Join Dr. Bill as he examines the wild and wacky world of the web, computers, and all things geeky! Hot Tech Tips, Tech News, and Geek Culture are examined… with plenty of good humor as well!
Well, a new year, a new DirCaster update! This one fixes the “LastBuildDate” field in the feed to be compliant with standards just as the last version fixed the “PubDate” field. Again, check it out with FeedValidator.org and you will see that it passes with flying colors! Hooray!
Have you seen the new Zune advertisements? What was Microsoft thinking? (Were they thinking?) These ads are slightly creepy and I don’t see how they are actually encouraging anyone to buy a Zune!
The “Super Gamer DVD” begs to differ! Now at Release 2, the Super Gamer has lot’s of games running on a “Live DVD” based on PCLinuxOSO. Cool!
“The Super Gamer is a Live DVD that is based on the core of PCLinuxOS., put together by Darin, a community member. Darin started out making the Super Gamer for his own, and some friends. Soon others got a copy and decided they liked it . They jumped on board to help test and develop. The Super Gamer is optimized for a gaming computer environment, with some tweaks to help speed up running from the LiveDVD. Extra games were added along with some demos of proprietary games. All Games are Linux Native. Users wishing to run Windows Native games, may install Wine or a Wine related application such as Cedega. Since the Gamer is developed on the pure core of PCLinuxOS, updating and adding other programs from the PCLOS’s repository is completely compatible, and easy.”
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Dr. Bill Podcast – 69 – (12/30/06)
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Almost live via a podcast to celebrate the close of 2006! Big, hairy hints about 2007 coming soon! Techpodcasts promo, of course! Podcast number 69! 70 is coming… and it will be cool! Dr. Bill is having a good coding day! Hoo-ray! The cosmic flow of the coding is working today! And now, a Geek Culture retrospective… yay! Every OS Sucks by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie! Hearkening back to the 1970’s with that song! The “Switch to Linux” Fake Ad in an homage to the Mac “switch” ads! Open Source…Linux… gotta love it! Go to the web site… thecomputercurmudgeon.COM! A “cur” is a bad dog, rolling around in the “mud” on the Planet “Geon.” The Numa Numa song! The Llama Song! A frenetic song! Let’s all retire and become ducks in 2007! Why Did Shipping Vista Turn Out to be So Hard? And yet, there are still issues with it! The Computer Man! The Night Santa Went Crazy! Poor quality audio… but still funny! And that ties up our year for Geek Culture… even with a second of the Bunnies from Star Wars! Please Digg the Doctor (The Doctor grovels!) PLEASE! Do so and goodness will expand throughout the galaxy and the stars will align! There is already an update to the DirCaster project! Many great fixes to DirCaster… thanks to Henry! More code coming on DirCaster! A new Paint.NET update is out! I used it just last night to create a new Streaming MP3 “badge” for the web site. Stop those pesky Wi-Fi’ers! An “Open Source” hardware project that is illegal! An RF jammer! The FCC is NOT excited about this… so don’t actually build it! The “Cult of the Dead Cow” strikes again! The Phoenix electric powered truck! 95% charged in 10 minutes! Driving away making no noise… how spooky is that?! Sa-lute! The new look for the blog! A new theme, and new features! Blog posting articles on the calendar in the sidebar! The Audio Flash Player didn’t work so I fixed it with streaming audio for MP3’s using the “M3U” format. Link to the M3U file to play your MP3! All 69 podcasts listed on ONE page! It is a “static” HTML page using a plugin for WordPress that allows “calling” static HTML pages! You can do popups entirely with CSS! With no javascript at all! Really! Here’s the link, just for you:
Microsoft sent cool notebooks with Vista to bloggers to get good press… it kinda backfired. And one guy decided to auction it off on eBay and give the proceeds to the EFF! Microsoft now wants them back! And, that’s it for this week! See you next week! (A quick secret hint in the exit music!)
So here’s the controversy: Microsoft decided to give away free (very NICE) Acer Ferrari 1000 notebooks with Vista pre-loaded to some bloggers to get a “buzz” going about Vista. A) Not a bad marketing plan, B) Wonder why they didn’t send me one? (Hummmmmm… OK, maybe I know why!) But one blogger they sent the notebook to is auctioning it off, with the proceeds to go to the EFF! Ohhh… that is cool! The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) is a donor-funded non-profit and depends on contributions to support it’s efforts to defend our digital rights. Gotta love that!
Windows Vista Laptop on eBay, Proceeds Going To EFF
“So regarding my infamous Acer Ferrari 1000 Windows Vista laptop (one of several sent to bloggers which are stirring up a quite a bit of controversy), I think the best thing to do at this point is auction it off on eBay and donate the proceeds from the auction to one of my favorite non-profits, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Honestly, I’m not really the right person to do a proper review of Windows Vista and at this point, it is still unclear why I was even selected to receive it, not to mention the fact that there has been quite a bit of inconsistency regarding what Microsoft, AMD and Edelman wanted people to do with the laptop after they were done testing it. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate being included, but now I think it’s time to move on. I’ll purchase the Windows Vista upgrade when it comes out as I had originally planned on doing. I’m starting the auction today (in the US only) and it will end in 7 days on January 4th. This will give me some more time to test out the laptop some more and see what Windows Vista is like, before it is sold to someone who will really benefit from having it, possibly even someone who will be able to give it a proper review.”
Oh, by the way, Microsoft NOW claims (since the whole controversy started in the “blogosphere” that they were only LENDING the notebooks to bloggers. They now want them back! Talk about making a bad move worse!
So, we have a new look for the ol’ Blog! What thinkest thou? I think it is a little cleaner, and a little geekier… so I like it. Also, there is a new header bar with buttons… cool, huh? And, overall the Blog theme expresses the essence of “computer curmudgeon-ness” as well. Note that my “Dr. Bill” icon in the header is in the position of the CPU in the circuit board. Like I am the “brain” of the Blog. Note the deep symbolism. Yeeesss! Whoa! I stayed up too late last night working on this didn’t I?
The 100% electric Phoenix sport-utility truck holds five passengers, has plenty of cargo space, does 95mph, 0-60 in under 10 seconds, and charges to 95% full in under 10 minutes. And it’s not even ugly… whoa! Rock on! I want one… anybody want to buy me one? Okay… I know… not likely… but I can dream!
Why would you want to? Well, maybe security? Not me… but if you need to, here’s an “Open Source” hardware project that will auto-tune and do it!
So, now you can jam those pesky Wi-Fi users. Riiight! Whatever floats your boat… but, it IS interesting!
“This website details the design and construction Wave Bubble: a self-tuning, wide-bandwidth portable RF jammer. The device is lightweight and small for easy camoflauging: it is the size of a pack of cigarettes. An internal lithium-ion battery provides up to 2 hours of jamming (two bands, such as cell) or 4 hours (single band, such as cordless phone, GPS, WiFi, bluetooth, etc). The battery is rechargeable via a mini-USB connector or 4mm DC jack (a common size). Alternately, 3 AAA batteries may also be used. Output power is .1W (high bands) and .3W (low bands). Effective range is approximately 20′ radius with well-tuned antennas. Less so with the internal antennas or poorly matched antennas. Self-tuning is provided via dual PLL, therefore, no spectrum analyzer is necessary to build this jammer and a single Wave Bubble can jam many different frequency bands – unlike any other design currently available! To reconfigure the RF bands, simply plug it into the USB port of your PC and type in the new frequencies when prompted. Multiple frequency ranges can be programmed in, each time the device is power cycled it will advance to the next program in memory. While the documentation here is both accurate and complete (as much as possible), the construction of such a device is still an advanced project. I would not suggest this as even an ‘intermediate’ skill project, considering the large amount of difficult SMT soldering (multiple TSSOP and SOT chips, 0603 RC’s), obscure parts, and equipment necessary to properly construct and debug. This design is not for sale or available as a kit and never will be due to FCC regulations. Please do not ask me to assist you in such matters. All original content for this project is distributed open source under Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution / Share-Alike.”
Oh, and did I mention it is also HIGHLY illegal? Hummmm…
You will remember that we talked about Paint.NET Version 3.0 a few weeks back… well, Beta 3 is out… and it is just getting better!
Thanks to Henry L. Ratliff, a listener to our podcast, we now have a fixed DirCaster release with new features! Here’s the ChangeLog:
ChangeLog for Version 0.7a
==================================================
2006-12-25 H. L. Ratliff
. Fixed several PHP Notice errors issued when error level set to ALL
. Patched occasion where single digit day in pubdate sometimes
displayed for example ‘ 1’ instead of ‘ 01’. new function fixDat()
. Substituted RSS title tag value with file name when id3 title value
is empty. stripType() drops the file extension
. Corrected raw ‘&’ in RSS title tag (use ‘&’ instead)
. Fixed variable name error which caused, the logic to produce only
a set number of feeds, not to work. Controlled by $maxFeeds.
Thanks so much to Henry for helping get the bugs fixed, and the new features I talked about wanting on the last podcast included. He rocks! Oh, by the way, DirCaster generated RSS feeds now pass the FeedValidator.org RSS feed tester for iTunes and RSS feeds PERFECTLY!