Munden's Bar

I may play with this guide on making Ubuntu Hardy Heron look and act like Mac OSX Leopard, because it sounds much easier than actually installing OSX. :)

Digg also found this really cute little collection of sysadmin tricks from IBM, including how to tunnel SSH thru a company firewall, and then tunnel VNC thru SSH... *grins evilly*

Purdue has come up with a cheaper way of manufacturing LED's meaning that LED-based light bulbs may soon become cost competitive with CF ones. You can already buy LED light bulbs, which have a much longer life than CF bulbs, use less power, and become bright faster (though most don't give off as many lumens as a CF bulb at present), but currently they are mainly made only to support US voltages and are generally more expensive than CF bulbs. As the article says, consider not having to change a bulb for a decade, and using only 3W of power instead of the 10 - 18W of CF bulbs. LED bulbs are the way of the future, and if anyone's looking at a market to get into I reckon this one is going to sweep away CF before it even becomes fully established.

For the techno-lovers, Delia Derbyshire of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, responsible for the ground-breaking Dr. Who theme song, died in 2001, but recently tapes have been discovered in her attic, and the BBC is making some of them available on it's web site, including a techno-sounding track that could have been released now. There's a good list of what's available on Noise Addicts.

In other news, I recently bought a USB video capture device from offtheback.co.nz with the idea of transferring a few old videos on to digital. The first video I dug out to test iit on happens to have the Kapcon XII Twelfth Night LARP on it (the archive site is in bad repair at present, one of the many things I need to fix). That was in 2003, only five years ago. Lots of people on it in great costumes, I've noticed vizi, exiledinpn, superlate, andymacdaddy, jenni_talula's brother, and evie_fae so far. I will now take bribes to not release this video on you tube! :)

Actually, you won't have to worry for a while yet, the capture device and associated software (ULead VideoStudio 10.0) doesn't seem to be able to maintain a smooth capture rate, at least not with my old work lap-top, and raw video in AVI format really chews up hard drive space!

Last week I bought a Brother MFC-425CN network enabled colour printer/scanner/fax unit off of TradeMe for just over $30 (they're usually in the $100-$200 range I think). This morning, just over an hour ago it arrived via courier (which made it cost another $20-odd bucks).

I now hold in my hand a Printer Test Page delivered via CUPS from my Red Hat Linux server.

I am impressed because I have already installed and tested the Windows software on wasup_bro's machine, and carried out network scanning and printed a test page from that. I was then pleasantly surprised to discover that Brother provide Linux support on their web site, so after following the simple instructions there, I now have installed a CUPS wrapped LDR/LPR driver in less time than it took to install and test the Windows printing (though admittedly the Windows install is fancier, and included the OCR and Fax software)

I have also installed and configured the Brother network-enabled SANE drivers, but I have yet to test those, as I've never had a scanner hooked up to my Linux machine before and I have to go figure out what software to use to actually initiate a scan. The Brother software also supports a "Scan To" function which allows you to stand by the scsnner and operate it and then tell the scanner which computer to send the results to, and reportedly this will work for Linux as well!

So, yeah, I'm impressed at how easy this was and the support provided by Brother for setting up the system on Linux. I'm pleased that I now have all the functionality of the previous HP units (in fact a lot more because it adds fax and network support) in a package that takes up at least half the desktop space, is quieter and faster, and uses far less cabling.

The hardest part of the installation? Figuring out where the bloomin' Ethernet port was on the printer! Luckily there was FAQ entry on the Brother website, go have a look you'll see why it was tricky! :)

Edit: And now I'm happily scanning using xsane, it took a bit of time to figure out that the examples which were using the scanner's name were reliant on a hosts file or some other different network setting, but using the IP address directly fixed that issue anyway. Unfortunately, using network scanning it takes forever to scan at any rs solution over 100dpi, I'll have to see if it's faster via USB or not.

Pete Gutman at Auckland University gives us the straight dope on Microsoft Vista

Executive Executive Summary
The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

Selected further quote :

However, one important point that must be kept in mind when reading this document is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes it were possible.

The one thing I disagree with Pete about is how much it will affect those of us who use older OSes or Unix, at least other than potentially increased hardware prices. It will significantly increase the value of pre-Vista second-hand machines!

Because we don't need to access protected content, we just won't talk to idiots who use Vista. They'll become like AOLusers. There is already enough un-protected content in the wild, and enough artists who are happy to release new unprotected content, that the rest of the world will just ignore the leper colony of Vista users. People using Vista will be like the castaways in Lost.

Or, all Vista usrs will find they have to run hacked machines to talk to the rest of us, because as Pete says :

...the Vista content protection will take less than a day to bypass if the bypass mechanism is something like a driver bug or a simple security hole... and less than a week to comprehensively bypass in a driver/hardware-independent manner. This doesn't mean it'll be broken the day or week that it appears, but simply that once a sufficiently skilled attacker is motivated to bypass the protection, it'll take them less than a day or a week to do so.

I suggest that anyone who works with computers start publicising this to their bosses. Convince them that Vista is not the way. I'm certainly going to agitate loudly in my workplace against it , and I will be passing it on to our major clients in government and the banking sectors, who often care about reliability and cost.

Given the huge hardware upgrades required to run Vista, the potential for hugely inflated help-desk costs, and the potential for a hacker to remotely shut down people's computers, most cost and security conscious organizations should be able to realize that the cost and risk of training users and support staff to move to Open Office and Thunderbird/Evolution on Linux workstations using their current hardware is going to be less than moving from Windows 20000 to Vista, regardless of the cost of the actual operating system.