The Tentacled Monkey

So yesterday I received my first phone upgrade in almost 2 years, Verizon’s new Motorola Droid. So far there really are only two things that I can say negative about it.

1. The antenna is noticeably weaker than it was in my Blackberry 8830. However, the 8830 has the best cellular antenna on any phone I have ever seen so it wasn’t a surpise to me.

2. The keyboard is just slightly smaller than I would have liked. But again, it is huge in comparrison to the minute keyboard on the 8830. In fact this post was placed using the Droid.

The email app also doesn’t seem to support rulesets, but again this isn’t a huge issue.

The good attributes are simply too long to list. The screen is amazing! And video plays with seemingly HD quality. The unit is very responsive and I am generally in love with it.

I cannot as of yet give an accurate account of battery life as today is the first day of a full charge, but I will let you know later.

Pics follow, sorry for their quality. I only had access to a camera phone.

MurfMan Geek, Tech cellphone, droid, Geek, review, Tech

Well I finally finished Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. About three-quarters of the way through and I started getting really pissed with Mr. Abercrombie and the somewhat predictable nature to which he tends to place in his stories. But alas, he has redeemed himself and the ending of Best Served Cold was far far better than the so-called ending of the First Law Trilogy. He still tends to have an issue with leaving characters alive that probably should have died, but honestly this novel is filled with death. So characters not dying was against the grain. I have to say that I will read anything else that Mr. Abercrombie produces.

On a second note, I have started reading after much delay, Use of Weapons by the great Iain M. Banks. This marks the third in the Culture series, which has taken its place as being the best Sci-Fi series that I have read ever. I have only gotten about 50 pages deep into it, but I cannot tell you how nice it was to bridge the gap from epic fantasy to space opera in one day. It was like a long awaited homecoming. More on this novel later.

I have managed to finally come to terms with Windows Vista. I replaced the shell. Yes in the 90’s fashion of Win200 and XP I tried several old favorites (Litestep, BB4Win) and some new ones (Geo-Shell, Object Desktop) but it was SharpE that grabbed my attention. SharpE is a very polished and usable shell that can be used without heavy customization, although some tweaking won’t hurt at all. If anyone is fed up with the default Windows shell environment, the window manager for those in the know, then I highly recommend SharpE!

MurfMan Books, Tech Books, Culture, Iain Banks, Joe Abercrombie, SharpE, shell, Tech

After years of constant legal battles, the guys behind The Pirate Bay are selling one of the world’s most popular internet sites for just under 8 million dollars according to the website’s own blog and Ars Technica. The reasoning behind the sale, from what I can gleam from the blog and a the Twits from one site admin, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, is extreme burnout.

And honestly, who can blame them? For six years these guys have been around providing the world with not just the best torrent tracker on the web, but also a continuing front line for digital freedom. And according to Kolmisoppi, only TPB is being sold, the other apps and websites that the group owns will remain intact.

What sort of impact will this have on the torrent scene in general? Well, it is hard to say but this is definitely not the first time that the p2p subculture has seen things turned on its ear. So most likely, things will continue on with another website rising up from the ranks to fill the void.

It might mark the end of an era, however, the fall of TPB might just signify the drop in widespread pirating of media, especially as more and more legally free streaming routes become availiable (hulu, last.fm, pandora, etc.). But ultimately only time will tell.

MurfMan News, Tech, Web Pirates, Tech

This is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound dice rolling machine capable of processing 1.3 dice rolls per day. It is really quite impressive… dare I day a thing a beauty?

MurfMan Geek, Tech, Web dice, gadgets, Geek, Tech

MurfMan Geek, Tech, Web Economics, TED, video

An absolutely amazing talk by mycologist Paul Stamets at the TED conference where he lists 6 ways that the mycelium fungus can help save the world. A must watch!

MurfMan News, Tech, Web Science, TED, video

Well it seems that TWC is at it again. This time by trying to outlaw city owned ISPs in North Carolina. Basically this is the deal, TWC got their panties in a know because their tiered billing plan fell through. This caused them to evidently pull the DOCSIS 3.0 testing from the floor citing that it was a part of CBB (Content Based Billing). (OK guys, that was fucking shady and for more of it hit the link.)

But now, they are trying to lobby against community owned ISPs stating that they cannot turn a profit when in competition against them. This seems like an open market to me but who the fuck cares, what the people of Wilson, NC did is a geeks wet dream. There lowest package of digital cable bundled with 10MBS UP&DOWN was $35! Their highest package was $300 a month but it is 100MBS up and down. Anyway, TWC evidently has a tree lodged in their urethra to try and pull some fucked up shite like this.

Read more about it from these links (they get into more detail but not as fun).

[image from indyweek]

• Read – DailyTech article
• Read – IndyWeek article
• Read – Greenlight home page
• Read – Save NC Broadband blog

MurfMan News, Tech assholes, Greenlight, ISPs, Time Warner Cable, TWC

In case that you have been living under a rock lately, or running Windows exclusively, you might not have heard about Boxee. Boxee is basically a 10-foot interface for you computer to be displayed on your flat screen tv. Where it differs from most though is that not only is it possible to view your local content (videos, music, pictures, etc.) but you can also view lots of content that is streamed down from the internet.

Boxee is not the first people to do this, the Popcorn Hour device will also do it, but it has a dedicated hard ware device. Boxee can just run similar to Media Center for Windows on top of everything else. Oh and all of the feeds for the internet tv are RSS so you get all sorts of great stuff from Hulu to PBS to Joost and the BBC.

So anyway I signed up a few months back to take part in the alpha phase testing of Boxee on Windows and I got the email last night to download the app. So far they have done a great job, the only issue I have had as of yet is that the items from the BBC would not play last night. But over all I am very happy with it so far.

I will keep everybody up to date regarding the findings as they happen.

MurfMan Personal, Tech, Web alpha testing, boxxe, Tech, Windows

Really interesting talk about Howard Moskowitz and the world of variants of food science and branding.

MurfMan Tech, Web gladwell, moskowitz, TED

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu based distro that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and an up to date GNU/Linux desktop. Here is the blurb from DistroWatch.com:

Linux Mint is one of the surprise packages of the past year. Originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs, it has now developed into one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market – complete with a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, a web-based package installation interface, and a number of different editions. Perhaps most importantly, this is one project where the developers and users are in constant interaction, resulting in dramatic, user-driven improvements with every new release. DistroWatch has spoken to the founder and lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, about the history of the distribution.

Linux Mint Desktop

One of the best ideas behind Linux Mint is that things should work out of the box, period. So even my fairly new Atheros wifi card in the laptop was recognized without issue, something that Ubuntu 8.10 was unable to do. Also, there are enough multimedia codecs to make anyone happy.

Mint also uses their own package repositories, the Ubuntu repositories, and the apt repos for Debian, allowing you to search between them all individually to find the right package. A very nice touch if you ask me.

All in all there is not a whole lot that I can say is bad about this distro. I like it much better than Ubuntu, I really like the look and feel of it all, the menus are great, hardware recognition is on better than 95% of the distros out there, and it’s Debian based.

The one big issue that I did notice is when I attempted to install Mint on the my laptop;s hdd. I did not want to do a full install but had planned to dual-boot with Vista, I use it for work, make Mint the primary and set up a virtual session to the Vista partition. Sounds fine, but the Mint partitioner failed when attempting to re-partition the free space. It sat at 0% for abotu an hour and a half before prompting me that the partioning tool failed.

At this point I was fairly frightened that I had just nuked the hdd and lost my work essentials in the process (I know I know I should have backed it all up). So I rebooted into Vista and watched intently and chkdsk worked for about an hour to repair the damage done to the partition. Once it was finished, Vista came back to life with no data lost (extremely happy).

So I then decided to install it on a USB drive and just run Mint persistently. I decided that this would be a great time to try out a few different methods for installing to a pen drive, something that in years past was a bit of a daunting task.

First I went and found a tool I heard about from Veronica Belmont on Tekzilla, Unetbootin. Unetbootin is a simple windows app that will install from an ISO or will download an entire distro for you. It will copy all of the files over and then make the pen drive bootable. Since I already had the Linux Mint iso I did that option and had a bootable pen drive in about 5 minutes.

Unetbootin Interface

I did try the Distribution selector first and installed Slax, which is KDE based and although it found my wifi adapter I could not get KwifiManager to actually use it to save my life.

Next I tried a micro-distribution that I had heard about and thought “what the hell” called SliTaz. I have to admit that this little guy really agreed with my minimalistic nature. It was really fast as the entire thing loads to RAM when it starts by default, its only an 80MB filesystem and a 30MB iso.

I honestly think that if I had the opportunity to really start hashing away at it I might switch to this little distro in the future. The major drawback for me was that there was no wifi support built into it’s kernel at all. oh well.

So all in all I am exceptionally pleased with Linux Mint and plan on using it as my main distro for the foreseeable future. I would actually recommend it over Ubuntu for Linux newbies and regulars out there alike.

Update! – Unetbootin will not create a persistent flash install as it turns out. After hours of setting up Linux Mint last night I turned it on this morning and realized that it was not actually persistent at all. So I recreated the flash drive from the ISO and from the tutorial at PendriveLinux. All is well again.

MurfMan Personal, Tech hardware, KDE, Linux, Linux Mint, SliTaz, Ubuntu, Unetbootin