Stephen Gentle

I saw an article about the new Thunderbird 2.0 alpha on CyberNet News. It looks great! I use Thunderbird on my Linux box and it is a great app. I have a lot of email accounts, and it’s very easy to sort all my email into different folders and so on…

-Stephen

We have ADSL 2+ now. The router says that we are going at 994 / 6647 kbps up/down. Thats 0.97 / 6.49mbps! So you should be able to load pages off my server four to six times faster than before.

-Stephen

Check out this bizarre WiFi extender on Make blog…

This is also funny: A blogger’s proverb:

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
but only in expressing his opinion.
Proverbs 18v2

-Stephen

P.S. I still have to style the blockquote element with CSS in my theme…

Robert Scoble posted some links to funny videos making fun of the Alaskan senator Ted Stevens on his blog. The John Stewart video is awesome.

In other news, Valve has just released a new Half-Life 2: Episode 2 trailer. The game looks a lot more realistic than it did just a few months ago, and I can’t wait for that, Portal and Team Fortress 2 to come out. I think that the bundle of those three games will be US$20, which is awesome. I saw this blog entry which talks about some of the improvements in HL2:Episode 2, which is interesting.

-Stephen

I saw an interesting idea on the Linux and Open Source Blog: The idea is to create an open souce 3D accelerated graphics card. It would be fully documented and completly open. This would make it very easy to support for any platform, and would not require to use closed source drivers which are often buggy. You can see the project’s home page here.

The only downside is that it does not have programmable shaders, so it would not be great for recently released games. It is aimed at desktop 3D, so which does not require them, and lets face it: there aren’t any decent games for linux (yet )

-Stephen

Our newest computer broke yesterday. It crashed, and Windows messed up some important system files. It just wouldn’t boot after that… I fixed it by using the recovery console to do a checkdisk of the drive, and then restored the system back to Wednesday.

On a completly different topic, I saw this on the Linux and Open Source blog:

VISTA =Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware

Nice to see you get all that with VISTA.

-Stephen

I have finished installing Linux on my computer now. Well, I have actually installed it three times, but I messed up both of those earlier installatiions by trying to compile and load a module for my wireless card. The newest installation is working great, but it is annoying to have to run a network cable up to my room. It was very easy to install and very easy to configure the system, although partitioning the disks the way I wanted took a bit of practise. I have set up my sound card, installed some programs, sorted my email in Thunderbird and it all works very well, except for the wireless card.

-Stephen

I have started installing Suse Linux 10.1 on my computer. This is actually my third try, but I had to start again because I selected the wrong filesystem for a swap partition, and then because the installer crashed at the package selection page. I have found that the partitioning is quite hard to do, but now I can do the layout I want very quickly, due to the two practice runs before.

It’s annoying too that checking dependicies and “evaluating packages” takes so long. My computer is very slow..

I’ll post later when I’m finished – maybe from the new installation.

-Stephen