Linux Blog

I’ve always had an interest for electronics and recently I’ve been exploring my interests more. Last week I sorted through my tub of parts and placed them in individual draws. It took a good while to sort everything but I think it was worth it. I’ve seen power supplies built from PC power supplies before so I thought I’d build one my self. Thing is, I never really got around to it.

Yesterday I was feeling rather ambitious and decided to make a bench top power supply for small electronics. All the sites I found I have lost, so I kind of made it up as I went along. Most of them used ATX power supplies that are readily available, but I opted for the easy way out and used an AT with a hard on/off switch. At first this was the only reason I used it, but there are more advantages to using a AT over an ATX power supply for an external power supply. Firstly, it was cheap, well free actually. I took it from a PC that I had modified some time ago. I have a box full of AT power supplies in storage that I’ll get to some time and replace it. But I won’t be using the PC it came out of for a while, mostly because I have toaster ovens that are faster. Another reason it is better than a ATX is it has less voltages. The only voltages listed are 12v, 5v, -5v (7v) and GND. They vary in amps but are sufficient for what I will be using it for. It made it easy not to screw it up since there wasn’t many wires.

To make it was really easy. I took the top off. Drilled 4 holes in the case and inserted the insulated terminal, checking to make sure they didn’t ground out on the case. Cut most of the cables, leaving a couple of molex’s hanging out just in case I need them. I then soldered the remaining wires to a terminal by voltage (Yellow +12, Red +5, Red +/-5, Black GND.) It might not be the prettiest of them all, but I think it will do its job well.

Some one (and I’m sorry if I’m breaking some sort of twitter code here) but I can’t remember who tweeted about this website called academic earth (http://www.academicearth.org/) The concept is simple, go there and you can watch video’s or lectures from some famous professors. I watched one on physics, but could not finish it. My thoughts through out this entire video were something as follows:

“This is a college course?”
“This is a college course at MIT?”
“This guy is nuts”
and
“Why are they using overhead projectors.”

So my time at MIT didn’t go very well, but atleast I didn’t pay for it. Anyway maybe you’ll do better. Head over to academicearth.org and watch some videos. Let me know if you find anything particurly interesting relating to technology – The introduction to robotics was cool, although I don’t think we should be teaching our students how to make killer robots.

No, not Dataflow Diagram. Document freedom day. Undoubtedly you’re are aware that it is today, given the amount of press it has got and what a good cause. I was thinking about how I could participate in Document Freedom Day. A few things came to mind. The first was was:

“How about I save all my documents in .odt, that will teach them.”

No go on that one, I already do that because I’m too lazy to save into .doc. I also call the “open source” people out on it when they ask me to save as .doc because it “works on Windows”.

“I could translate all the .doc’s and .docx’s on the file server to an open format.”

Well, my wife just lost her job, I don’t need to lose mine too, although it would be hilarious and it would raise awareness.

Too bad, I’ll have to do nothing this year, perhaps next year I can join the celebration if there is a “Team” in my area. They should really make it a Friday. I’d totally go out and down a few beers in the name of document freedom.

Psst. Want a Free Linux Magazine Subscription? Not just any magazine, the original Linux magazine The Linux Journal. If you missed out on the fifteen issues for $15 then this may be a better deal for you. This is not one of those scams where you get a free magazine in exchange for a limb at the end of the year. Basically each day there is going to be a Sesame Street “Today’s episode brought to you by the letter…”. At the end of the week, you have to unscramble the letters and submit your answer. Every correct answer submitted *cue count voice* “One HA HA HA HA” second before Sat 14th March gets a free digital subscription to The Linux Journal! It couldn’t be easier. Although, I still think you missed out on the $15 for fifteen print issues. Oh well, follow me on twitter @LinuxBlog and next time you’ll know.

Just a quick heads up for those that are interested. Carolina Con 09 is coming up and if your going to, or can be in the Raleigh NC area between March 13th and 14th then you should head on over. I’ve been a couple of times and it’s always been a blast. This year the line up looks good and the party will be even better, so mark your calendar and I’ll see you there. http://carolinacon.org/

I had to leave town last Tuesday for a family funeral, and therefore did not make any updates to my blog. While I had a long drive that I could have wrote some posts, its sometimes nice to just take a break. I didn’t even update or check my Twitter account.

In the upcoming days I’ll have some more blog posts written. Its almost Halloween again, and I guess its been almost a year (maybe two) since I introduced Aaron but he never made a post. Perhaps I’ll convince him to write one since I’ve been helping him out with his blog BackwoodsHorror.com (and I just linked to him.) I do however have some guest posts from some one called Dave from the good old Internet’s that I’ll be posting for your reading pleasure. If you’d like to write for TheLinuxBlog, just send them to me by e-mail (owen–A T–thelinuxblog.com) or send me a message and I’ll create you a user account.

As always I appreciate user feedback and more content to publish would be awesome! Thanks for all of your contributions,

- Owen.

All right, so just because this is a Linux Blog does that mean I’m only allowed to blog about Linux technologies? Well, its my blog and since I’m here I might as well go ahead and write about what is on my mind.

Over the past year I’ve noticed a lot of advertisements that have the “nerdy” appeal to them. Namely the Mac Vs. Pc ones, and any others that you might see whist watching say the Office.

Well, it seems that Microsoft is trying to promote Server 2008 in this way. Creating “hip” advertisements that make people laugh. Whilst I thought the advertisement I saw on some IT blog was funny, after watching it a couple of times (downloading it, uploading to YouTube and posting it here) I’m starting to find it rather annoying.

So here is the video

What do you think of this video? I snickered at first, and then watched the other videos… (I had to bust out Windows, blow the dust off of it, endure the bootup and then install silverlight to see all of them) and I can’t say that it was time well spent. None of these adverts give me any information as to why I should use Windows virtualization other than the point of “We have a big marketing budget, buy our stuff” Well, if they are just trying to get the word out, I guess it worked, after all I am blogging about it :) If they’re trying to get people to think about it, then I guess it worked. This sort of reminds me of the older VOIP YOUR WAY ads, which I enjoyed a lot better. Again, they must have a huge budget for this as they have re-done the VOIP site (it used to be silverlight only, its now flash)

Well, I suppose I’m starting to rant now, so I’ll let you all go about your business. I’m posting this in the Linux Blog News category for lack of a better place. Perhaps I’ll create an area for non Linux related posts one day.

This week I’ve been particularly slacking on this blog. However I did get to talk to the guys over at Linux Cranks. Throughout the week I found some interesting stuff on the web. Most of its Linux or tech related so if you’re interested … (Read on …)

Hey there, this is Owen from TheLinuxBlog.com
Was just wondering, if any of you guys would be interested in some free books. I’ve got a ton of Linux and tech related books, I’m not ready to give them all up but here are two books I just got given. I want to read the VI/EX one and may keep it around. But I have another copy of the Perl one that’s in a little better shape, so the Perl one is definitely going. Leave a comment here or on twitter if your interested. You’ll have to pay shipping but it shouldn’t be expensive with media mail.

I’ve got a bunch of other books that I’d like to trade, sell or give away, but haven’t found a good “books” module for WordPress yet. Does any one else have books they no longer want or need? Would you guys be interested in trading or getting free books if you pay shipping? If there is interest, I’ll start a forum. I have access to a ton of non tech related books, but I’d rather keep it to a topic that I know. I’ll be posting more free books in the future so follow me on twitter and sign up for the RSS feed.

The 2.6.26.4 Kernel was released at 11:47UTC with a lot of fixes. Notably the eeepc-laptop module got a fix that should stop it from failing to unload if anyone has an eeepc and had that problem. There were 40 unique commits to this update and I think that everyone involved should be thanked for their hard work.

A new Wine was released on Friday the 5th putting Wine on version 1.1.4, so those of you that use Wine may want to update to see if your apps run better. They’ve fixed a lot of applications and reimplemented parts of WinHTTP. Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’ll know about Google Chrome, and this Wine version includes several fixes to better support this. I might do a writeup of getting Google Chrome to work under Linux.

In security its just about the usual, SQL injections and XSS holes everywhere. Tomcat has some information disclosures that if your running the newest versions will not affect you.

Wireshark has some denial of service attacks and possibly arbitrary code execution, but only the DOS attacks have been confirmed. Your distribution probably has an older version in its repositories so, unless your running 1.0.3 which was released on September 3rd, you may want to update if your mission relies on this.

If you run postfix and notice your mail servers load is unusually high, look out for a denial of service against that also.

This ones an oldie but a good one: Get Pwnd by your Coffee machine of course its just one coffee machine, but as we see more household appliances being connected to the web. Which might get you thinking about Linux on Household Appliances.

Hey there guys and gals,

I’ve got a few pieces of news to report today, mostly to do with this site so if you are interested, give it a read. If you couldn’t care less then skip right along to the next post :)

Advertising
I will be adding the adbard network to this site one day soon, which will get rid of the Google ads and display some that are more of an open source theme. I may from time to time pop in some links to Amazon affiliate links to help with the costs involved in running this site. I don’t think that you’ll mind, and besides you don’t really have a choice. If you don’t want to see advertisements; learn How to set up a Squid Proxy Server.

I’ve changed my name!
I’ve changed my name (not legally) to display as TheLinuxBlog.com. I’ve done this because many people syndicate my content and are not correctly attributing my work. Don’t worry, I’ll still post guest posters names and sign my posts with my name so you’ll know its me (But I doubt you care anyway, just as long as there is decent content here or you find the answer to the Linux problem that has you stumped.)

Feeds Shortened
I’ll be shortening my RSS feed in effort to draw more people to participate in the site. After all, we all like comments and contributions, so why not contribute? This may also help out with spam also. If you’d still like my full feed in your RSS feed reader, send me an e-mail or leave a comment and I’ll hook you up with a private feed.

Artwork
For those of you that enjoy laughing I mean, reading my blog I’ll be providing some artwork. I’d appreciate links to me with or without the artwork. I may in the future start giving out free swag so be on the lookout!

Thanks for your interest and time,

- Owen.