Welcome Back

So for a few weeks now I have been trying to get the wife to let me get a new gaming desktop :).  When I first started looking at them newegg had an awesome motherboard/cpu combo that ended up with essentially a free motherboard.  Unfortunately, by the time I was able to purchase my new computer that combo deal was gone so I ended up paying more than I had hoped.. but I still think I did good for the computer I will be getting.

Do you have an old PC you don’t use?

** I have now reviewed the pfSense firewall here.

Hello again!  Up until a few days ago I secured my home DSL broadband network with the IPCOP 1.4 firewall.  I do like IPCOP and it was fun and easy to use.. especially when you add all the addons (which are of course unsupported) that you may want.  Keep in mind that, while Linux based, everything is managed through a web interface, just like any Netgear/Linksys router.  Now, I do believe in the KISS principal on security.  A server/box should be what it is and nothing more.  A firewal should be a firewall, proxy a proxy, mail server a mail server, etc.  The more you combine into one machine the more chance multiple applications/systems can become compromised.

Hello to All!!

So, recently I decided I wanted to get an android phone.  With the release of the Palm Pre and it’s WebOS it sparked me into considering a touch-screen smart phone again.  The last time I looked at these the iPhone was the only real contender, and considering I *despise* Apple and several of it’s business strategies (for example: here), I never really cared to look at it.

Hello!!

Recently I’ve been going through some of the free Linux games to see what ones I liked. Two of them I have come across are “Battle for Wesnoth” and “Savage 2”.

A video converter script I built using mencoder

In my Last Post I took a look at HyperVC and WinFF which were frontends for FFMPEG. HyperVC is also a frontend for Mencoder for people who prefer to use that.

One thing I found they both lacked was the ability to auto-crop the files in batch mode. So far the only Rip/Converting program I’ve seen that will allow that is the AcidRip – but it won’t auto-detect the crop sizes for Vob Files.

Welcome back!

In this post I’m going to take a look at WinFF and Hyper Video Converter.  In my Arch Linux post I detailed my many problems getting a decent video converter to work right in Arch Linux and on the Acer Aspire One.

In all of the big all-in-one packages: OGMRip, dvd::rip, AcidRip, HandBrake, etc.  I ran into one problem after the other.

Talk about speedy!

How’s it going everybody?? Few days ago a friend of mine got me to throw on Arch Linux and give it a whirl, again.  So, I been away getting Arch Linux setup and running and remembering why I liked it the first time :).

Just some more rambling.

So, after making my last post on my new Acer Aspire One I went to bed :).

Then this morning I started really testing this thing out.  I did realize that at the “Step By Step” tutorial that I linked in my previous post they recommended an Intrepid Backports driver for the wireless card.  This did appear to work too.. but when trying to copy over a ton of data from one of the home machines to this tablet it kept dying on me.

Sweet!  Finally got one!

So, if you’ve been reading my blog you’ve probably figured out I have a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet… and that I love it!  It’s a great little device that you can load a full debian or Ubuntu linux on, and be on the move.

Welcome back!

I decided recently I wanted to give my kids back a computer… I had configured an Ubuntu box for them before but we ended up selling the laptop we were using for them so they were left without.  They are only 7 and 4 years so it wasn’t a big deal.. only the 7 year old was old enough to figure anything out.