have anything documented about it.
I won't get into why, after 10+ years I've switched my work desktop from Linux to Windows 7, but suffice to say its been painful. I stil...
Bought on a whim, this tiny chromebook quickly became my go-to device mainly because it was light, turns on immediately, and I could get 90% of my work done on it. I've been using an ASUS C201 Chromebook for a full year (see original post) now as my daily driver personal machine. I got mine u...
I use my Arch powered bootable USB drive on lots of different hardware, but most often on hand-me-down laptops from work. I recently moved into a newish laptop (a Dell Inspiron 13-7352, P57G) which came with an Intel 7265D wireless card. Its a really nice 2 in 1 laptop where the screen folds b...
I frequently boot Arch Linux from a USB3 drive in various Intel based machines which I've discussed here before. Recently I was using the drive in a Dell e7240 which is a fairly nice, if older, Core i5 based ultrabook and although the drive was inserted in the USB port marked SS (USB3) performan...
Ever since I first got an android based ASUS Transformer model TF-101 back in 2011 I've been a fan of the tiny netbook sized laptop form factor. The Transformer could be separated from its (optional) keyboard but I never used the Transformer in tablet mode anyway, and the few times I did it was...
While still enjoying the holiday with my family I found a recent story in various online forums strangely compelling. It concerned Ian Murdock, an icon in the open source and Linux community for his contribution of Debian (Ubuntu is one of the many Debian derivatives) in 1993 while at Purdue Univ...
I've had a Raspberry Pi2 since earlier this year when it first came out. I had gotten it in a package which included a see-through plastic case, a miniSD card pre-loaded with Noobs on it, a wifi USB dongle, USB power supply, and HDMI cable. Since I already had a wireless keyboard and mouse I...
Its been a while since I've posted anything here so just as an excercise for the fingers I thought I'd post an update about my current machine.
I've been running Arch on an old Thinkpad T410s for almost a year now ( journalctl says logs started on June 23, 2014). Its an Intel i5 M560 2.67 G...
This is just a snippet of text I got from here which I keep around and paste into my crontab on any new machine I set up. If I forget to do this I invariably end up googling it again... every time.
Back in February I wrote about setting up a bootable USB stick with Arch Linux. At the time I was using it with a Dell laptop, but since then have been running it mainly off an old Thinkpad T410s (with a now totally non-functional power cable and a cracked palmrest) that had been retired from w...
While I certainly have been enjoying running Arch on usb on the Dell, my main machine is still the old MacBook running Ubuntu. I had some extra time today and thought "hey, I should install steam and grab FTL and Kerbal Space Program" but then promptly decided Id rather do upgrades?
Im runn...
I recently got a new laptop from work. Its a refurbished Dell Latitude E6330 with an Intel Core i5 processor, a 13" screen and a 120GB SSD drive that came with Windows 7 Pro. I haven't used Windows regularly in quite some time (I've been using a WinXP VM on the rare occassion I need to do someth...
A while ago I created a virtual machine (VM) under VMware 5.1 with Ubuntu as the guest OS. I wasn't giving the task my full attention and I made a couple choices without thinking when setting this one up. The problem I ended up with is that I only allocated about 10GB to the VM which, while certai...
editor's note: I've updated this story many times since I first posted it. For the current status, scroll all the way to the end of the story as I've appended update notices to the end each time I upgraded or switched Roms.
Back in December, 2011 when I first got my ASUS Transformer TF101 it...
Recently one of my monitors at work was refusing to go on in the morning. I've got two: a Samsung SyncMaster 940T and an HP L1950. Its sort of a wierd setup in that the (now quite old) PC I'm using came with a single VGA output, so I ended up buying an add-on DVI card, but I usually end up with wh...
Installing Ubuntu on the MacBook recently, I knew there would be a bunch of OSX programs I would no longer be able to run but I was pretty confident that I'd be able to get some Windows programs going with wine. Having had good luck with Temple of Elemental Evil on the Elitebook last December,...
Last year when I got an HP EliteBook for work I thought my days with the old MacBook were numbered. The MacBook isn't that old, its a 2009 Core 2 Duo aluminum body 13" model, but the EliteBook's iCore 5 was is faster. The Mac screen is better, but not by very much. Both processors support V...
OK kids, make sure you have python installed so you can fire photons in this python remix of the classic Fortran Super Star Trek classic terminal game from the mid 70s. I played this game (poorly) in High School and had gotten frustrated trying to run the original Fortran version some while ago. T...
OK, so I'm not a sports fan, but I admit that I did try to watch the superbowl since its supposedly the American thing to do. Since I don't pay for cable TV at $100 a month, I don't get any of those cable channels showing the game, but thought I'd be able to get it on broadcast NBC but no. Appar...
These are just my notes on how to install Atari's official Dungeons and Dragons game Temple of Elemental Evil (ToEE) using wine in Ubuntu 11.10. This old game has been on my shelf since 2004 and with the kids' recent interest in D&D I thought it was a good time to see if it would install on the...
I originally posted this to the G+ app on the tablet, but have rewritten large parts of it here.
I was reading an article linked below on the tablet when I clicked a little "sharing" icon in my browser which passed the link to another application (G+). According to a recent ruling, you won't be ab...
In the first week of July I received in a bunch of machines off my company's UPS technology subsidy. The story of the subsidy is probably worth a post all its own, but suffice to say, UPS basically gives the company a bunch of PCs every so often based on how much we ship with them. One of the ma...
I was rifling through my top desk drawer when I chanced to spy the CD case for an old copy of Quake II. My mind raced back to years ago when my brother and some friends would frag each other for hours in the dark on our makeshift home LAN yelling and laughing in Deathmatch games. GoodTimes! So,...
Installing Google Earth in Ubuntu 11.04 turned out to be as easy as downloading the latest version from here and double-clicking it, but not until I had already tried to download the source and build an install package manually. I'm not sure how this would have worked, but I gave up when Ubuntu...
I got a new laptop for work today (an HP EliteBook 8460p). I've never used an HP laptop before (we usually get Thinkpads for work) but we had a subsidy to use up and it was easier to get everything from the same vendor. The idea was to get a laptop I could use in meetings and elsewhere around th...
While I've always kept little lists of things "to do" in a spiral notebook on my desk, I've never used PC based todo (task) lists. Even when I was using a PDA constantly (back when we called them "palm pilots") I don't think I used the tasks app even one time. But lately it seems like the number...
update 2024 Holy smokes this is an old post. Its likely that nothing in this post will help you today!
Backstory: The kids have been using an old and relatively slow (Celeron) IBM Thinkpad R60e running Ubuntu 10.04. update 130317: tested and working on 12.04 There have been a lot of conf...
Army Builder is a windows program that helps you build an army for use in playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle that conforms to the rules of the game. This simple program took all the pain out of building my little Dwarf army and got me playing much faster - I highly recommend it. As there is only...
In 1999, I gave up on MS Windows entirely and actually purchased Redhat Linux. I went through a couple versions of the kernel, and learned alot about how to run the OS. It did pretty much everything Windows did, but never easily. I was searching for something more polished, and easier to use and...
