imnuts’ Home

I'm not sure how many people out there are apart of the Folding@Home project, but I run it on my desktop and server systems. I started running Linux on my main desktop a little bit ago and wanted to have a way to run the clients on my machine before I logged in. Usually, it would get me another few seconds of folding in, but if power ever goes out when I'm away, it could potentially be hours of folding I wouldn't otherwise get, so I wanted an init script to startup the client for me. There are a few different scripts out there to accomplish this, and I've tried a few, and they work. I wanted something different though. Gentoo has an init script, but it can only be used properly if you use the ebuild associated with the build. I found another script, but it didn't shut the client down properly. So, I combined the two scripts and came up with a better one, at least I think it is. The only issue with it that I have is when you stop a client, it will essentially terminate any other clients you have running. Since you usually let it go on its own, this shouldn't be a problem. I haven't found a way around this though, so I guess it's just something to deal with. So, if anyone else would like to use this script, here it is. Read more »

HP announced a $499 laptop today targeted at the education market. The HP 2133 Mini-Note PC seems remarkably underfeatured to me for the price: it has no DVD or even CD drive; no hard drive (a 4 GB flash module is included); an 8.9-inch display; just 512 MB of RAM, and the Linux operating system (SuSE Enterprise Desktop 10). What gives? It's all about the weight, durability, and market segment. I could go and buy a Dell Inspiron 1525 for $499 and get Windows Vista Home Basic, a CD burner/DVD writer, 2 GB RAM, an 80 GB hard drive, and 15.4-inch screen, among other features.

When I drill into the details, too, I find a lot about the HP model that's particular to this market as well. It's got a sudden-motion sensor for drive safety built into the models with hard drives that start at $549; Dell offers that only as a $150 capacity/feature upgrade on the 1525. The small screen is WXGA--least 1,280 by 768 pixels, which means images and video should be crisp, not blocky. A built-in VGA camera on the HP 2133 costs $25 more to add to the Dell unit. But the biggest tradeoff is weight and size: the Dell starts at 5.9 lbs (2.7 kg); the Mini-Note PC, just 2.8 lbs (1.3 kg). For students and staff alike, that's a lot less to carry, and may be a big part of its appeal, just like Apple's somewhat less-than-fully-equipped MacBook Air that sheds 2 to 3 pounds off similar devices from Apple and other makers. Read more »

On Wednesday the Mozilla Foundation announced that the fifth beta of its upcoming Firefox 3 browser is now available for download. Remarkably, the new release includes more than 750 changes from the previous release, though beta 4 was widely praised for its improved speed and stability. The beta is thought to be the last before final GA release. Though the media has reported that Firefox 3 beta 4 was ready for general use, it seems that with beta 5 it's still only suitable for developers and testers, and that further enhancements will appear in the final release.

New features in beta 5 include native Windows icons and interface widgets, and on the Macintosh a more native OS X look. In addition, Mozilla is offering Firefox 3 in 45 languages, up from 40. Firefox 3's "Places" feature has once again been updated. This window for organizing your bookmarks, history, and searches has been augmented with full backup capability. Mozilla says performance of the browser's JavaScript engine now makes browsing twice as fast as Firefox 2 for some highly interactive Web applications. For more details, release notes, and the list of known issues, head to the Mozilla Developer Center.

Source: PC Magazine

Recently, there was a video that I wanted to watch that was streamed over the internet and was embedded on a webpage. It wasn't just a short video, or else I would have just watched it at the time and moved on. So, I went on to do what I did previously when there was a streaming video that I wanted to download and keep to watch later. I just downloaded it. Unfortunately, some videos, such as the one that I wanted to watch, can't just be saved. The reason for this is that they are linked to via a multimedia stream (mms:// url). While it didn't appear that way on the page I was viewing, it just showed up as an AVI file, I later found out this is how it was being sent out to users whom were watching it. So, to make this process easier for everyone else, I decided to write up a short and simple guide on how to save streaming content on your own. I'd just like to note that this should work for any form of streaming, whether it's through an mms:// url or http:// url as I have tried both previously. I'm just going to do an example here, no actual linked file so I can save people out there some bandwidth, but it's simple enough to do once you find something you want.

First off, you're going to need to get the free program called MPlayer. It is an open source program that has a version available for whatever operating system you're running. I'm also going to be using the assumption that most people reading this are going to be on Windows (of some form) so the commands listed will be in that form. I'll also list the similar steps for other operating systems, but I haven't confirmed the accuracy of the other commands, so I make no guarantees that everything in the post will work if you happen to be on OS X or a Linux/UNIX system. Hopefully you are smart enough to figure it out though on your own if you are using one of the two systems. Once you've downloaded MPlayer, of which you'll want the non-GUI version, you want to have it installed or extracted to a folder that is easy to access. For Windows, I'd recommend extracting the archive to the Desktop, for other systems, if it's installed that should be good enough. Read more »

With the release of Windows Vista, there are likely many users that would want to install Windows Vista along side some sort of Linux distribution. The problem arises with two small features of Windows Vista that do not play well with Linux. The first of which, and the main issue, is the new bootloader that Windows Vista uses. The second, which only causes minor issues, is the new NTFS format that is used by Vista. The main installation procedure here is install Windows Vista, see the PROnetworks Installation Guide for details, and then install Linux. This guide will give users the instructions for doing so using the GRUB bootloader do to popularity. LILO, being a significantly less used bootloader, will not be looked at as distributions that have the option for LILO also can use GRUB. Read more »