screenshots

With ebola out of the pawnshop I decided now was as good a time as any to restore the factory vista install and then reinstall Sabayon GNU/Linux. That all went reasonably well. Only issue with SL 3.5 L3 was that the installer didn't give me the option for installing grub on /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sda. I needed to as my /boot is sdb1 and with the raid0 setup it's what was needed. Not a major issue once the install was finished and it just continued to boot direct to windows I just reboot in to System Rescue CD and added grub to the remaining location and we were dual-booting happily.

Anyhow so I only use Vista for playing Command and Conquer 3. So my I spend all my time in the linux playing with crap in Virtual Machines flashing routers and just being a geek. So yeah I spent a good day getting everything dialed in on the interface. Focus follows mouse. Found the smoothest cleanest animations for all the compiz settings. It all functions quite nicely on this laptop but since we do the dynamic CPU speed thing sometimes the animations speeds get flakey.... but the fade always looks nice and crisp so that's what a few of them are set to now.

Anyhow here's screenshots of just the look. With SL3.5L3 things work great. Ecstatic about how things are progressing over there. They're getting funding... and they've moved away from that god awful red/yellow branding and adopted a nice blue. That works for me because the laptop has blue led's so it encourages me to go with a blue theme too.

amateur astronomer finds new "green thing"

I guess the headline really sums this up. A dutch school teacher found an odd green thing. Posted it to Galaxy Zoo to ask what it was, and it turns out we don't know. Probably something knew. She called it a Voorwerp. "Thing" or "subject" maybe appropriate translations... but it's green... which makes me happy.

interesting

Clearwire & Sprint and everybody who's part of the new wimax venture that I think is actually being called "New Clearwire" (yeah that worked out great for new coke) but the idea actually has me intrigued. Any device, more or less. Any application, more or less.

Now, I've been a Clearwire user for just over a year. I was angrily disatisfied with the service when I first signed up. No torrent would go faster than 3K/s. Other downloads faired better. I'd get bursts of 300K/s... for maybe 5 minutes at a time. It would throttle down to a solid 90K/s. It stayed there I'd say 90% of the time.

I download Sabayon GNU/Linux DVD's everytime they release. Including all of their Beta "Loops". I have a modern laptop with 3d, hdmi, dvd dl, bluetooth all kinds of lil' gizmos. Everyone of them has worked out-of-the-box for 6 releases so far. But it's a lot of downloading every time there's a new release to try out. All legal, and well supported on BitTorrent to make the download as distributed and painless on everybody as is practicable.

I had originally written how things were currently still the same here in Clearwire land. It would seem, however, that things have changed drastically in the last week or two. I've been fairly busy with work and having a wife and two kids and what have you... and haven't really done any large downloads. There was, however, the release of Sabayon 3.5 Loop 3. So it's time to download a new DVD. So I started grabbing it while I wrote... all of this.

Things are getting better, it would seem. I know get the usual start-out and happy little bursts of 300K/s or so and there's still the usual 90K/s cap for most of the transfer. But it seems to, almost entirely randomly, jump on up to 150 or so for a bit. Often enough to keep it down to probably 8 hours for the DVD. A lot better than the last two or three I've downloaded since signin' up with Clearwire because I could use it today and I liked the idea of taking it school so I didn't have to use the College's wifi.

If this new performance is a sign of where the New Clearwire (Nuclearwire?) heading on the any device, any service, any content promise... then... man I'm sold and on board as long as BitTorrent starts behaving. Let the Copyright holders handle enforcement. They already have people contracted for that. I had questions about the company in the begining and didn't feel any happier when I saw Comcast in the list of people possibly involved in this deal.

But if they do it, amen. They did say lawful referring to the service and devices. I'm fine with that. I fully expect that this is the answer to all of our bitching about throttling and traffic shapping. They'll just be all out millitant about AUP inforcement. That'll definitely be a document to read real carefully before signing up.

Bandwidth caps would be annoying. I see a lot of ISP's going that way. Too many. If you sell me 6m, I get to use 6m. If I have a reason to generate or download as much traffic as I've paid to, I can do it... even if it's for every single second. I'm not going to, but that's what the connection is for. I'd make my 28.8K dedicated static PPP connection do for weeks on end back in the day. Downloading a new GNU/Linux distribution took days and days. Then there were those 3 or 4 boxes of floppies to dd.

Geek crap is data intensive. All my GNU/Linux work these days involves source, and patches, and git trees, and I mirror a lot of content locally for on the go stuff. Like project gutenberg and tons of docs stuff that needs to be kept up-to-date. It adds up.

But it's all perfectly legal and has a positive net impact on the internet community as a whole. Especially with GNU/Linux making such great in roads into the mainstream these days. The world is really starting to see the value of software built by people who care because they want it to work for them... and my testing helps and it would make my life easier.

... amen.

I just saw this video for Chamillionaire's Evening News on the back end of the video for Hip-Hop Police. I know the views here aren't new, and a lot of us agree... but I just really thought it was great. Never posted a video to a blog, so _joy_ for that. heh.

oh-huh

So, after re-reading that post below I realized I have learned a little bit more that I should add. While the accton router from open-mesh is indeed an OpenWRT device, it's not quite vanilla. It has RO.B.IN mesh setup specific to open-mesh. While this is indeed great, it's not what I needed. I took the files from open-mesh's re-flash instructions and replaced the root fs and kernel from the OpenWRT current version of Kamikaze. Once I did that I followed the OpenWRT docs and did what I wanted.

At present the device is running my IRC client, screen'd, connected to freenode. It's also a kismet_drone for me so I can get an idea of the competing wifi signals in my area. I had previously done this work, and then the Toyota dealership across the freeway started one up on channel 11 and caused me some problems. Channel 3 had looked great based on the previous survey, but my new crappy cordless phone that claims to be a 900mhz cheapy knocks me off of channel 3 every single time you turn it on.

I'm looking to setup an IPv6 tunnel on the thing, and make that an IPv6 only access point. That should be nice. My woman has mentioned the possibility of either an HP Mini-note with expresscard data via one of the cellular providers, maybe even Clearwire, or an iPhone 3g with data. This isn't until after the garnish stops and her additional income starts rolling in... but still it's some really nice geek fun and connectivity. The 3g will only be an option if tethering isn't too expensive because I will eventually be getting the HP Mini-note either way. Once I do I'm sure I'll be... keeping more of this type of crap up-to-date.