Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 59 of 70).
Yesterday I switched my .forward on my Ibiblio account to point to my Gmail address. Poof! About 99% of the spam I was getting moved with it.
If my Ibiblio account wasn’t so useful or Ibiblio’s mission so important, I’d have probably axed it a long time ago, simply for the amount spam it generates.
A dozen years ago I was a young IT manager at a Raleigh software company. I had just ordered new Gateway 2000 PCs for our developers but something was terribly wrong. After just six months of service, the Western Digital hard drives in the new PCs all failed, taking a lot of work with them and adding a lot of work for me to rebuild the systems. I swore I would never buy another Western Digital hard drive.
Time moves on and the anger subsides. WD did the right thing by replacing all the defective drives. Quality improved. I dared purchase more WD stuff.
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I really love hobbies or projects that tie together many of my interests. One project that does this is the field of panoramic photography. It touches on astronomy, photography, mapping, math, orbital mechanics, image manipulation, spycraft, open source, and good old-fashioned duct-tape engineering. Maybe even a bit of fame, too!
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I’m working from the in-laws’ house today, so I need to access the same networking stuff I do from home. I have Tunnelblick running OpenVPN on my OS X laptop to provide access to my home and office servers from here. All that works fine for my OS X apps but it doesn’t carry over into my VMware Fusion sessions. Those sessions treat themselves as independent devices and therefore don’t route through my VPN.
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I was poking around my Mac tonight when I remembered I once downloaded Stellarium, the GPL star chart. “Awesome” is the only way to describe Stellarium. It draws the night sky as seen from anywhere in the world. You can instantly find any object in the sky. It can even point a motorized telescope. I hope to take it in the back yard at night and get better acquainted with the night sky.
Also check out Celestia, another GPL space viewer, only Celestia lets you fly through space to visit an object up close and personal.
Hard to believe software like this is freely available. It is, though, thanks to the GPL.
I was happy to learn that some fine hackers have ported the excellent OpenWRT package to the very Zyxel (rebranded as Sprint) DSL modem I bought off of Craigslist for $20. Some of these Zyxel modems include an integrated WiFi access point, so in theory you could use Linux to control your DSL, act as your firewall, and push bits into the ether, all from one tiny little box.
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For those of you who were waiting with baited breath to know how my AT&T FastAccess DSL was working for me (you remember, the $10/month plan?), I have been slack in updating you.
In short, it works great. Not fast enough to replace my cable modem, however, not with 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up. It wasn’t more than an hour or two before Kelly was complaining about the slow connection.
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As a frequent-flying geek I read with interest that JetBlue may soon roll out Internet access on its flights. When reporters raised the possibility of passengers making Internet phone calls, the airlines stubbornly dug in their heels:
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Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and present a crazy idea.
I do lots of thinking at 30,000 feet. I even do some at 10,000 feet on approach. Tonight I was marveling at the skill in which the pilot was using the rudder to counter the strong crosswind we were flying through. It planted a seed in my mind.
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Microsoft is doing away with the “kill switch” feature in Microsoft Vista, according to the Beeb. According to Microsoft, its anti-piracy features have served their purpose:
Microsoft said efforts to tackle piracy had seen numbers of fake copies of Vista at half the level of XP, the previous Windows operating system.
What doesn’t get mentioned is that perhaps more people prefer XP over Vista, hmm?
Anti-piracy tools have never, ever been a match for determined crackers. Pirates consider these measures to be mere speed bumps. In light of this, how bad does an operating system have to be to make even pirates not interested in it?
