It was great meeting everyone on the cruise. “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve.” Please enjoy my pictures from the cruise and if you would like any prints just let me know and I can get you a high-res copy. Best wishes, –Jake
Merlefest 2009 is going on as write this post. I have dumped some of the better shots from Thursday and Friday in my gallery already, with Saturday and Sunday to follow. It is a great show as always and wicked fun for me. 4 days of great music and me playing with my camera, what’s not to love. Enjoy the photos, I am off to the festival.
YAY! It is the happiest time of the year again. Merlefest is going extremely well. I have pictures up from Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Sunday’s pictures are yet to come. It is also worth mentioning that my pictures that were taken using RAW mode are not up yet due to the time involved in their processing. Once the festival is over I will hopefully find the time to repost the color corrected images in albums sorted by artist.
As many of you may know, I do photography for the festival and I try my best to be the first one to get their pictures on the net. I am usually successful with this, so in that vain. Here are my pictures from Thursday @ Merelfest 2007. There is a lot more to say, but as I write this, I am missing performances, so I am off to the show. I hope the pictures tell the story.
*UPDATE* The festival has been fantastic this year. I can’t believe it is almost over. So far I have posted my pictures for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. You can find them in my Merlefest 2007 Gallery.
Well it is once again February 5th and that means I am another year older. For those of you that do not know, my birthday is really more of a birth-fest that starts on Groundhog Day and ends on Feb. 6. This year my birthday was most excellent. My girlfriend came home to spend the weekend with me. We visited some of my family as well as going to a friends place to have a wonderful birthday sushi party.
Thanks to all of my friends and family for making my 26th birth-fest so very special. I received some very thoughtful gifts and had a wonderful time. If you would like to help make my birth-fest even more wonderful, please consider buying one of these books from my Amazon Wish List for me.
Today I was browsing the pennfans forum and someone mentioned a South Park character creator. Why didn’t someone tell me about this before?! I played with it for a good half-hour trying to make a character that at least remotely resembled me. Not having much luck with that I thought I would try to make one for my girlfriend Murphy. I definitely got a lot closer resemblance with her character than with mine. For anyone that knows Murphy, the likeness is uncanny. From the band-aid covering a bike related accident to the assault rifle, it all screams Murphy.
To create this image, I made a character for each of us, then I took screen shots of them. Next, I used GIMP cut out our characters and put us in front of a simple gradient.
From Wikipedia, ‘IPCop is a Linux based firewall distribution, which aims to provide a simple-to-manage firewall appliance based on PC hardware. IPCop is a Stateful firewall built on the Linux netfilter framework. Originally a fork of the SmoothWall Linux firewall, the projects are developed independently, and have now diverged significantly.’ Im upgrading now, wish me luck. If I am not back in 10 minutes, just wait longer.
Today, December 7, 2006, marks the release of OpenSuSE 10.2. After the lackluster 10.1 release with its numerous and long-standing package management issues, OpenSuSE 10.2 promises to redeem the distro. Please check the OpenSuSE 10.2 Release Notes for more information.
The following list are few highlights of OpenSuSE 10.2:
I have been running OpenSuSE 10.2 on my machine since Alpha 5. Since then, it has evolved into a great release. If you had problems with SuSE 10.1 package management and moved to an alternative package manager, such as Smart, rest assured that YaST package management is working very well again. In fact, I have even left all of the ZenWorks applets running with syncing enabled and YaST starts and operates with perfectly acceptable speeds as well as offering the benefit of delta rpms. I have not pulled out a stopwatch, however it appears to load faster than Smart GUI now. All of this considered, I am going back to using YaST as my primary package manager. I have not used ‘rug’ yet, but I plan to give it a shot soon. I was very glad to see that some non-ZenWorks tools had been included. I do not know about a default GNOME install, but with a default KDE install, zypper and opensuseupdater are installed as well as ZenWorks. If it does not work out with ZMD and rug, I will just remove ZenWorks. Some additional points of interest, as of 10.2, the released distribution is known as, OpenSuSE. This was done to clear up the confusion created by having the project/community known as OpenSuSE, but a distro called SuSE Linux. Also, I have Intel 2200 wireless in my laptop and I cannot get Network Manager to connect to my WPA AP(worked fine in 10.1) and if I disable network manager and use traditional ifup method, then ipw-firmware endlessly eats all of the system resources. I’m still looking into this, but if you have had similar experience, please let me know.
OpenSuSE 10.2 can be downloaded in any number of ways. I suggest going to http://en.opensuse.org/Released_Version for download links, torrents metalinks, and mirrors. If you are on SuSE Linux 10.1 and looking to upgrade, just supplement my Upgrade to SuSE Linux 10.1 article with the OpenSuSE 10.2 sources given below.
Life has gotten a lot busier for me recently so I will not be doing a big article detailing the setup process of OpenSuSE 10.2. Instead, I will pass along a few short notes to point people in the right direction.
Adding sources to YaST is quiet easy in 10.2. It is the same procedure as it was in 10.1, but now It actually works. Adding the online Install repository still takes a very long time. With a good mirror and a 3mbit connecting it took a good 10 or 15 minutes on my machine. That said, Guru, Packman, NonOSS sources added very quickly. Below I have provided a must-have list of sources to get multimedia codecs such as mp3.
These may not be ideal mirrors for you, but I leave it to you to find additional mirrors. These sources can be added by going to YaST -> Installation Sources -> Add -> Specify URL. With the above sources, you can add mp3 playback to amarok by installing ‘libxine1′ through YaST -> Software Manager. Sorry, thats all folks, leave a comment if you have a specific question and I will try to come back and address it.
As many of my readers are aware, I can usually be found in #SuSE on irc.freenode.net. I have been a regular there since I started using SuSE ~1.5 years ago. Before SuSE 10.1 was released, most of my time there was spent chatting with other SuSE users and helping new users with basic tasks like: adding MP3 support, using YaST, getting around in KDE, and other benign user-goals. That all changed for the worse with the release of SuSE Linux 10.1.
Since SuSE 10.1 was released, almost ALL of my time in #SuSE has been spent explaining why the package management is broken and what can be done to fix it. As one can imagine, this is NOT my idea of contributing to the SuSE community. Doing damage control for someone else’s disastrous mistakes is less than rewarding. In fact, it is a royal pain in the ass. The users experiencing these issues are already upset and are not always appreciative of your efforts to help them. The package management issues with the SuSE 10.1 release are raised in the channel an average of 6-10 times per day! This results in myself and other regulars, whom are normally more than happy to help new users, becoming jaded and apathetic.
I am a huge fan of the PennRadio show, hosted by Penn Jillette and Michael Goudeau. I have been listening to the show since it began back in January. I have always appreciated Penn Jillette’s sense of humor, but I never realized what a wonderful story teller he is. I knew I would listen to every PennRadio show I could get my hands on when I heard this episode[mp3], which was the basis for what is now known as ‘Monkey Tuesday‘. In this momentous show, Penn told some of the funniest stories I have ever heard in my life. These stories ranged in topic, but my personal favorite story was known as “The Story of the Monkey and the Dwarf“. There were also stories about people wearing various costumes, such as a giant chicken costume, a power ranger, and a gorilla suit. I laughed so hard that, had I been driving, I could have been killed!
When PennRadio first started, it was only broadcast over the radio. Despite the technology to do so, CBS was reluctant to make the show available as a podcast. To fill the demand, PennRadio listeners began recording the streaming audio many radio stations offer through their websites’, and then posting them all over the web. At the first of this year, I was looking for a reliable source of PennRadio shows, and I found PennFans.Net.
The site’s admin, Zac, dutifully records PennRadio episodes, trims them up, encodes them as mp3s, and then posts them to his website. He does a wonderful job and if you appreciate the show, you should make a donation to help him cover his hosting costs. Just last week, after being ‘dugg’, he used 120GB of bandwidth in a 24 hour period! In an effort to help Zac deal with the increasing bandwidth consumption on his site, I am now mirroring PennFans.Net files.
I am just a guy with passion for the outdoors, photography, technology, and in general, shiny things with blinking lights.
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