Archive for April, 2006
Install SharpMusique!
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Digital music, Install on April 28th, 2006
SharpMusique has been around for a while, but I just got around to posting about it. It’s a very light-weight, cross-platform alternate front-end to the iTunes Music Store! It’s surprisingly full-featured:
Features:
- Preview songs
- Signup for an account
- Buy songs and albums
- Redownload songs that you bought with SharpMusique
- Redeem Pepsi caps
- Redeem gift certificates
Of course, this is more useful under Windows, where one could actually llisten to the music that you purchased. But this does make it easy for Linux users to search the iTMS and buy the music they want. Then it’s just a matter of firing up iTunes under either WINE or vmplayer to listen to the music, burn it to CD, and then rip it to a more-friendly format.
Yahoo! Mail beta
Get in on the Yahoo! Mail Beta right now! Download Squad has step-by-step directions for forcing your way into the Yahoo! Mail beta:
Been dying to try the new AJAXed-out Yahoo! Mail Beta? Well it turns out it only takes a few simple steps to switch your Yahoo! Mail account over to the new hotness.
It actually is just as easy as the article makes it sound. In less than five minutes, I was in on the beta, as you can see from the screenshot above. I’ve just spent a few minutes testing out the new Yahoo! Mail, and I am quite impressed. One note: If you use Linux, you’ll get a warning that Yahoo! hasn’t tested Mail Beta in Linux yet, and can’t guarantee that it’ll work. But it’s working flawlessly for me in Ubuntu (Breezy) using Firefox 1.5.0.2.
Perri-Air!
Posted by Biffster in Miscellany, SciFi on April 20th, 2006
While Spaceballs was not a great movie, it had some amusing parts. One of those involved Perri-Air, premium canned air. As is often the case, life imitates art!
A new group of manufacturers are marketing canned oxygen as a luxury pick-me-up, for when regular air won’t do. It comes in flavors, and has been likened to bottled water: a thing you can get for free that you might pay money for anyway.
Get your game on with SuperGamer-1
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Games on April 20th, 2006
Are you a Linux user who’s tired of having your Windows buddies say, “Yeah, but you can’t game on Linux”? Then the GSuperGamer-1 Live DVD is for you! What better way to show off Linux’s gaming abilities than with this DVD.
The SuperGamer-1 is a modification of the famous and well respected PCLinuxOS distribution optimized for gaming. It includes 3d acceleration drivers, the underlying pclos system, and several nice games (or demos).
[snip]
Some of the included software includes:
- 3D games: america’s army, cube, doom 3, enemy territory, legends, nexuiz, privateer, quake 4, soldier of fortune, ufo: alien invasion, ut2004, wesnoth
- Arcade: BzFlag, chromium, 3d pinball, frozen bubble, neverball, neverput, penguin racer, supertux, tuxkart
- Cards: Pysol
- Strategy: Foobillards
Wait, did they just list Battle for Wesnoth as a 3D game? That’s not right. But I digress!
The DVD iso can be either nabbed from bittorrent or purchased for a very small fee. Either way, this is a great an easy way to play some really awesome games on Linux. And to show your Windows pals that yes, it is possible to game on Linux.
Madpenguin really, really likes Ubuntu
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Uncategorized on April 19th, 2006
MadPenguin has tried out a preview of Dapper Drake (the forthcoming Ubuntu 6.06) and really, really likes it. I mean in a disturbing, get-a-room-already kinda way:
Ubuntu 6.06 promises to be one of the best distributions to come out in 2006. Not only does it perform with the best of them, it has a perfect compliment of included applications, has a beautiful interface, supports hotplugging/automounting USB devices (superbly I might add), provides excellent hardware support, and it installs with ease.
All joking aside, Drake is shaping up to be a damned good distro, and a damned good update to an already great OS. I’ve loved Breezy since finally making the change, and can’t wait for Drake to go gold (so to speak).
Procmail primer
Posted by Biffster in Debian/Linux, Email on April 19th, 2006
Procmail can be either a blessing or a curse. Once you get the hang of the syntax and write a few recipes, it can be a major timesaver. But learning the syntax can be a real pain in the ass. Fortunately, there are a few great tutorials on procmail. And linux.com has a primer for those new to procmail up right now. It’s a very good introduction to this powerful but confusing tool.
Procmail is a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA), meaning it can be used along with a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) such as mutt or sendmail to filter messages. Procmail processes all messages before they are delivered to your mailbox. You can have your incoming messages distributed into various folders based on preset criteria such as the subject of a message or the recipient. The use of regular expressions for creating rules and the ability to run multiple rules on messages make procmail a very precise mail filtering program.
Lower Firefox’s memory use (Windows-only)
Another amazingly useful Firefox hack, this one instantly reduces Firefox’s memory usage on Windows.
This little fix will move Firefox to your hard drive when you minimize it, and as a result it will take up less than 10MB of memory while minimized. So far, from my experiences with using this today, when you maximize Firefox it will obviously increase the memory usage. However, it does not seem to go back up to the insane amount that it was at before minimizing it.
I am very impressed with the hacks that are found to improve the performance of our favorite web browser. Hopefully a lot of these hacks are incorporated in the next release.
