First of all, the size. Obviously Internet exploder fails in epic ways regarding favicon.ico.
Basically, if it isn’t a microsoft ico format with a 16×16 (or maybe 32×32) icon in it, IE fails.
So what we do is create a nice ico file that contains all relevant sizes (which are 64×64, 48×48, 32×32 and 16×16).
Oh, let’s not forget about the color depth, this should be either 8-bit or 24-bit. (although it wouldn’t surprise me if 24 bits fails on IE).
Note that Firefox and Opera aren’t that picky, they even accept PNG and JPEG files these days. Even better, they claim to support APNG files… could be interesting.

Anyway, the creation. Gimp yourself a nice set of images for the specified format, or if you’re lazy simply create 1 image and convert it with imagemagick.
P.S. Details on convert can be found here, wonderful tool.

Now that we’ve got those images fixed, I usually use png2ico to convert the to the final ico file.

Obviously we first need to compile and install that tool. Skip this if you already have it

Now for the creation of the favicon.ico

Put it in your webroot and you can add a header tag to make it official (although most browsers request favicon.ico whether you specify it or not).

NOTE:
If you add the 16×16 icon, be aware that it might not look as fancy as you’d think. Most browsers will display this size by default though, so if your 16×16 version looks
like crap, simply don’t include it.

Cry me a river

Stolen from Wayfinder’s blog – check it out, it has many more funny face pics, not to mention great music!

Traffic graph

Disk I/O

HDD temperature

Why make these graphs? Because you can. Because they can show you gradual changes that you normally wouldn’t notice because the change per day is only very little. Because they’re fancy. Because they can give an indication on how hot stuff runs. Because they can kill your mother while you sleep. Because they got all the legendary items that you’ll never have. Tons of reasons.
But mainly because they’re pretty

Fileserver in the barn

These days there are plenty of options, but back the option that I liked best was write some scripts that hack together a bunch of rrdtool commands and run those from cron every 5 minutes. For those who don’t know rrdtool, RRDtool is a neat tool that creates round robin databases that you can feed data into based on an interval of your choosing. After feeding it information you can pull graphs out of it as shown in the top images with a ton of options.
Hacking these scripts together was fun the first time, but after a while it gets tedious. Especially when you lose the scripts to a harddisk crash or have to rewrite them because of different output etc. So what some people do is use a tool that takes data from a source (still a script in most cases, but very tiny scripts) and stashes it into a rrdtool database for them. Some of them even generate the graphs for you with a nice little (web)interface.

So after losing the entire fileserver after moving (guess it didn’t like being removed from the barn) I checked out several tools.

• MRTG is well known for making those router datatraffic graphs. People (ab)use it for generating tons of other graphs as well these days. Nice and simple if you want to generate those data traffic graphs, but if you want a tool that is a little more versatile you probably do not want MRTG. It’s cool though, and made by the same author as RRDtool.
• Munin is a bigger project aimed at monitoring pretty much everything. There’s a ton of plugins for this beast that do just that. However, when playing around with it I found out that it also sucked a ton of CPU out of my machine while generating the graphs every time. It has a CGI mode where it’s supposed to only generate those when requested, but I couldn’t get it working (dead image links and everything). Cute toy, but it’s still very rough around the edges. Too much for my liking, so I ditched it after toying with it for a few months.
• Then we have Cacti, the tool I still use today. You can read more about it below.
• Of course there are also a ton of commercial solutions for this, but I don’t like commercial stuff. I’ve heard a few good things about ZenOSS though… but I can’t get through their commercial site. No info, only marketing bullshit. So no go. (and no sale)

Cacti

Right now I’m back to Cacti again for the pretty graphs solution. Why Cacti?

• Relatively nice web interface to configure and view your data sources, devices to monitor, and of course your graphs
• Comes with a bunch of good default graphs and tools. Templates are good.
• Doesn’t suck the life out of my CPU, although obviously all monitoring solutions waste a bunch of CPU. One reason is that it generates graphs on demand, not every 5 minutes.
• Easy installation (Apache + PHP + MySQL), doesn’t require much on other devices that you want to monitor. (SNMP is enough most of the times)

What sucks about Cacti?

• It can be a bitch to get a graph working. One of the reasons I switched to other products was that I couldn’t get Cacti to work for some very simple graphs, but I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t work.
• Interface could use a redesign. It works, but the steps to generate a graph are confusing, there are several ways to do it and half of them don’t work as you’d expect. Maybe some wizards could fix this though.
• Development isn’t dead, but it sure as hell isn’t going anywhere soon. When I quit using Cacti it pretty much looked and worked the same as it does now. That’s been 3 years I think.

Installing Cacti is something you’ll manage yourself. Just trash it in the webdir, point your browser at it and walk through the installation steps. Easy enough. Just make sure your server has net-snmp installed. Now for adding some basic graphs.

The easiest way of generating graphs is by getting your data through SNMP. Most (not too cheap) routers and managed switches respond to it, and on all *nix systems you can get it running. Configuring SNMP can be a little more annoying though, since it’s one of those products that are really confusing to start with. Either walk through snmpconf -g basic_setup to generate your snmpd.conf, or take mine for some defaults. Be sure to close SNMP from outside your network of trust (the internet), they don’t need that access. SNMP is one of those protocols that can’t convince me of being secure. There are 3 versions of it, version 1 basically has no security, version 2 has no security with added layers of obscurity and with version 3 it becomes impossible to operate while having user/password/network combinations of “security”. So I don’t trust it, but that’s what a firewall is for. Since I don’t trust it anyway, I have the configuration pretty much open for reading anything by anyone as long as you can reach it. (I’m sure the SNMP experts disagree with my vision. You can link your tutorials on how to set it up below).
snmpd.conf - Version - SHA: 2312cae8b385d02864094427db75696857d16a32
Oh yeah, another beauty: smnpd and its configuration depend on how it was compiled. So sometimes you do get disk stats, sometimes you don’t. Sensor statistics usually isn’t included, but if you recompile net-snmp and add --with-mib-modules="ucd-snmp/lmSensors" (and your other modules!!!) you at least have a chance of getting it working.
If you want to test or check the information that your snmp daemon returns, try snmpwalk -v1 -c public $YOURHOSTNAME.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s walk through the steps of creating fancy graphs.

0. On your device that you want to make graphs of, install snmpd and put the snmpd.conf in /etc/snmp. Oh, and start snmpd.
1. In the webinterface (as admin), go to Console -> Devices and click add in the upper right corner
2. Fill out information that’s obvious (hostname, description) and pick ucd/net SNMP host for template. I always pick SNMP version 2 (since 3 is so much more hassle to setup) and hit create. It should return Save Successful.If it mentions SNMP error then your snmp daemon could not be reached or returned bad information. Fix it! For pokemon os check out /etc/default/snmpd where they run it only on 127.0.0.1 by default. Either remove it or add your internal network IP address there. If you think it’s fixed OR want some debug info, scroll down to Associated Data Queries and click verbose query (any one will do). Once SNMP information doesn’t moan about errors anymore but gives you some decent info, it’s good.
3. Click Create Graphs for this Host. You should now get a selection screen where you can check boxes of things you want graphs from. If because of your constant failing the SNMP queries failed to get results in the previous step and therefore show you no options in the Data Query boxes, you might have to click the green circle in the blue bar to reload that query. If it’s still empty your snmpd probably doesn’t supply that information.
4. Enable the checkboxes for lines that sound like they would make an interesting graph. CPU, Memory, and Load usually work and if you have interface statistics pick one that has a reasonable IP address. Hit Create when you’ve enabled all checkboxes that sound good.
5. This is enough to let Cacti generate graphs, but you also want to be able to view those graphs. Go to Graph Trees in the left menu and click Default Tree on the rigth pane. Click Add, then for Tree Item Type take Host. Select your newly created device and hit Create. Now go fix yourself a cup of coffee while the graphs are being manufactured.

“But my graphs are empty! Images missing! My head exploding!”
Yeah, I know that feeling. First of all: WAIT! First the graphs have to be generated and collect some data before something appears. This will take a few cycles, and a cycle is 5 minutes. In other words: go fish for half an hour, play a game, do a rain dance. Now there should be pretty graphs!
Like this:

Cacti new graphs

Now go add your other devices!
If you feel like trying out some more advanced stuff, check out some of the scripts/templates on the cacti forums . For instance the Disk IO graphs I can be made with this snmpdiskio package.

Well, enough for now, thanks for reading!

Enough about where you might encounter them, I wanted to talk about having them as a plant.
“Huh, plant?”
Yeah, you know… a greenish thing with leaves and sometimes flowers that stands in the dirt all day trying to catch sunlight and occasionally some water.
“Never heard of it.”
Idiot. Play some more Mario or Spore until you know.

What I did this year was:

• Buy a red bell pepper from the shop (because we needed one for dinner or whatever). Pick any color you like though, except for green, since green ones taste bad
• When preparing it for the food -keep- the part that has all the seeds, and peel off a bunch of them.
• Put those seeds on a saucer and let them dry for a while (a day orso)
• Take a pot, fill it with some nice soil and put the seeds into the soil. (not too deep!)
• Cover the pot with a little foil. (I used a rubber band to keep it in place)
• Put the pot in front of the window so it gets some nice sunlight during the day
• Wait, water the pot a little once every few days

After a week or so something will start to grow in there. Mine looked like this:

Paprika plantje jong

Paprika plantjes

Things I’ve noticed while growing these:

• The plants grow bigger if they have more room to grow. We put one plant in a big pot and two plants in smaller pots. It shows in the size of the plant. For reference, here is one of the smaller ones and the big one. The smaller plant is less than half the size.




• They don’t like a lack of water. Sounds obvious, but when they are out of water for a short period, a day orso, (and the leaves start hanging and looking sad) the fruit will get distorted shapes. (or get dropped completely).
• As they grow bigger the stem hardens so they don’t really need support from sticks or anything. Quite surprising with the big fruit.
• It’s fun to see your own bell pepper hanging on the plant, however, checking it every 5 minutes won’t make it bigger or more colored.

As for the question “How about putting them outside?”, I haven’t tried this year since our garden was not quite ready for stuff like that yet. Also I expect that they dislike the dutch climate and therefore will either die, be sad and give no fruit, or give tiny fruit. I’ll try it next year though, just to see what it does

So…. try it yourself!
Next year I’ll also try growing some Jalapeño peppers, should be pretty much the same process

The issue was on teigetje, you remember the box from the NFS story earlier today.
Starting firefox gave nothing, it was just stuck. Running a strace on it:

The exact reason isn’t known to me, probably NFS related, but this works to get it going:

In other words, this comments out the /lib/libsafe.so.2 line so it wont be loaded anymore using LD_PRELOAD.
“But isn’t that unsafe?”
Pfffrt…. if you insist on firefox you’re probably opening yourself up for Adobe issues anyway. And libsafe doesn’t really make stuff “safe”, it only tries to protect your machine against buffer overflow attacks. So now it’s up to your kernel to ‘safe’ you instead.

Did I mention my machine doesn’t have windows? Makes it… interesting.
First we obviously tried wine. Well, it installs without much hassle, which is a good thing.
However, it doesn’t launch. Some piece of garbage called GameGuard doesn’t work on wine. And because it doesn’t, neither does Aion.
Great going Aion guys! Needless to say they couldn’t be arsed to write a linux binary for it, so they SUCK per default! They couldn’t even be arsed to write a Mac binary for it. Pffrt.

However, to make an interesting attempt to test out Virtualbox’s 3d acceleration support, I decided to install Aion in a virtualboxed windows xp that I “borrowed” from lotjuh.
Virtualbox is at version 3.0.6 these days, so first I installed the latest version.
The installation went fine:

Aion installation on XP in Virtualbox 3.0.6

Aion Updater

Aion GameGuard part`

Aion dies

Anyway, from what I’ve seen of the game (it runs ‘fine’ on lotjuh’s PC with her “Seven” failure install), it’s a World of Warcraft wannabe.
Graphics are a lot better, they put in some cute stuff like when it rains and the character idles it’ll put a leave over their head. The movies are cute, the quests sometimes even show you stuff (like a little ingame movie of the target area) to go along with the text. But all in all it doesn’t look like a wow killer. No linux support (not even with wine), no mac support, and so far I haven’t seen a major reason for people to switch from wow to this game, except for the graphics. Then again, I’ve only looked at it for a short amount of time, maybe it’ll get better
I’m sure they’ll get a decent amount of players though, it’s a good wow clone.
Story wise the game is fail, I could sum it up with “There were gods, and a planet, and now the planet is split in 2 half planets and the ‘people’ on those halves fight eachother”.

It asks for a stellar converter if you ask me. (master of orion 2 reference, can’t find a good image/video on google)

Needless to say I went for the source ball. Through my famous slackbuild script of course!
That went fine, until configure barfed about some CEGUI thing.
What’s a CEGUI thing?
Apparently it’s some kind of windowing/widget library. Yeah, another one.
So I ram it through slackbuild, which went fine as usual after I did a make distclean in the source dir. Some how the first build fucked up, don’t ask me why.
Anyhow, I installed the CEGUI package and ran back to the smc source dir.
Slackbuild had no other issues this time so out rolled a package. After installation I tried to run it.

Here’s what it said after my screen went black for about a second and came back:

Yeah, that’s what I get for trusting yet another crap library with widgets. *sigh*

However, I had just enough energy left to try one detour into bug/issue fixing land.
Google came up with basically only 1 thing, so after trying my best to read some italian forum I trashed it back through google’s own translation service.
Now that it was in dutch it was a bit more readable, it hinted about using the freeimage library instead of the default TGA codec (which obviously failed).

Installing the freeimage library was pretty trivial, although they don’t use autoconf so I had to go through their Makefiles manually.
The first hint of trouble is usually when source packages come delivered in the famous .zip format. Oh, sorry, I meant .ZIP-EVERYTHING_IS_CAPS format. Seriously, don’t get me started on how many times those kankerthings exploded in my /usr/src dir so far, completely splattering up everything there.
Good thing I’m good with rm. Anyhow, this zip package was decent and created a dir (without version number though).
After fiddling with the makefiles and building freeimage, I also build freeimage plus and stashed it into a package with makepkg.
Phew, sweat on my forehead. Hopefully slackbuild will be able to handle this some day….. (dream on)

Back to CEGUI — compiling it with the freeimage library went without problems, and after upgrading my previous CEGUI package it was finally time to retry SMC.
By the way, did I note that all these packages compiled on x86_64? Good job on that one guys

This time the screen actually came up with some mario^H^Hyo like stuff! Just like the good old days with the SNES!
It looked a bit like this:

On the background the theme music played that reminded me quite a bit of the original snes game.

Messing around with it a bit I quickly got myself killed a few times and had some fun.

I soon realized that the SNES version had better controls, but then again… playing on a keyboard is kinda cramped for platform games.
So I reconnected my Logitech Rumblepad 2 to see if it would work. Well, if works great
Not a snes pad (the thing is a lot like the original playstation controller), but it played a hell of a lot better.

Conclusion: if you’re feeling bored, give it a shot. Good for a bit of fun, and it has a level editor as well!
(which can be seen in this impressive edit I made here

Keep up the good work, guys from SMC!

Do they have a cute little firewall at your work that only allows outgoing traffic on a certain port? Does some site have retarded IP restrictions? Does the piratebay block you from home?
Have no fear, ssh is slow as a bear. (huh?)

Anyway, you could use an anonymous proxy to get around all of this, but they are often slow and hard to find. Not only that, they often require you to use a specific port.
So the simple solution for all this: use ssh. Of course this requires you to have ssh access on a machine outside of the network that you’re trying to get out of.
But if you don’t even have that, you probably suck anyway. (get lost with your micro~s fail piece of cardboard).

Solution #1, for simple TCP port forwards. For instance when you’re trying to access a remote snmp server that has the irc port (6667 by default) firewalled:

After a successful login you can now connect an IRC program to localhost on port 1234 and it will act as if you were connecting to the remote machine directly. (bypassing the firewall).
Woei. Too bad this fails for UDP though. You also need to keep the ssh connection open, but that’s pretty obvious.

Solution #2, for a real proxy solution. When you’re trying to access a remote web server it becomes more annoying to use a simple port forward, since your browser will not pass the correct
information to the remote server. (It will say Host: 127.0.0.1 for where it was supposed to be Host: www.piratebay.org for example).
To make this work we simply turn ssh into a socks proxy like this:

Now you can enter localhost and port 1234 in your browser’s proxy configuration in the SOCKS proxy section. Magic, you can now go to any site and it will be tunneled through the nicely encrypted ssh session. (although it might be a bit slower).

Well, so much for the obvious stuff today.

Record companies: please die. Now.

To get it running, open up your favorite terminal that supports 256 colors and allows palette changing – I found both xterm and urxvt to work.
Make sure your TERM variable is set to something that allows this, for instance in urxvt:

or this worked for me with xterm:

Something like this is the result:

Enjoy!

So what the fuck are screenlets? Looks cute, feels cute, and once you think about it for a bit you immediately realize that it’s cute for 10 minutes after which you’ll kill the thing because it slows down your PC and you never really look at it anyway, but regardless I feel like checking it out.

“<BenV> Download… … I thought this page said download… and fuck off with your .deb file, gimme the source Ah, there we go - Source”

It’s funny how some people write software that they don’t want anyone to use. How the shift-3 am I supposed to download that source thing? Log in? Are you insane? For a download?

(speaking of which, go to hell fileplanet, gamersheaven and all such “login to download” kanker sites).

So what they really want to change that download link into is this: DOWNLOAD.

Feeding a url from that page to slackbuild.pl gives you a “Self signed certificate, AAAARGH, I’m dying, je moeder” whining from wget, so stuff it a –no-check-certificate and patch my slackbuild, done. Wait a minute…. certificate? On a http:// link? Oooh, thanks for the redirection guys. Makes me wonder why opera doesn’t bitch about self signed certificate for that link…. while wget does… let’s try firefox… nope, no warning. WHAT THE FUCK, try opening a website and they scream bloody murder because of a self signed cert, but a download? Oooh, noo, nooo problem. Morons.

In case you’re wondering about the cert, either go there for yourself, or check what openssl thinks:

Maybe it’s OK when “they” selfsign, but it’s not ok if -I- selfsign? Guess I’m clueless…

Anyway, back to screenlets:
Untarring their ‘sourceball’ gives me a retarded directoryname (no version number), which hints me that it’s probably no decent autoconf thing. Ok, it’s python, so no surprise there.
Other than that it builds and install without issues. Note to self: have to add python setup.py support to slackbuild, they’re clean enough to support that.

So after installing, wondering what to do next… I type “screenlets” in my urxvt and hit enter.
*suspense*
Will it work?

…

OF COURSE NOT!

Big surprise, probably something I managed to not install, how stupid of me. So what does it say now?

Mhm, that’s cute….
Missing python-xdg then huh. Let’s see how easy_install handles that. Speaking of which, I don’t think I have installed that yet. Let’s go!

And we have a package. Now for xdg:

easy_install http://www.freedesktop.org/~lanius/pyxdg-0.17.tar.gz
That should fix it
However, the screenlets require more garbage, such as gnome-keyring (in case of missing GConf at least) so I ran slackbuild.pl http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/gnome-keyring/2.26/gnome-keyring-2.26.3.tar.bz2 but then also needed libtasn which was also handled by slackbuild.pl. Man I love that script. Especially the leech support
But the screenlets still didn’t function. … so I hunted for gnome-python-desktop, which had YET ANOTHER RETARDED BUILD SYSTEM CALLED ‘WAF’. *sigh*. I hate it when 5 million people think they’re smarter than the other. They should simply all succumb to me. *adds another todo note in slackbuild.pl*

But then: finally, it worked!

*time passes*

Yep, I’ve messed around with it a bit…. and it’s cute… but fluxbox has its own mind about it. (giving the widgets a nice “you’re an application!” bar)… maybe I’ll reserve a desktop for it and
see if I like it. A nice ‘widget’ screen on desktop 10 or something
The good:

• It’s cute
• Skinning support
• Seems easy to build new screenlets, so many more will spawn

The bad:

• Gnome based, so gnome deps and many screenlets assume too much
• Young, so a bit buggy (mouse clicks through some screenlets, although that could be fluxbox related)
• Eyecandy, while some could be useful it is just another resource hog.

One thing though… where’s the auto-download-and-install support? Even firefox has it these days…

Not just the DOS stuff from back then was great, but also the console games.  We had a NES and later a SNES and games like Zelda, Mario, Mega Man and Double Dragon gave us a lot of education

Somehow we missed the Final Fantasy series though, but one of the things I often play these days is one of the RPG genre.  In fact, I played Final Fantasy 2 on my laptop just a week ago

“But how, my stupid x86 machine doesn’t accept these cardridges!“.

Well, you need a bigger hammer obviously. Try stuffing them into the PCMCIA slot if you have one, I hear they are twice as fast. Or if you strip the plastic casing you can maybe insert them into an ISA slot if you still have one. You might need an adapter for the PCI slots though.

…

Oh, you’re still here? Well, ok, try an emulator if your slot smashing skills aren’t up to par.

<rant alert>

So someone explain to me:

If you’re writing an emulator…. you know, a thing that has to waste tons of CPU cycles in order to play dress-up and imitate a console with a different architecture…

Why the # wouldn’t you make it as cross platform as possible? Yeah, sure, I understand that you want to make it fast and hack in some assembly code. In fact, I love assembly code

However,  that concept is getting more obsolete every day. So if you write an emulator, MAKE SURE IT COMPILES ON BenV’s MACHINE!

That means it should run on at least x86 AND x86_64. Why write an emulator that’s obsolete even before you finish it? I’m looking at you pcsx2 -.-

Applaud to DOSBox for that matter, they get it right.

</rant>

So anyway, for the NES games I suggest using FCEUX these days. It runs on both x86 and x86_64, and it runs my games on my new slackware 64 installation… which makes me happy

For SNES I always used ZSNES, but they’re still stuck in the DOS era… trying to upgrade their obsolete assembly code to more generic stuff like the QT toolkit. It works great if you have an x86 installation, but it refuses my new slackware 64…. and I refuse to chroot back to my old slackware32 for an emulator like this. Puh, I’d sooner start it in dosbox :p. “But BenV, how do you play A Link to the Past then these days?”. Ahh, a good question, but it’s easy: I simply use bsnes. Runs all my snes games so far

Then there’s the matter of the prutsstation, or PSX. Yeah, that’s another disaster area… let me know if you have a decent emulator. Guess I’m stuck to using epsxe in a chroot environment for now.  Other than that it works pretty well once you get the plugins etc sorted, but I haven’t touched it lately. (guess why).

For N64 we have another good emulator these days, called Mupen64plus. To my surprise a simple recompile worked on slack64, so no issues there (good coder ). And it runs zelda, what more do you want?

Then there’s the new PSX, or PSX2. Yeah…. that’s in the same (sinking) boat as the PSX. Only 1 reason to play: final fantasy. Only 1 somewhat decent emulator for this: pcsx2. Unfortunately it feels like they don’t give a damn about linux, and certainly not 64 bit linux. They “dropped the 64 bit build”…. idiots. So if you feel like it you can get it running on 32 bits, which I’ve done, and it runs ok. But you need a fast pc (multicore) and a decent graphics card and then it still runs like a garbagecan on wheels. (the wheels come off every 3 meters and you have to open the lid, shuffle the garbage around and close it again before it continues). Of course they are quite active, so that’s good, there’s still hope. For kicks lotjuh tried running this thing on windows, and it runs a bit better there, but they still have a lot of work to do. Let’s hope they consider dropping the 32 bitch port and switching to 64 before they’re even obsolete in windows land.

That’s all the emulators I can think of at the moment… or at least, that I want to talk about, this page is getting long enough. Yeah, there’s plenty more, like mame,  ccs64, stella and whatnot, but you can handle google yourself if you want to play those things.

Oh yeah, one more important thing: Gamepads
If you want to play these console games, you want… I’d almost say -need- a gamepad. Final Fantasy and Zelda can be played with the keyboard just fine, but you’ll be crying me plenty of rivers if you attempt to complete Mega Man or Double Dragon with the keyboard. A little while ago I got myself a Logitech Rumblepad 2 which I’m quite happy with. Yeah, it’s not a rectangular box that’ll give you hernia and makes your skin come off after playing a few hours of mario like in the old days, so you’ll have to miss out on that nostalgia….

but like I say, I’m quite happy with it. It even vibrates if you push the right button . Needless to say it works under linux…. although you will want to enable the kernel option for it. My kernel config has CONFIG_LOGITECH_FF=y, CONFIG_LOGIRUMBLEPAD2_FF=y, and CONFIG_HID_LOGITECH=y, and so far all decent emulators play with it without much hassle.

So if you’re bored, go get one of these emulators, a gamepad, and give it a shot!

Give it a shot if you’re bored

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven”

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

Now, these things immediately reminded me of the ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi garbage. However: first of all, I don’t run that on my machine since it’s a relatively new install that doesn’t have it yet.
Second, those IPs…. they’re not mine. Whois tells me it’s Quicknet/multikabel/ziggo… which some of our friends and relatives have.
That’s the weird part here, I can’t stop wondering why they’re requesting my domain while they’re back at home, so they should have a new dhcp entry and ditched their “search” line in resolv.conf. (ignoring windows as an option for now).

Google tells me it’s indeed Bonjour DNS based “service discovery” related, great, looks interesting, but I’m not in the mood to mess with DNS now… at least not until I have a machine that can actually use it. I wonder who it was though….

Anyway, a nice tool to figure out uuids of block devices: blkid. (gives a nice overview per block device… you probably need to be root for it to work though)
Alternative: findfs, so you can search for a label or uuid.

Let is be known that grub2 is a kutproduct as far as documentation is concerned… but that’s no surprise given it’s infancy status
Works pretty good so far though, once you get the grub.cfg etc right. Also works with my ext4 partition these days (required a svn up and recompile/reinstall though)