Charles' Tech Talk

Yesterday this site was in offline mode most of the day. My apologies to anyone trying to access content. I started an update to Drupal that failed. I then had to rollback the update and try again... this time successfully, but it took the better part of the day because I was at work for most of the day and couldn't take the time to work on the site.

I'm planning another update today after which all updates should be complete for a little while. As some may have noticed I've reorganized parts of the site, and I'll probably continue to reorganize bits so content is more readily available.

One of the features we love in older versions of Nautilus is the Location Bar. The Location Bar is the URL Entry bar that lets you do cool things like quickly jump to different folders without clicking through or accessing SAMBA network shares just by typing smb:////

It turns out newer versions haven't totally got rid of the Location Bar, it can be accessed by holding down the Ctrl key and pressing l (small L). It can also be accessed through the menu by clicking the Go menu option and then clicking the Location sub-menu option.

In the "oops, who messed up" category Factory Direct had a computer on sale today for $99999.99. If you look carefully you'll notice that it's a refurbished PC with a 90 day warranty, 100 grand doesn't go very far these days!

By the time you read this post they'll probably have fixed the problem, but it's funny nonetheless.

In a move that makes Darth-Gates (Bill Gates has often been vilified because of some of Microsoft's anti-privacy/anti-consumer tactics) look like a new born lamb, Steve Jobs' Apple has applied for a patent to biometrically monitor people through their devices and possibly disable/brick devices they don't feel are being "used properly."

What are we talking about? Monitoring heart rate, recording voice patterns, silently taking images of surroundings, all without making a sound or any kind of flash.

Yesterday I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to hook up my VCR to my TV Tuner card in order to back up some of my old VHS movies. After all these years, and dozens of posts about the subject it's still a painful process under Linux.

From time to time I do a little computer repair outside my day job as a computer refurbisher. A few days ago I took in one repair that consisted of removing malware. When the client started up the computer the infection was pretty obvious. The computer seemed to boot pretty rapidly despite the malware, so I thought I'd be finished the next day. Two days later I'm still fighting the infection. The problem is that malware can hide other problems.

Acorn Andy is a flash game developed by Mike, one of the volunteers at The Working Centre's Computer Recycling Project. The game currently consists of 5 levels. You play the part of Andy, a squirrel on the hunt for nuts. Evil blood red squirrels protect the nuts. Run into a red squirrel and your energy (represented by hearts) goes down. Run out of hearts and it's game over. Collect all nuts and progress to the next level.

Can you say bloatware? Boy I sure can after the painful installation of OpenSUSE 11.2. Of course I should have been warned off OpenSUSE when it suggested on boot that at 768MB of virtual RAM (I was installing in a Virtual Machine) that I didn't really have enough memory. This is almost as bad as Windows Vista's requirements, it almost makes me wonder if there was some side bloatware deal?

I've been a bit quiet lately. Rather than rehashing what's on Slashdot or OSNews I decided just be quiet until I had some good news. Most of what I've been doing at work is in preparation to move to a more government-mandated workflow. Outside of work the only web development work I've been doing is behind the scenes of freesoftshop.com (which has not been releaunched yet). Much of the work has been adding content, but in the next few days I'm hoping to start work on development side of the site, then moving on to updating this site.

A few times I've been asked "how do I download a Youtube video" or the more complicated "how do I download the audio from a Youtube video?" Now both answers can be solved with one web site: dirpy.com. Dirpy is a Google-backed site that lets you download audio from Youtube videos in .mp3 format. It also offers up videos in a variety of resolutions. No more Firefox add-ons and then stripping out audio, dirpy makes getting Youtube content simple.