The Morning Napalm

Cool tricks with Atmospheric Pressure

themorningnapalm — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:31:24 +0000

Check out these cool tricks all based on the effect of atmospheric pressure!

What unsuspecting person will you find?

Fun Lesson for Monday

themorningnapalm — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 04:07:44 +0000

Remember, no ice cream if you spill the glass!

Software Loaded on My Gutsy Ubuntu System

themorningnapalm — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 22:00:05 +0000

The following applications are ones that I have loaded to try on my Ubuntu system. I will try to provide comments on each whether or not they seem worth it.

Media
VLC Media Player: This is a must have media player. It plays everything (.mp4, .avi, .iso, .bin, .flv, ….)

Education
galculator: new

Utilities
Metamorphose: New
Kompozer: New
glabels: new
hardinfo: new
Ktorrent: Good P2P

Games
Gridwars: Awesome game and very addictive!
glest: New
Alien Arena 2007: not downloaded yet, but curious

I will edit to add more and try to keep this up to date.

Google Toolbar Not Working in Gutsy

themorningnapalm — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:11:48 +0000

I did a fresh install of Gutsy and my Google Toolbar stopped downloading bookmarks. Actually, another Gusty install is doing the same thing. I found a suggestion to install the libstdc++5 app and then reinstall the Toolbar. It had mixed reviews, but it worked for me. I’ll try it on the other computer soon.

Adding Sytem Information To Your Desktop – Using Conky

themorningnapalm — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:59:02 +0000

I was looking through the latest Edition (Issue #10) of Full Circle Magazine and someone had written in asking how to add system information to your desktop. I was wondering this myself, seeing it in many screen shots of Linux systems. There was a nice tutorial written which can be found here in the Ubuntu Forums (HowTo:Get a beautiful Conky 1.4.2 setup). I essentially followed this tutorial.

1) Conky was in the repositories for Ubunty 7.10 (Gutsy Gibon) and installed without a glitch.
2) I added the .conkyrc file to my home directory,
3) Pasted the sample config into it
4) Modified my xorg.conf file as stated,
5) Included conky in my startup items, and
6) Added the startup script for Compiz users to delay the start (and made it executable)

It all looked great except it was in front of the other windows on the screen no matter what I did. Looking through the man page, it looked like if I added a -d in the startup, it would set it to the background. This worked great! I then played around with the configuration, changed the drives it was displaying and removed the Log section and Fortune.

I like it. I’ll use it for at least a while and make sure nothing strange happens. Something else to spend a few minutes on I guess.

Fab@Home

themorningnapalm — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 17:55:43 +0000

I saw a brief Article on this very cool item in the March 2008 PC World. It is an open source project that has designed a 3D Fabrication system that can be built to produce 3D prototype parts or anything else you can imagine. They claim you can build the entire device for ~$2400 and the software is all open source, so you can modify it to do whatever you want.

Here is a link to the site: Fab@Home

Virtualization

themorningnapalm — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:12:32 +0000

I have been using VirtualBox for testing various Linux Distributions on my laptop, running Windows XP. This has been a great way to look at how different distributions install and how they run once they are set up.

I currently have the following distributions set up in VirtualBox to play around with:

Desktop BSD, DreamLinux, DSL, Gentoo, GEUbuntu, Kunbuntu, Ubuntu, and Xunbuntu

I’ll write more later on how each of these has worked out.

I currently have Ubuntu Gutsy Gibon and Edubuntu (Gutsy) install on two home computers, dual booting with Windows XP.