Charles' Tech Talk

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It seems that not a day passes without some increasing form of paranoia coming from the Canada/U.S. Border. Awhile back I saw a news post about a group of U.S. Border guards who beat Canadian Science Fiction author Dr. Peter Watts as he was leaving the U.S. for Canada. There are lots of angles on the story, but the result is that Dr. Watts is up on charges in the U.S. for acting in an aggressive manner (getting out of his car) towards the guards. Not mentioned is the fact that the U.S.

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PearPC is an open source program that claims to let you run MacOS (9 and 10.x) based on PPC architecture on a PC running Linux. We couldn't get it working well, but it did recognize the Mac OS X (10.4) cd we put in the cdrom. The documentation suggests that pearpc runs very slowly, but after about 10 minutes we stopped the application from running, giving up in frustration that it wouldn't go any further than a text screen.

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My notebook, a Lenovo 3000 C100, is my main computer at home. In fact it's the only computer I own at home. Because it is my only computer I run a LTS (Long Term Service) version of Ubuntu Linux on it. Now I like to try out shiny new software as much as the next guy. I could go to work, buy a machine, and use it as a Linux development machine, but I'm trying to reduce the number of computers we have in the house, not increase them.

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BBS News has an article suggesting that most youth are no longer interested in blogging, instead using micro-blogging as a source of communication. The article also suggests those over 30 are blogging more. So why the separation? I have a theory:

This screen shot is a screen shot of the command line behind Ubuntu Linux 8.04-LTS. In this day and age most desktop users don't ever need the command line, but it comes in really handy and tends to be faster than a graphical user interface once you get used to it. What makes this screen shot pretty interesting is that the resolution of this command line is 1024x768. The font is not the standard blocky font. Using a program called startupmanager you can modify the resolution of the "framebuffer" where the command line resides:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

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Startupmanager is perhaps Ubuntu Linux's best kept startup secret. If you want a little more control over the screens that appear when your computer starts up I strongly encourage you to install startupmanager. Installation is simple:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

Startupmanager gives you control over the colour-depth, resolution, and image (Usplash) that loads as Ubuntu Linux starts to load. It also lets you set colours for the grub boot loader and change the timeout option.

This morning I thought it would be interesting to ask what celebrities friends have met? It could be an actor, actress, singer, stand-up comic, computer personality, or other well known public person.

I think it was around 1986 that I attended a Barrie Chamber of Commerce function at which then Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was speaking. I didn't get a chance to talk to The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, but it was interesting listening to him talk.

I've added a slew of new articles to the web site. I'm still figuring out the best way to display them. For the moment I've made a menu entry called Old Articles. Many of the articles come from articles I've written on blogger over the past 6 years.

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It's never a good thing when someone loses their home. So when Shawn Powers lost his, some among the open source community took it upon themselves to start up a fund to help Shawn and his family get back on their feet. And while $10,000 is a far cry from being able to buy a home (lets hope Shawn had fire insurance) and all the memories with that house, it's a pretty significant amount for 3 days of fund raising and shows how generous people can be, even in these financially difficult times.

Good luck Shawn, everyone hopes for better times for you and your family!

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I've mentioned various media centres like Boxee and XBMC before. There's a new media centre in town made by the same folks who do the Geexbox media software. Enna is the next generation of Geexbox's interface, but it seems like it might get separated from the live CD. This would be a good thing because it would get included in more distributions as it matures.