To keep up with my blogging, visit tumblr.lapubell.com.

It’s a good time.

To all those that don’t know, the update will NOT be pushed to you over the air. You have to download this weird little Samsung program to your computer, connect your phone, and then push the updated firmware to it.

Also, that program only runs under windows, so I had to borrow my coworker’s netbook running win7 to make this happen.

My favorite part about the update is the auto tether. I’m currently typing this blog post on my laptop using the T-Mobile 3G connection through my phone. No more internet woes without a wifi hotspot. :)

Balls. Piss. Shit. ARG!

Well, now that i’ve gotten that out of my system, anyone know of any good freelance web development work needing done? I have more than enough motivation, and I gotta get some cash, quick!

The project was a success and I wrote my first app! It isn’t anything all that special, but it’s definitly more cool than a hello world app. It shows a background image, has my job’s logo as a button, and when you click it the phone shakes and adds the text "Zoom... " to the screen. There is also an options menu!

I did a writeup on my company blog today, so feel free to read it, download it, run it, criticize it, share it, whatever.

Company blog post

While playing Strange Idea of Love, we blew out our only remaining tweeter, leaving us with mid heavy mud for backing tracks. This really kinda blows.

Anyone know an awesome online store that sells tweeters?

I chose to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, instead of being a color. I think it worked out pretty well. Here’s some pictures.

If you still haven’t bought a ticket for that, head over to PinkNoiseBoys.co.uk and buy one. If you buy from us, not only do you skip out on the service charges, but you also get entered in to win a Pink Noise shirt! Then you can wear it to the show, and look more awesome than everyone else!

Anyway, i’ll be updating my twitter from the road, and maybe i’ll post here too, who knows how much time i’ll have in-between playing shows and driving and partying. See you all in a week at the Hawthorne Theatre! Let’s hope my car can make it without trouble on the road! Woo Hoo!!! I’m on tour!!!

They do good work for a fair price, and support Windows and Linux. If you got a mac, just take it to those "Geniuses".

This might be the best ebay purchase I’ve made so far.

Ukulele 1 – Download MP3 | OGG

If you can’t see the audio player above, it’s because your browser sucks and doesn’t understand HTML5. Get a better browser, or just download the track. HTML5 FTW!

This thing is pretty freaking rad. I got it, along with a huge wine glass for a quarter. Yes, this AND a wine glass for 25 cents. Super awesome.

Where did I score such a deal? The Estate Store that’s where. It’s a rad store that is like an awesome garage sale and always has a different supply of neat little things. They put their coolest items up on their blog, so people from all over the world can buy some of the more awesome items, but you gotta go out there to really experience the store.

well, just follow this link to watch the whole thing.

Here’s what i did:

Here is my ukulele. It’s a Lanikai LU-21C and it’s a great little gal. She sounds great, and is a huge step up from the toy ukes people can get for $30.

Here you can see that i’ve undone the strings, and placed the piezo pickup on the body. This is the piezo unit that I used. It costs 75 cents. Sounds great too. Here’s a close up of it.

I bought a mono 1/4’’ jack from radio shack that came in a two pack. It think that cost me about $2. Here’s a close up of that.

Next I used some copper wire and connected the leads from the piezo to the audio jack, and then removed the casing from the piezo. Becareful taking the plastic off the piezo. These things can break pretty easyily.

Next I used my dremel to make a hole for the jack. I took the washer off of the jack and traced the inside circle onto the body. Eventually it was the right size and the jack fit like a glove.

After putting the strings back on and taping the piezo to the body of the uke, I was all done! One afternoon and $2 and now I can play it through my sweet old Kustom amp. Not a bad saturday afternoon!

NOTES: I used to much wiring from the piezo to the jack and now there is a bunch of extra wire in the body of the uke. It rattles sometimes. Use less wire to avoid this.

If you don’t like the sound of the instrument when you amplify it, try moving the piezo to a differnet spot inside the body. It will pick up different vibrations better in different locations, so give it a try, and move it if necessary.

How cool is that? I mean, you can learn so much from a place like this, and I doubt by sharing their schematics they are going to loose any customers.

It sounds like it opened and closed, but if I was in amsterdam more often I would have been all over that place.

Last night i went to a craft night where I put together this and then headed home to take my evening nap around 11:30pm. Too bad my brain was still going because it took me a while to fall asleep and then i think my 4AM-7AM sleep was a little less deep. I did watch 3 episodes of true blood though, and that was awesome.

What is the everyman sleep schedule? Glad you asked. Most people in the world sleep about 7-8 hours each night (at least that’s the recommended amount) all in one go. Some people sleep a little less each night and have an afternoon nap. The everyman sleep schedule takes this idea a step further and has you sleep 3 hours for your main sleep, and take a short 20-25 minute nap about every 5 hours.

This means that I’ll be sleeping from 4AM-7AM before I get up and go to work. then, I’ll take three naps at some point in the day around noon, 5PM and 11PM. What I’ll get is about 3-4 more hours each day to work on awesome things, and my body won’t (hopefully) feel any worse. Actually, most people that can adapt to this schedule feel quite alert throughout the day.

Last night was my first attempt at this new schedule, and my body isn’t quite used to the two short naps. I didn’t get to sleep at all during my 6PM nap, and just barely dosed off during my 11PM nap. It wasn’t too surprising that I didn’t quite make it to 4AM, but hey, it was my first try. Tonight is going to be better.

This was a pretty good idea for the sparkfun.com guys, cause now i still really want that stuff in my cart, even if i have to buy it.

*sigh.

I write for my company’s blog every thursday, occasionally with a co-worker filling in when they have something awesome to write about. This last thursday was thanksgiving, so what better topic than turkeys and stuff? I decided to write a flash game and post it for the world to see, play, and rip me apart for not commenting my code enough.

Here is the FLA file.

when I get more info, like what hte movie is called, how awesome it was, and all that stuff, then i’ll update this post.

today is such a good day. not only am I now on google wave, but tonight is also the Pink Noise show at the Dante’s Go-Go Fashion show! OH BOY!

This whole weekend was pretty rad, and it all started with some pure bad ass-ness when Dethklok rocked my face off for the 2nd time. Yes, that’s right, I went and saw dethklok perform again and it was just as awesome as the last time.

Then, on saturday, I went to my good buddy Jordan Green’s new house to hang out for a bit and get the tour and all that. We also watched part of Krull, and I started getting that movie because it’s awesome. I didn’t have a chance to finish the movie because I had to rush home and finish up the background track for sunday’s show.

Sunday morning Pink Noise played the Portland marathon and we rocked it! The north end of the St. Johns bridge has never been rocked so hard! That song that I was working on so hard on saturday was our disco dance cover of Chariots of Fire, and I think it was a huge success. That was in the morning, so then I got to go home and take a nap and read my book. I’m currently reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman. It’s pretty effing rad.

I used to use ubuntu at work (cause i’m lazy) and sidux at home (because it’s fun), but when my work got us new laptops, I left the *buntu family behind. Now with sidux at work with the amazing KDE 4.3 desktop, my life is super sparkly.

If you don’t know what KDE is, then I feel a little bad for you. I’ve used every desktop manager that still exists in the debian repos and keep coming back to KDE. for a long time i used the 3.x branch. I think I was there from about 3.3 up till that amazing 3.5.10. Anyway, check out this announcement about KDE 4.3 if you want to learn more about it. With this desktop, you can have a MOVING STARFEILD AS YOUR DESKTOP. THAT’S BADASS.

My car was the Linux Racer, and was blocky and silly to say the least. I gutted a desktop alarm/AM/FM radio i got at goodwill and mounted the screen inside a "computer monitor." Then i made a matching keyboard and attached it. the final nerdy piece was a mounted usb thumb drive with bootable linux on it. this way I could bring my laptop to the derby and show off the power that my car could provide. it was quite beautiful. it was also the only one with working electronics. one car had a rocket attached, but that wasn’t usable until after the regulation speed races.

Here are some more pictures for your greedy little eyes to take in. Don’t you want to be there next year?

And finally, the grand champion of the day, our friend Gallagher and his winning watermelon car.

Monday, tonight: be sure to head down to the good foot for their weekly open mic band night where you can see Pink Noise perform sometime between 1030 and midnight. We are sure to win that prize money.

Tuesday: work and work from home on my sweet pinewood derby car.

Wednesday: work and band practice. finish last touches on my pinewood derby car.

Thursday: leave work early to head out to the new deal vodka distillery. perform for the Bradley Angle rebranding party. read morre about that here.

Friday: Evening show with Babies Got Rabies, Saucy Yoda, and Space Panther at Duke’s Landing. It’s free, so be there! More details here.

Saturday: Adult pinewood derby race! My car is sweet. I can’t divulge the secrets yet, but once the race is over, i’ll post pics and more.

Sunday... sleeeeeeeep.

Also, over the weekend me and my good buddy matt went to Oregon Decorative Rock and picked up some stone for the house’s firepit. After a long day of toil, the side yard looks FANTASTIC. pics to come.

my current projects are painting my room, finishing up the kitchen, setting up the network at home with vic and D, and setting up the music making station in the living room.

I think our house might settle down with the name "Fuck Mountain" and i’m so ready for the house to be finished. :)

To get started on the 200 situps program, hop over to http://www.twohundredsitups.com/ and take the initial test. If you didn’t hear, I also completed the 100 push up program. I highly encourage everyone to get involved with this, as these programs are awesome.

Time to start the 200 squats program!

When his first born was on it’s way, I made a little baby sweater with my trusty crocheting skills. It had a rad little skull on the front that was embroidered on there with help from my mom and her awesome sewing machine.

I was guessing that this new little guy, who is named Evan Jacob would need something rad to match that hand me down skull sweater, so i pulled out my hook, and got to work. Below see it in all it’s glory.

I’ve built all the releases up through now, and they were all very "fun". It was so nice to see that Google adopted the .deb package format first. I guess this makes sense as everyone always says that Google’s in house OS is based on Ubuntu, but either way, it makes me happy.

GDebi installer worked perfect on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine at work, and I’m guessing that it will work just as well for my Sidux laptop when I get home tonight. If not, you can be sure that I’ll be back here to bitch and moan about it. If you want the browser, click here.

Way to go Google devs! I am quite pleased. :)

This is a good thing, as I’ll finally be able to have a server that isn’t affected by hillsboro’s power outages (or my buddies random opps that results in the server going down...)

Please hold tight while the migration happens.

On a completly seperate note, I have been messing around with new music software called Renoise. It’s so cool! It’s a classic tracker, meaning that the note input is vertical, not piano roll style. It’s so good because it uses vsts, vstis and normal samples. If you know what that means, then you should totally check it out. I’m running the demo through WINE right now and playing around with it. I’m gonna try and make some music that sounds like chip tunes (Sabrepulse specifically). If i end up making anything cool enough, I’ll share it on my music page.

 

*wisest wizard is a drinking game where after every beer that you drink, you tape the empty can to the bottom of the next beer. eventually you have a bunch of empties taped to the bottom of your beer, and this is your wizard staff. whoever has the longest staff at the end of the night is the wisest wizard.

The opera that I saw was Rigoletto. all about this dude who has a hump on his back and is the henchman for a corrupt duke. He helps the duke get laid and seduce all the pretty ladies, but doesn’t want the duke to get his hands on his hot young daughter. Basically, this opera is a tragedy, so you know that it’s all gonna go to shit. He gets cursed, the duke kidnaps his daughter (all with a light hearted nature, of course), has his way with her, she’s still in love (WTF?) and decides to intervine when she learns that Rigoletto has hired an assassin to kill the duke. Instead she sacrifices herself for the dude, dies and the opera ends. Ha! Verdi was a messed up dude.

Anyway, it was still super rad, and I loved every minute of it. I highly recommend that everyone goes to the opera at least once, but give the italian opera a shot first. That or german. I’m super stoked for this next year’s season of operas. Puccini and Mozart! Hells yeah!

First things first, work has been pretty awesome. Nice full days with fun stuff to work on. The last couple of projects have been pretty huge and it’s nice to have a bunch of that stuff under my belt.

Oh yeah, I also went to go see Ladytron and The Faint play at the Roseland Theater. It was RAD. They both did super good. It was good to get up and dance around again. I haven’t done that in quite some time.

Next, I was working on a version of the Gnome game Robots in Flash, so I should have that ready to be played pretty soon. It’ll be on my work’s website, but I’ll probably put the .fla up here too, so all you real flash programmers can laugh at my methods (I’d rather build it in pygame, but that’s not as internet friendly).

Last but not least, I got a rad haircut. I’m so 80s! Check out my myspace page to see it (no i’m not going to get a stupid facebook. This is the only site that I want to upkeep, but what the hell, i’ve had that myspace account for a long time now anyway). myspace.com/lapubell. ]]> Thu, 07 May 2009 15:32:57 -0700 kholsapple@gmail.com (Kurtis Holsapple) http://www.lapubell.com/index.php?page=comment&post=50 What happened? Today is the first day since I implemented google analytics that I have had more Windows users than Linux users view my site... :(

Does this mean that I need to post more about Linux? I can do that.

my only concern is weather or not this one will affect my hand modeling. I’m not too concerned, as this thing is rad.

over the weekend my buddy was moving stuff around in his garage. It’s much better organized, but in the process the web server that we have in there got unplugged and went down. I finally made it out to hillsboro and got everything hooked up again.

trouble shooting a computer’s boot process without a monitor is not easy.

built in flash, this little site is all kinds of fun. you can trigger some bad techno that I wrote to start spinning on a turntable, turn on and off the party lights, and more. it’s super silly and a whole lot of fun. check it out here.

In other news about my life, Pink Noise is about to release a 3 song pre-EP record that we are going to give away. I’ll put those ogg files up (with the preview buttons and mp3s) when they are ready to go, and they will be on cds that will be all over portland soon. I’m super pumped about this band!

can’t wait for the weekend. I’m gonna sleep like a baby.

I’m going to now move on to the 200 situp program, which i’m sure will also be an amazing accomplishment. for now, if you don’t know what i’m talking about, head to hundredpushups.com and take your initial test.

lets all get dead sexy!

then I headed to my parent’s house where I have been house sitting and met up here with my buddy matt. we are working on a little website for a rental house in Sunriver. Instead of getting paid, we’re gonna be able to hang out there. sweet deal in my book.

on another note, I finally got my portfolio section online. sadly enough, I don’t have that much to show for. a lot of the stuff I coded in the past isn’t online anymore (stupid real estate agents) and I don’t have a way to get a prety screen shot of it. it probably sucked though, as I’ve gotten way better at coding in the last year or two, but it would have still been nice to have. ah well. check it out if you want, the link is on my sidebar.

Also, I’m house sitting out at my parents house this week, so I’m not going to be doing too much. Maybe this means that I’ll get more done on some of my side projects...? I’ll be chilling with my little brother (ubuntu user, go mikey!) so I don’t know how productive i’ll be.

Oh and two things that I hate: D-Link routers and Sterling Internet Access. My parents wifi sucks.

Really, I was a bit skeptical of the platform and how much custom coding was going to have to be done, but it really has come quite a long way. They have hooks in every part of their system so expanding it is really easy.

I’m thinking of writing a GPL plugin. Any fresh ideas on a plugin the community needs? I don’t think that the custom code i’ve written for this site will really be useful to anyone else.

Anyway, after a nice long week, I had a great night filled with adventure and fun, and I’m really excited for this weekend. Laid back Saturday working on a couple of projects and a Dot Matrix practice on Sunday. well, anyway, just wanted to post about a great Thursday night.

this is something that for some reason I thought was limited to Macs only (like they had some crazy propritary hardware/software mix) and never thought that it was going to happen on my machine. but then, my fellow nerd buddy/musician friendwas talking to me about this new version of Linux he was trying out called Chakra Linux. It’s based off of arch, so I was totally interested, as Arch has been the only other distro that I would consider trying anymore (I’m just too into debian to give it up, no matter how many times i’ve strayed I always come back).

Now I knew that arch is super good at documenting just about everything, but didn’t know some of the things that are talked about in the arch wiki. After reading some of the stuff my buddy sent me, I decided to put it to the test and add some stuff to my sidux install. I followed the instructions here and learned how to make my touchpad register multi touch for vertical scrolling! It’s awesome!

The lines that I added to my xorg.conf file are all in the "InputDevice" section:
     Option "VertEdgeScroll" "false"
     Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "false"
     Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "true"

Three lines, and I deactivated the default behavour and added my own. Linux never ceases to amaze me!

Has anyone ever used the circular scrolling? Leave me a comment on how much you like it if so!

Anyway... after finishing those books, I moved on to a new series. Remembering how much I liked reading the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I got my hands on all five books in the series. They are all pretty short, and I figured that I could get through them pretty quick.

The first book is so good. I’m now about halfway through the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. It’s really not that great. It’s a little too out there. If someone would be so kind, could they tell me what the rest of the books are like? I sure hope this one gets better!

Next, I fixed my wireless problem last night! For those that don’t know, I use Sidux as my Linux OS and the last upgrade broke the wireless software that I was using. After much reading and learning, I have found out that the way I was connecting to the internet through my wifi card wasn’t officially supported. So, after some software installs, some config file editing, rebooting, some cursing, some more reading, and some more editing it all works now! hoorah!

Last but not least, does everyone know what I’ve always wanted to be? Professional musician? Maybe. Professional Nerd? Maybe that too. But here’s the right answer. PROFESSIONAL HAND MODEL! And my career is about to take off! I’m going to be featured in an upcoming ad for a local group using my beautiful hands to showcase something awesome. When the project is finished up in two weeks, I’ll post some of my favorite shots for your viewing pleasure.

Man today is so good! Who loves life? I DO!

so here are the first two tracks. please let me know what you think when you take a listen. if you couldn’t tell, we are trying to be an 80’s band, not an 80’s inspired band.

I love the software energyXT as a DAW for music creation and recording. It’s really robust, doesn’t limit me in ways i’ve been limited before, and is only slightly tweeky. It has a linux version, but that version doesn’t support VSTi synths. I tried using the windows version from wine with linux, but then certain vsts won’t load as they have registry entries and wine just doesn’t cut it (even with wineASIO, which helped a ton).

so alas, I’ve been in dual boot mode and have been using xp for most if not all of my weekend. and I must say, I miss linux! I use sidux with KDE 3.5.10 as my primary desktop and can’t stand all the bugs and glitches in windows XP. I will admit, after getting used to the linux way of doing things, windows system administration is so annoying... ugh.

That is all i wanted to share. Once the week starts up again, i’ll be able to get back into the programmers mindset and will definitely be back into my favorite OS. can’t wait.

P.S. go download energyXT and make some rad music. then post it online and send me a link. I’d love to hear it.

The only annoying thing is that stupid "from web" that shows up at the end of the tweet. supposedly, I have it set up so that it should say "from lapubell.com" but it doesn’t. grr.

What does that mean? Well, if you are stalking me, I’ve just made your life that much easier. Please just check out this link and if I turn into a true twitterer (is that a word?) then you should be able to get updates about me regularly.

May I present a screenshot of my top score, 79,547, from Bubble Spinner. What’s your top score?

VICTORY IS MINE!

So anyway, I’ve never messed with Kino, or Cinerlla (or whatever it’s called) but knew that i could rip the video into clips with ffmpeg. Here is how it ended up working.

Here is all you need to know:
-The starting point of your clip (HH:MM:SS)
-The length of the clip (HH:MM:SS)
-and these commands...

So the first thing that we need to do is convert the movie to a raw mpg. You do this with this command:

ffmpeg -i INPUTMOVIE -sameq -intra OUTPUTFILE

ffmpeg -ss STARTING_TIME -vsync 0 -t LENGTH -i OUTPUTFILE -vcodec copy YOURCLIP

ffmpeg ROCKS!

Here is a link to the album’s purchase page on Amazon.com. At the time of writing, it’s only $7.99, which is probably the best eight bucks you could spend.

the stupid keyboard is so annoying. the touch screen is super nice, but the keyboard was so hard to figure out. stupid sliding your finer/stylus up the keyboard from bottom to top changes it from lowercase, to uppercase, to puncuation, to numbers. took way too long to figure that out.

And now i’m also typing this on my new connection from comcast. after moving it took me a while to get the internet set up here. the neighbors are nice though, good ol’ open wifi points

I just got back from a 2 week break where my job is closed for the holidays. It was a nice break and was good timing with all that winter storm crap that we had this year.

Now that I am back to work, I’ll be updating my programs section with some new stuff that I have been working on. My pygame skills got a little more polished over this break, and the upcoming Dot Matrix video game should be pretty cool.

So if you haven’t already, you should go to this page to learn how you can get your own gmail stickers.

I completely agree that Linux is what it is because of the natural evolution of the OS from the ground up. Linux’s strength lies in the fact that it is open, has choices and does things it’s own way. As a user that came from a Windows background, I will be the first to admit that the learning curve is great, but entirely worth it.

One thing that I always ask myself when reading about Linux adoption is, "Is wide spread Linux adoption what we really want?" By this I mean, do we really want to put ourselves into the position that Microsoft currently holds? I for one am slightly concerned by this notion. The beauty of this is that if "Linux" becomes the number one OS for consumer desktops, it will not be controlled by a single corporation. This is a problem for end users though

If we really want Linux to become a widely used desktop OS, we need to remove the OS from the user experience. This is why the learning curve is so high, as every OS has a way that it does things. We will never be able to remove the OS from the user experience because each use is different. Again, here lies the beauty of Linux, as it can be customized to work exactly as the user wants it to.

I am not one to put Linux in a box and make it so that there are less choices, and thus less freedoms, but I am a supporter of the Linux Standard Base. I am also a supporter of a unified Package Management system. I don’t believe that they must become part of every distro though. Standardization makes things simple. If a platform is to be widely adopted, it needs to be able to be supported. If a distro chooses to opt out of a standard that is set in place, that is fine and more power to them! However, I would not expect them to be a major player in the desktop market.

As a user of a Debain based Linux distro (Sidux), I always feel much more comfortable doing things on Debian based systems. I’ve never felt comfortable on a system that uses rpms as packages, nor on a suse machine. I love the fact that they have grown so large (and PCLinuxOS is pretty cool, too). However, when a new person comes up to me and is finally ready to make the switch, I would be stupid to recommend something that I am not familiar with.

My little brother is a good example. I was very excited to set him up with a dual booting machine (Ubuntu and Vista) as I knew he would still want to play computer games and use software that isn’t available on Ubuntu (yet). After a few months, he called me up looking for help as his computer wouldn’t boot any longer. It turns out that he wasn’t using his linux partition at all, and had filled his 150G Vista partition. As Vista doesn’t include ext3 drivers, the other half of his 300G hard drive was sitting there without being used. So, the inexperienced user that he is, he decided to remove the linux partition so that he could use that hard disk space for more stuff. Unfortunately for him, this wiped his GRUB install and there went his boot.

How do we help users like my little brother? He doesn’t really care what he is using, as long as it works, and doesn’t mind paying for software. Luckily for him, he was broke enough that he didn’t go out and buy a new copy of vista (his machine was refurbished and didn’t come with disks) and instead decided to install gOS after my recommendation. There are many people though that only use their computer as a tool and don’t mind paying for the OS, Office Suite and more.

My question for you is, how will Linux fill the role in their lives if it isn’t standardized? Software will be hard to install, they will never touch a config file, and the system won’t be customized to work the way they want it to. They will use the default options and just click OK without reading any prompts that the computer puts in their way.

I guess a bigger question is, should we be pushing for such a user to be using Linux anyway?

Congrats america! This one is for the history books.

I am calling out for all websites to use tables for data and CSS for layout. Is that really so bad? Keeping everything tidy, your HTML separate from your CSS and your javascript, makes everything much easier to debug, restyle or add to. Tables should be used to store table data. That’s all.

sheesh. i feel like a grumpy old man.

On a completely different note, I have been chosen as a beta tester for the upcoming game Atmosphir! I’m so stoked! I saw the announcement for the beta sign ups on Digg, and didn’t actually think I’d get chosen, but now I have a pretty sweet beta running on my thinkpad. I loved the way they got this working. Three download options, Windows, Mac and Universal Linux. I thought I would run into problems on my Sidux box, but to my surprise, run the bin file they give out and BAM, game time. (and people are saying it is too hard to program games for linux... to many distros... whatever)

I still have yet to make my first level and want some inspiration for level design. As I don’t know how many beta testers there are out there, I thought I would give a shout out to the community. If you haven’t been chosen but have some good ideas for level design, let me know in a comment below. I’ll totally reply to a serious request and as I get better at making the levels your idea WILL be implemented. Let me know!

So here is the story. I work at a tech savvy little office doing various little development projects (mostly PHP and a little bit of jQuery) and we have got a smoking fast connection to the internets. This however does not incline me to take advantage of this speed to grab all kinds of stuff off the web with bittorrent. I do however enjoy listening to a good book on tape while building things.

So I find a link to a torrent of Librivox Reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula (it’s not the ogg files, but I can live with that) and want to listen. I could wait until I’m home, but why do that? I have my shell access open on my home machine and a CLI bittorrent client. SSH to the rescue!

lapubell@localMachine:~$ ssh lapubell@remoteMachine

lapubell@remoteMachine:~$ btdownloadheadless --url http://isohunt.com/download/23888711/librivox.torrent
(I know, i know, this is a server running older software, the newer version has a different command line name)

lapubell@localMachine:~$ sshfs lapubell@remoteMachine:PATHTOBTDOWNLOAD /media/server

If you followed all of that, you would now know that I now have my home machine downloading the audio book, but I have that folder mounted via SSH to a local folder. This way, I can still listen to the book as the files finish downloading, but not use up the company’s bandwidth on something I can download using this method.

Thank you to the strangers that took my digg submission and spread the word to stumbleupon.com, tuxmachines.org, boycottnovel.com and especially linuxtoday.com.

let’s keep spreading the linux love!

With the release of dolphin, the new KDE default file manager, I decided to give the default file manager a try again. Still couldn’t get it to do what I wanted, so it’s back to trusty ol’ thunar.

Why do I love it so much? Simple.

Edit > Configure Custom Actions

With this one simple dialog, I can turn my file manager into the script power house that I have grown to love. With a simple written script, and a quick configuration change to thunar, I have point and click execution. awesome.

Here is a screen shot of me right clicking on a folder to get the custom actions available to that item.

My ’chmod to 644’ option was really easy to set up and a huge time saver for all the files i create inside of my Virtual Box installation of Windows XP. As I am sure many of you know, any files created inside of my virtual machine that are located on a shared folder come out with permissions for read/write on the owner level only. This sucks when I have to ftp those files to a web server, and the permissions usually make it so that they are not even viewable. My solution, add a custom action to Thunar, then any files I want to can be selected, right clicked and chmodded to 644. Here is my thunar entry for this command:

All in all, I have never seen so much flexibility in a file manager with such ease of integration. Way to go XFCE devs, my hat is off to you.

This means that I have access to some of the earliest binary packages that come to Debian, getting me very new software. I also get a very fast running machine, as everything Sidux related is compiled for i686. The stock KDE 3 desktop is the fastest I have seen it run.

Check it out if you want to. It’s not as polished as Ubuntu (and it’s derivatives) and I think it is a little easier to set up than straight Debian. You can get to the site here. ]]> Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:26:34 -0700 kholsapple@gmail.com (Kurtis Holsapple) http://www.lapubell.com/index.php?page=comment&post=16 I finished getting my bike up and running, and it just needs a few more touches on the pain and brake cabling. So far I have ridden it to work 4 times, and it is taking it’s toll.

I’m sleepy.

On another note, my first batch of beer is finished and me and Vic bottled up ~36 22oz "bombers" of delicious homebrew. Soon we will have a party. Wanna come?

Database calls, multipe style sheets for different themes, and much much more.  Be prepared...

Brendon Small was front and center and was shredding like crazy. Gene Hoglan (the drummer for the tv show) was rocking and the other two guys (I couldn't make out their names)used to play with Steve Vai.  All while they were ricking, there were animated clips of the Five cartoon Dethklok members doing what they do best, killing and rocking.

 There were little breaks in the set where the story would come in, with the panel of observers talking about gassing the crowd and turning us all into mutants.  I loved it.

Click here to download this awesome game. Note, it runs in dos, so you will either need to get some dos emulator installed or pull that REALLY old computer out. I used DOSBOX and it ran like a champ. The game wants you to be using a joystick, but I figured out that when you are supposed to push the joystick button, you can press F10. Have fun world!

Also, I finally finished my first program that I am willing to share with the world. It’s called kurtisWrite and you can downlod it on my programming page. GPL so do with it as you would.