Author: BlankMike
The first is more of an update than a review. Ubuntu 13.4 is out. For those into running Linux this has been a fairly successful update. Although I haven’t tried it there does not appear to be many complaints. Mint 15 (derived from this version of Ubuntu) should be out toward the end of May. The second is a program called Simutrans found at http://freecode.com. Alternatively it is available in the repositories if there is access to a Debian based…
For those interested in running Linux directly or through a virtual machine, this distribution is worth a look. In my case I first tried it on a virtual machine then later on a few bare metal installations. For years I have been saying operating systems (all of them) have become bloated with useless software. The people who created this distribution have proved my point. When running a virtual machine a significant hit in performance is expected. In this case the…
Minecraft is an on-line game where the players run around mining for certain minerals, build structures, combat monsters as well as each other. and generally explore an expanding world. It is divided into two components. Namely on-line servers as well as clients to access the servers. Both components are free however to make full use of the capabilities of the client, a non-free (premium) account must be used. The game components are available for the “big three” operating systems (Linux,…
A couple of weeks ago I noticed my HP printer was no longer printing two sided pages. Strictly speaking this was with Linux but it could happen with the Mac as well since they use the same printer driver software… I figured it was an application problem with Thunderbird and Firefox since all the other applications (and computers on my LAN) worked fine. It never occurred to me it was a driver problem. Thanks to some prodding by Adam T….
Here is the situation… My father was asked to take some pictures for a club he attends every week. He generally prints them out when ever someone asks for a copy. He also prints out a series of thumbnail pictures on a single page. I gather this is called a contact sheet. This time around the Windows program he used decided not to recognise the network printer. This was very odd because all the other programs on his machine saw…
What is K3b? It is a free CD/DVD/Bluray burning program for Linux (it can be compiled for the Mac as well). For the last little while, even before the last upgrade to the current version of Mint, I was having some trouble with the program. At first it no longer wanted to verify data disks. Just recently it wouldn’t even read the hard drive to pick up files to burn. It turned out the problem was a permissions thing. Unfortunately…
A couple of months ago I posted an article about a “home made” antenna I made from plans on the internet. A couple of days ago I completed an antenna with a different design I also found on the internet. Last night I held a demo of it for some friends (including a couple of retired TV/RADAR/HAM professionals. They were fairly impressed with the results and sensitivity. Considering the darned thing was made of wood and mostly wire coat hangers…
This is of concern to people running Intel Macs, PCs, or Virtual Machines. As of May 23, 2012 the official version of Mint 13 is available from http://linuxmint.com. If anyone has the RC version, it seems to have updated successfully to the official version. The release comes on a single layer 800MB DVD. There are two versions at the moment. Cinnamon (a Gnome 3 fork) and MATE (a Gnome 2 fork). I have installed the 64 bit RC of Cinnamon…
Regular readers will know I’m into DIY and fixing things. Lately my Linux PC has been having some hardware problems (which is why people haven’t been seeing a lot of regular posts from me lately). It’s been going on for some time in fact. I’ve checked out a lot of potential hardware issues and ended up replacing most of the computer at one point or another. One thing I haven’t checked out is the SATA cables. Last Friday I borrowed…
This is a generic sort of article… I have only tried it on one type of machine but this advice may prove useful in other situations. As regular readers know, I volunteer at an educational non-profit organisation every Friday as a systems administrator.One of the privileges is I get to borrow a computer every so often for one of my projects. In this case I had a computer I was using as a file server (using FreeNAS v7.x). Since I…
It’s going to take a while to get to the computer related material in this article. Please be patient. Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been curious about the world around me. I was the type of kid who wanted to see what was on the next block or figure out how dolls were made (yes I took them apart and put them back together again). The only time I got into trouble for it was when a…
I’ve discovered something surprising. There are many E-book readers for the Mac and only one for Linux. This is a shocker. Ideally, with a few changes, those Mac readers should function under Linux. I mention this because I like how some of the ones for the Mac work. The reader for Linux is so-so. Since there is only one (and I talked about E-book readers at length a few months ago) I’ll just say it is available in the Debian/Ubuntu/Mint…
Those of us in Canada are aware how our government keeps “shooting itself in the foot”. Those outside the country may not be aware just how silly and petty our government can get. For example they have this thing about promoting Canadian culture in the media. Not too bad on the surface of things right? Rather than encourage Canadians to produce our own material they de-regulate the media so they can purchase more American programming. Some of the stuff from…
This article is presented for those with Intel Macs (and PCs) who choose to have an alternative operating system available. It is possible to install it as a Dual-Boot system, Virtual Machine, or just run it from the live DVD. Late last month (November) Mint 12 was released to the public (free). Mint is a full multi-media distribution of Linux. There has been a lot of extremely positive press about this version. It’s almost as if someone hired the PR…
Ghostery is an add-on to FireFox (and other web browsers) which stop sites from tracking users as they surf the web. Installing it depends on which web browser and which version is being used. A good place to start is either tools, extensions, or add-ons. Once installed and the browser is restarted, Ghostery will go through three or four configuration screens. The last screen lets the user select which tracking cookies/bugs to block. One of the options is to let…
Frequent readers of this web page will realise I like to learn how to do things (this is the reason for the long gaps between my posts). I hope readers find this information to be useful… After seeing a member of another club demo it on a smart phone for me, I decided to give it a try myself. Be aware this is only scratching the surface of the topic and it can be a security risk if not implemented…
This is a command coming from the *NIX world I found to be useful for maintaining a backup for important software. It works either on a single computer or with two computers. The details can be found in the man page for the command. I’d like to thank Mike Doob from the MUUG for reminding me about this command. The simplest way to use the command is “rsync <file list or directory 1> <file list or directory 2>”. All it…
Last night I noticed there were some updates for Snow Leopard. I decided to install them. When I sat down at the computer an hour ago I saw there were errors and nothing was installed. This seemed oddly familiar when (back in the day) M$ was trying to get its users to leave ME and go with XP. They would push out failed updates and updates which would crash the system unless the user did a clean install… Assuming this…
Happy Canadian Thanksgiving everybody. This review will be just a quick one. I’m not an expert with this sort of thing and have only dabbled with it from time to time… What is it? Handbrake is simply a transcoder. It converts DVD’s to video files and video files from one format to another. Does it work? Yes. It does what it was designed to do quite well and actually is fairly stable in spite of having not been updated in…
A few minutes ago I downloaded and tried out a free music player called aTunes. They had a version update to 2.1.0. My impression is it is a good try. There are a couple of features which iTunes doesn’t have but (on the Mac at least) the interface is a little clunky. For the moment Apple doesn’t have much to worry about. However I can see where this project is going so it may be worth considering in the future….