Charles' Tech Talk

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Acorn Andy is a flash game developed by Mike, one of the volunteers at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project. The game currently consists of 5 levels. You play the part of Andy, a squirrel on the hunt for nuts. Evil blood red squirrels protect the nuts. Run into a red squirrel and your energy (represented by hearts) goes down. Run out of hearts and it's game over. Collect all nuts and progress to the next level.

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Can you say bloatware? Boy I sure can after the painful installation of OpenSUSE 11.2. Of course I should have been warned off OpenSUSE when it suggested on boot that at 768MB of virtual RAM (I was installing in a Virtual Machine) that I didn't really have enough memory. This is almost as bad as Windows Vista's requirements, it almost makes me wonder if there was some side bloatware deal?

I've been a bit quiet lately. Rather than rehashing what's on Slashdot or OSNews I decided just be quiet until I had some good news. Most of what I've been doing at work is in preparation to move to a more government-mandated workflow. Outside of work the only web development work I've been doing is behind the scenes of freesoftshop.com (which has not been releaunched yet). Much of the work has been adding content, but in the next few days I'm hoping to start work on development side of the site, then moving on to updating this site.

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A few times I've been asked "how do I download a Youtube video" or the more complicated "how do I download the audio from a Youtube video?" Now both answers can be solved with one web site: dirpy.com. Dirpy is a Google-backed site that lets you download audio from Youtube videos in .mp3 format. It also offers up videos in a variety of resolutions. No more Firefox add-ons and then stripping out audio, dirpy makes getting Youtube content simple.

It's funny sometimes how only a few words can really put things into perspective. Leo Laporte retweeted a tweet which stated that BP owes around 65 million for the oil spill in the Gulf, but the RIAA expects Limewire to pay 1 Trillion dollars to the RIAA. So the worst oil spill of all time is nothing compared the damage file sharing does???

As someone else noted the RIAA isn't even representing all music industry artists, only major record labels. Pure greed, nothing more.

A few days ago in anticipation of our new Internet service from Teksavvy I got my hands on a GNet GBB2060-XI ADSL modem. After resetting the router and some experimentation I found the default web login page at:

http://192.168.1.1/

Note: (you need to set a static IP on the computer you're trying to first access the router from). I set mine to 192.168.1.2 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0 and the gateway field i left blank.

I may not post any articles until the next week or so. Last month when my wife and I got a hefty bill due to Rogers dropping their cap from 60 GB/mo to 25GB/mo, we decided it was time to move on.

As a computer refurbisher I am always pleased when people are open to switching to Linux. Long story short I was doing some work for a client that I'd switched to Linux when I ran the following command in his home directory:

sudo rm -rf /home/username/.gnome2

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When I logged into this site yesterday to post I noticed the Fedora count down had dropped to just shy of a week. This morning that date got pushed back to 14 days. Checking the Fedora Release Schedule it looks like this is actually the second missed release date, the first being on May 11th, 2010.

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I was scanning Twitter this morning when I found an interesting attempt to get Linux users to register with a web site. Most people know about the Linux Counter project which has counted Linux Users and Linux machines for several years. The 1 Million Tux project is an attempt to count 1 million Linux users in 100 days. So far the project is way behind that deadline, collecting about 35 registrations/day.