These are my links for May 10th through June 4th:

• AOJ Outdoors Tip – Eliminate Yellow Jackets With This Non-Toxic Homemade Yellow Jacket Trap! –
• Regrets of the Dying –
• The "How-to" for making an Arduino controlled smoker –
• Zuckerberg goes on a diet: Only meat he eats is what he kills – San Jose Mercury News – They all want to learn how to do it; they want to come in and watch us cut it up, because I think these days people who have the means to kill their own food want to see exactly what they're eating
• China used prisoners in lucrative internet gaming work –
• Confirmed: Google Wallet NFC payment system launches tomorrow, retail partners in tow –
• Banks launch clearXchange transfer system to rival PayPal –
• The Highly Sensitive Person –
• Roll a D6 – This is a spoof music video of ;Like a G6" by Far East Movement.
• Eternal Earth-Bound Pets –
• Everyday, No Days Off – Gun Blog –
• Linux Commando: How to disable SSH host key checking –
• KnifeKits.com Designer Knife Kits – Knife Making Supplies – Sheath and Holster Making Supplies –
• Grinder – getting started –
• Far Horizon Traders Home Page –

These are my links for March 13th through March 19th:

• debt collection, bankruptcy, personal finance & consumer rights | Caveat Emptor –
• consumerlawyer.mn — aggressive consumer advocacy –
• Y Combinator –
• How to Incorporate a Business –
• Beautiful by Nature – Turks and Caicos Islands – Turks and Caicos Tourist Board –
• FIAT of Austin –
• The Secret World –
• Langley Ranch –
• Japanese Earthquake Implications Quick Q&A –
• Someone is doing something nasty –
• Micromegas –

These are my links for February 25th through March 12th:

• GT Distributors – America’s Law Enforcement supply specialist –
• Dihydrogen Monoxide Dangerous! –
• Belts by The Belt Man –
• 1930 Art Deco Henderson –
• SIG forum –
• Garrison Brothers Distillery Texas Bourbon –
• Proposed Cuts Strike Teachers as Attacks on Their Value to Society – NYTimes.com –
• Gun Safes | Home Gun Safe | GunVault –
• STARSHIP PEGASUS :: SPACE AGE FUN FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY! –
• Monolithic — Home of the Monolithic Dome –
• Hand-Guns –
• SCP into Theory workstations from outside –
• Simple howtos –
• TxDPS – Applicant Fingerprinting Services –
• Mount&Blade/Companions –

These are my links for January 5th through January 15th:

• 25 Years Of Graphics History: A Farewell To ATI, In Pictures –
• Epoch Converter – Unix Timestamp Converter –
• The Naked Coder | Sarah White Consulting –
• Cheaper Than Dirt – America’s Ultimate Shooting Sports Discounter –
• TF2 Launch Options List – Steam Users’ Forums –
• LIRC – Linux Infrared Remote Control –
• Partial solar eclipse and transit of the Space Station from Oman –
• cRPG Guide, Read if new to cRPG – www.c-rpg.net –
• cRPG & Strategus forum on TaleWorlds –
• TaleWorlds –
• cRPG Mod – Mount and Blade –
• Ultra-Mini Nano USB 2.0 802.11n 150Mbps Wifi/WLAN Wireless Network Adapter –

These are my links for December 23rd through January 4th:

• Best Buy Masters Computer Science & Information Technology | Ratings & Rankings | GetEducated.com –
• CSU CS Online Masters Degree –
• Portalarium – Game Developer in Austin (Richard Garriott has joined this team)
• Car2Go Sweeps Austin Off Its Wheels – Car2Go to hopefully expand its area, and definitely expand its fleet with new cars
• bunnie’s blog –
• TF2 Backpack Examiner – Blueprints –
• Musican killed in home burglary attempt, authorities say –
• James Jean | Home –
• Chumby Spare Parts at Sparkfun –
• The animal world has its junkies too – Animals that get high
• MakerBot Industries – Robots That Make Things. –
• chumby sphere forum –
• Chumby hacker board beta – ChumbyWiki –
• chumby hacker board wiki –
• Texas State History IMAX Theatre –

These are my links for October 5th through October 10th:

• Report: Poor science education impairs U.S. economy – USATODAY.com –
• Essential SNMP: Chapter 2: A Closer Look at SNMP –
• How sticky tape trick led to Nobel Prize – so let me get this straight. The Nobel prize was awarded to a team sticking tape to pencil lead? wow

• Nuclear Dawn – Welcome » Half-Life 2 mod
• Drawn to be alive » inventive mod
• Darsana » standalone multiplayer medieval game
• Troubleshooting a Peer to Peer Networking » on Windows machines
• Htaccess file – Rewrite »
• Pepakura Designer » Turn 3d computer models into paper models
• University of Texas Videogame Archive »
• South Austin Museum of Popular Culture »
• Vulcan Gas Company posters » Austin myusic venue from the 60′s that was the predecessor and inspiration for the Armadillo World Headquarters
• Device wakes man with severe brain injuries | U.S. | Reuters » A man with severe brain injuries who spent six years in a near-vegetative state can now chew his food, watch a movie and talk with family thanks to a brain pacemaker that may change the way such patients are treated, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
• Will playing games create a two-tier society? » Scientists say gamers are more visually intelligent. But what does that mean for the future of the net?
• Beer in space: A short but frothy history »
• Firefox/Thunderbird Extension Wizard »

Probably a cryptic title to many of you. Compiz is a modification/replacement of the linux X desktop environment (I believe it’s Gnome-only, but not positive). It was originally developed by Novell. It progressed, by third party devs, to a combination with XGL to make very fancy desktop features. Notably, desktop cube, wobbly windows, transparency, windows on a plane, etc. It really was quite impressive, even in its first releases. It’s easy to see the influence OSX had on it, as it emulates a lot of OSX features, but it also adds things I haven’t seen before. The current iterations are also very snappy performance-wise.

I thought I had already written my experiences with it, as I installed the compiz/XGL stuff on by Ubuntu partition a couple months back. But apparently I didn’t get to that in my big linux project post. I will. And I think I’ll make a little desktop movie of my compiz, even though a ton of people already have them on youtube.

Anyways. The project has been forked to Beryl. I mean, I think Compiz will still be around, just that the main third-party devs for it at compiz.net have decided to make their version more of a total project rather than a mod.

They don’t have a working version of Beryl yet, so don’t fret about how to changeover quite yet.

The second Guitar Hero related story in as many days! Shocking!

What prompted me to start writing about my exploits in Linux this summer, beyond the fact that summer is almost over, is a discovery I made while exploring Linux gaming. One of the biggest impedance to Linux to a very active gamer as myself is the gaming aspect. Everyone knows that most commercial games are released Windows-only, and have been for years. So during my summer Linux trials, I have frequently been looking to see all that Linux has to offer to my gaming habits.

Today that search led me to Frets on Fire. While perusing several lists of games, I read one that described this as a guitar playing simulation, and that instantly rang the bells in my head that said: Guitar Hero clone. I’ve been looking for a good PC Guitar hero clone, and the only thing I had previously found was Freetar Hero. I had been following the progress of Freetar Hero for awhile, and while it is coming along nicely, the only thing released is a limited song editor. No flashy game, and not much to it.

Today, I stumble across a full game including editor, that runs in both Windows in Linux, and does not need the Guitar Hero controller. Since I was already booted into Ubuntu, I installed it first in Linux. First off, the tutorial voiceover is beyond annoying, but it shows off the game well. Even tells you to hold you keyboard like a guitar and use the F-keys as strings and the enter key as the pick. Cheesy, but it works. It was made more bulky by my Logitech G15, but I could always plug in my old keyboard to a USB port when I want to give it a whirl.

The songs are not any you would recognize, as they seem made just for the game, but they are reasonably fun to play. Each has three difficulty settings. The scrolling song action is very well done, already polished and only lacking in background visuals. You have multiple note scoring, and bright visual indicators of hits and misses. The sounds go all screwy when you miss notes, and they play satisfyingly loud when you nail it. The only things missing from the full Guitar Hero experience are the whammy bar and the tilting action, which I’m not sure can ever be duplicated with a keyboard.

I haven’t goofed around with the song editor enough to give it a good review, but it seemed complete and solid. I’ll have to give it a run with an actual song. And that brings us to a problem, the community for this game is very small, and there are a very sparse amount of songs converted to the game. I’m not sure if the song editor is at fault, the game is too new, or the community is not large enough, but there are less than a dozen songs I found on the message boards. Freetar Hero boasts many dozens, possibly hundreds, even with just an editor released.

I hope many others try out Frets on Fire, looking beyond the cheesy tutorial, and start popping out some songs! I don’t have a PS2, damnit!

update 1: Turns out there are plenty of songs if you register on the Frets on Fire forums. Still not as prolific a community as Freetar Hero, but all they have is an editor, so they may devote more time to cranking out songs. Also, almost all the FoF community songs are on “amazing” difficulty, and most are very tough.

One of many things I’ve neglected to write about is my adventures with Linux this summer. As I was forced (oh so willingly) into having my first summer off in 10+ years, I knew I needed projects to keep from boredom. While drinking mass quantities of tequila may be considered a project to some, I set my goals slightly higher.

I played around with the ideas of writing some Firefox extensions, such as porting PicArray over, or fixing DownloadSort to be able to treat upper- and lower-case extensions the same. I also thought of offering my limited coding skills to the PRMM project. Then I thought of the hobbies I’ve neglected, such as the guitar, painting, movie editing, cooking, and many others. I dabbled around until I thought of the perfect one. (One is more than enough for me and my ant-length attention span.) I decided to make a real go at using Linux as my desktop (for the umpteenth time).

Before I had shot at it from the sidelines. Over the years I’ve installed various distros: Suse, Slackware, RedHat, etc. All of them for various reasons, Suse had a huge native application list that installed with it, Slackware was for “power users and tweakers”, RedHat was for the masses. But this time, I wanted to actually not just putz around with it, but I wanted to use it as much as possible. This is a goal that’s difficulty is inversely proportional to how many things you do on a computer. I happen to do alot. I have a bazillion applications that I use weekly that are tweaked just-so in Windows to my tastes. Not to mention I have tweaked Windows far beyond what a normal user would do. My goal with Linux this time was to attempt to be able to do everything I can in Windows, and hopefully better.

I chose the Ubuntu distro for two reasons, one is: my school (University of Texas) had switched the majority of the Linux machines in the Computer Science area to Ubuntu. First Breezy, and more recently to Dapper. The second reason is that the Ubuntu community seems to be more active, or at least more prolific, and in technical matters, I’ve always found the best help from other users in an active community. So, I go to the Ubuntu site, and peruse their offerings. I look at the live CDs and choose one I think is appropriate to my machine, an AMD64 build of Dapper Drake… my first mistake.

I fired up the LiveCD and played around with it. I was duly impressed; things had progressed much since the last time I had tried Linux as a desktop (I have used it as a web server and FTP server for years, but as a desktop it’s been 3-4 years since I’ve tried it). Ubuntu was sharp and snappy, and the included apps were very impressive. So, I started to look into installing it permanently. I had cleared a bunch of space on one of my non-booting SATA drives, as I had heard there was something akin to Partition Magic that could resize my partitions to allow a Linux install. It turns out it is much better: qtparted. This little utility comes with the LiveCD and will repartition on-the-fly using unused space. No need to defragment beforehand or anything. Not only that, it totally resized and added two partitions in less than 5 minutes. I think it was closer to 2 minutes. I am impressed yet again.

Then I get on to the install. Snappy, quick, and its done. The result was a much faster Ubuntu than the LiveCD, obviously, and time to get myself in real trouble… installing applications to make it my own. AMD64 Ubuntu is dual booted and ready. It loads up on a non-primary SATA drive on the last partition on it, and runs perfectly. Time to screw things up!

More on that in the next installment.