I Can Has Linux?

It looks like you will soon be able to acquire a 25-watt AMD Athlon64 3100+ in the AM2 package, per this article on Linuxdevices.com. This is great news for embedded applications, as the Geode was a poor performer even by old standards.

I think these CPUs will find huge value in custom DVR boxes. Sure, MPEG-4 acceleration is fine when you just want to record or watch TV, but what if you want to compress those recordings? A custom DVR with a 3100+ could run compression jobs when the tuner’s not active, giving you even more space on your DVR’s drive. Assuming a performance profile on par with the Athlon 64 3000+, it should be more than enough for XviD encoding. You won’t get any stellar x264 encode performance, but such is life for anyone who doesn’t have an overclocked 4-way box as their media center.

Now we just need a mini-ITX AM2 board that supports 4GB of RAM and firewire, and we’ll be set!

The Linksys WRT54G….is there anything it can’t do?

I already think it’s possible to control a CNC mill with a WRT54G, but apparently someone has used one to pilot a robot, and that is fantastic.

You can already build a temperature sensor into the WRT54G (or any 1-wire device, for that matter), as somebody else has demonstrated. I wish I was more EE inclined, I’d be all over tinkering with this.

I wonder what other crazy stuff you can do with a WRT54G….hmmm…..

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

Make sure you have ‘beep’ installed. Try it out by executing beep at the command prompt. If you don’t have it, just ‘sudo apt-get install beep’ and you’ll be on your way.

Now, open up a terminal, and paste this in:
while true; do sleep $(($RANDOM/1000)) && beep -f 2000 -l $(($RANDOM/100)) ; done

Lock your terminal and go to lunch. When you get back from lunch, just CTRL+C to stop the annoyance.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

(No I’m not a BOFH….most of the time.)

Per this news article, it seems as though the next SCO-style legal fight could be over advertising, or more specifically, software that blocks ads from appearing.

What’s next, the AIAA sending you subpoenas because you run AdBlock Plus in Firefox? Rubbish.  I think this will be a very short-lived legal fight indeed. It’s one thing to violate TOS for a website, it’s another to go after customers. We’ll see how this pans out.

Until next time!

-LightningCrash

smbpasswd -U username -r domaincontroller

It’s that easy.

So if you’re a Linux guy stuck in a Windows workplace, there’s your solution, no RDP/VNC/VMware/walking over to Windows box needed!

Until next time,
-LightningCrash

I recently came across this article mentioning that Google searches for Ubuntu recently surpassed searches for Jesus.

At this point, I was curious. What else had Ubuntu surpassed?

Well, despite Ubuntu’s best marketing strategies, it has not surpassed sex, not by a long shot.

Ubuntu is very close to “friends” in search volume, however, and not too far away from “BMW.” The BMW is more likely to impress women than Ubuntu, though, so maybe you should skip the Linux User Group meeting and go to a BMW dealership instead.