I’ve been under a rock (and roll – hah!), but I just found out about MPD, otherwise known as the music player daemon. I’ve had my music server parked by my stereo for years and have been logging into the command line to play music. MPD makes this unnecessary.
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X-Geek
Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 60 of 70).
Donate computers to the Kramden Institute
I spent my lunch break gathering up old computers and parts I’ve been meaning to recycle for months now. I piled the back of the minivan high with this gear and drove over to the Kramden Institute in RTP to donate it all. Folks there were very friendly and appreciative of the gift. Thanks to my donations, two families will have nice computers that wouldn’t otherwise have them. Kids will be able to write papers, do research, and build their own ugly MySpace pages thanks to my gift.
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Cops should take a cue from kids
WRAL brings me the story that a new Interagency Radio System Helped Police in Cooper Capture.
The radios allowed law officers to do something this time that they had been unable to do in the past.
It also was something that police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel in New York City could not do on 9/11 – talk to one another by radio.
Slugging away
“Slug,” my Linux-hacked Linksys NSLU2 has been running Openslug Linux for months now and generally doing great. When the battery began dying on the UPS its been plugged into, Slug would reboot when the power would drop. It would then boot up but would frequently swap the drive order when it did, causing all sorts of mayhem.
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Get AT&T/Bellsouth DSL without the voice service!
It look some major sleuthing – all of my Internets skills, actually – but I finally discovered how to order standalone DSL (that is, DSL without phone service, a.k.a. “naked DSL”) from AT&T/Bellsouth! With this deal you can get high-speed Internet access without paying for a dial tone – redundant for people like my buddy Scott whose only phone is a mobile one.
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Bellsouth $10 DSL up and running
I got my Bellsouth $10 DSL up and running today with relatively little hassle. The “Sprint 660” DSL modem I purchased from Craigslist works just fine, too, in spite of not appearing on Bellsouth’s supported list of equipment.
I spent a little time at first just sorting out where my wiring goes in my house. I’ve got VoIP phones everywhere and so these “virtual” phone lines can be hard to tell apart from the real one. Once I found a good jack to use, I plugged in my DSL filters on my real phone line and cranked up my DSL modem.
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Bellsouth $10 DSL trial run
I signed up Sunday for AT&T’s FastAccess Lite DSL Term, otherwise known as $10 DSL. It requires a 12 month commitment, is only 768 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up, and requires your own DSL modem, but for the price its a deal … especially if AT&T loses money on it, and I have my reasons for, uh, wishing that to happen. While its true that the $10 deal does not appear on the FastAccess page, if you enter your phone number in the availability box the Term option for $10/month does appear which is the one you need.
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Fenyman and ants
Make Magazine’s blog linked to an amusing story on famous physicist Richard Fenyman’s experiments with ants. LanBo, the distributor of the gel-based ant farms, posted the Fenyman nuggets on its website.
Hallie has one of these ant farms on our kitchen counter. I hope she’s half as curious about ants as Fenyman was!
(Via the Make Magazine blog)
Linux and time zones
Okay, all you 1337 Linux haX0Rz out there, how do I teach my CentOS machines that the U.S. Gummint has screwed up daylight savings time this year?
Facebook’s worth fifteen billion? I think not.
Okay, that’s it. Money truly doesn’t mean anything anymore. Its all paper, worthless paper. I learned today that Microsoft just paid $240 million for a 1.6% share in Facebook.
Facebook, for crying out loud! And Microsoft’s quarter billion got them less than two percent of it!
I’m all for people being rewarded for their innovations, but Facebook is just another stupid social networking site. Where’s the lock-in? What’s to keep the next fad-du-jour from suddenly stealing their users? Remember Friendster? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
Give it up to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for hoodwinking Ballmer on this. He’s pulled off the con of the century.