Thursday, 30 October 2008

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex is Out

So it is finally with us, I am currently installing it on my eee pc 1000h. You can find out whats new in Intrepid by going here. Will report back on how well it runs on the machine, but in the meantime go to Ubuntu.com and download a copy yourself(use the torrent download, will be faste...

Saturday, 25 October 2008

Saturday, 11 October 2008

P1i Art

Drew these on my Sony Ericsson P1i phone.Apple treeLightningBurning treeBlack treeWhite treeStarry mountainsMoonlight fishingDouble visionDragon's eyeHypercolourShadow manTaking sidesSu...

Sunday, 5 October 2008

Thursday, 25 September 2008

Install Google Earth in Ubuntu

Google Earth is a brilliant application and its available for Linux. Installation isn't as straight forward as in Windows but it's not that difficult to get it on your Linux machine. There are two ways of installing it, the first method involves downloading the binary package and then executing it and the second method uses the Medibuntu repository.First MethodDownload the Google Earth package for Linux from here.Open the terminal and change directory...

EMdrive: Microwave Propulsion

There has been a lot of controversy around a claim by a British scientist who says he has found a way to create thrust from electrical energy via microwaves.Roger Shawyer is not some crank you can dismiss out of hand, he is a real scientist who has worked for companies such as EADS Astrium as a program manager. However, a lot of researchers have criticized his work, saying that his idea violates some important principles in physics.Here is the principle...

Speedup Application Startup Times with Preload

There are some applications that you use more often than others, the browser or media player for example. There is an application available that monitors what applications you use and after establishing the most recurring applications, it will load them faster in the future."preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. It monitors applications that users run, and by analyzing this data, predicts what applications users might run, and fetches those binaries and their dependencies into memory for faster startup times."To install Preload in Ubuntu you...

Tuesday, 23 September 2008

T-Mobile G1 Videos

So it's finally official, the first Android phone has been launched by T-Mobile. The HTC Dream is the T-Mobile G1. Check out the videos below.Link:Engad...

Saturday, 20 September 2008

Things to do After Installing Ubuntu

No operating system will come exactly the way you want it, there is always things to tweak or add so that it looks and behaves to your needs. Here, I want to go through some of the things I do immediately after installing/upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu. The following has been done in Ubuntu 8.04.Change Panel LayoutI am one of those people who likes to have only one panel at the bottom. I remove the bottom panel and then drag the top one down....

Friday, 19 September 2008

Toshiba NB100: Ubuntu Netbook

First Dell, now Toshiba have come out with a netbook which will come preloaded with Ubuntu 8.04.The NB100 packs a 8.9 inch screen and the usual Atom 1.6GHz processor, up to 1 GB RAM, 160 GB hard drive and WiFi b/g.Not the most impressive netbook, looks or specs wise, but with Ubuntu as default and a price tag around £260 it's not too bad. The device is expected to hit the shelves around Octob...

Monday, 15 September 2008

Launchy: Application Launcher for Linux

Launchy is another application launcher similar to GNOME Do. Just like GNOME Do; Launchy allows you to quickly open applications, documents or even web pages.I prefer Launchy over GNOME Do because of its support for themes and the fact that it has a smaller memory footprint.To install Launchy in Ubuntu, use the following commands:wget http://dfn.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/launchy/launchy_2.1.2-1_i386.deband then:sudo dpkg -i launchy_2.1.2-1_i386.debYou...

Delete Old Kernels and Clean-Up Grub Boot Menu

Every time Ubuntu upgrades its kernel the old ones are not removed. This means that over time your Grub boot menu list will grow in size with old kernels. The old kernels may be useful in the event your main one stops working.Intrepid Ibex will come with a tool that will automatically do the clean-up, but until then you can use the following method.The first thing you need to do is find out what your current kernel is. You can do this by entering the following command into your terminal:uname -rYour should see a result similar to this:2.6.24-19-genericRemember...

Sunday, 14 September 2008

Sitemeter Rollback

If you use SiteMeter you may be aware that they recently upgraded their website. The new look of the site was hideous and completely unusable. I am not the only one who hates it, soon after the new look came online, hate posts started appearing all over the net. They are now rolling back to the original.I spent 5 minutes looking at it, trying to figure it out but using it gave me a headache. They must have spent a lot of money designing the new look, whoever they paid clearly has no idea about usability. I would have provided a screenshot but I...

Matt Damon on Sarah Palin

Matt Damon's thoughts on Sarah Palin. I must say I agree with his views. The other day I watched a BBC news clip where a Republican Senator compared Sarah Palin to Margaret Thatcher- I laugh...

Friday, 12 September 2008

Thursday, 11 September 2008

Convert RPM Files to DEB in Ubuntu

You may come across software that is only available in .RPM format, which you cannot install in Ubuntu as it uses .deb format. There is however a tool called Alien, which can convert RPM files to DEB files."Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dpkg, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it.Despite the large version number, alien is still (and will...

Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"

With the release of 8.10 Intrepid Ibex getting very close, the Ubuntu team have decided to announce the codename of the next version of the operating system. Jaunty Jackalope will be a much bigger leap forward than Intrepid Ibex. My favorite part of the announcement:"There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One ofthem is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible - both inthe standard case, and especially when it is being tailored to aspecific device. The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it'sextremely hard...

Install Microsoft Fonts in Ubuntu

If like me you use Linux+ OpenOffice at home but are forced to use Microsoft Office at work/ school, you may want to install Microsoft fonts on your Linux machine. This will ensure that a document created in MS Word will look like it's supposed to in OpenOffice. Web browsing will also be a lot smoother as most, if not all, websites are designed with MS fonts in mind.To get MS fonts you will need to install a package called msttcorefonts. The package contains the following font types: Andale Mono Arial Black Arial (Bold, Italic, Bold Italic)...

Sunday, 7 September 2008

100th Post

I am sure my fan(s) will be delighted to hear that I have finally reached my 100th post on mopedia. I wrote my first post on the first of December 2007 and here we are now 10 months and 99 more posts later.The site has gone through a lot of changes during that time, I started off with zero CSS and very little HTML knowledge. Along the way I have learned so much about blogging, programming and the topics I write about. The look of my blog has also...

Ubuntu on a Acer Aspire One

Here is a very nice demonstration of Ubuntu running on the Acer Aspire One. The 8.9" netbook has an Intel Atom processor, 1 gig ram, 8 gig storage and Intel GMA 950 graphics.The default OS of this device is Linpus lite. I have never heard of this Linux distro before but I had a little play around with it in the shops and I think it looks really smart and sleek.Notice how smoothly Compiz is running. The author also has Photoshop running through Wi...

EEE PC 1000H vs 1000 SSD

When I first decided to buy an eee pc, I had my eyes firmly on the 1000 Linux version. I thought SSD vs HD was a no contest; I just assumed the SSD would be faster, lighter, more durable and less power hungry.Unfortunately, as it turns out the 1000 Linux version has two separate drives, a fast 8GB and a slow 32GB. As you can see from the tests conducted by jkkmobile, the 32GB SSD has a very poor write performance.The 32GB is a much cheaper SDHC card....

Friday, 5 September 2008

Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex Features

The next version of Ubuntu has gone into feature freeze; this means that no new features will be added and the focus now is on fixing bugs and polishing things up. So, I thought this would be a good time to compile a list of some of the interesting features we can expect in Intrepid Ibex. However, unlike Hardy Heron, it was much more difficult to pick out the interesting features. There simply isn't a lot to get excited about( for the average user...

Playdeb: Ubuntu Games Repository

A lot of people new to Linux are under the impression that once you start using a Linux distro you have to abandon any and all gaming. Sure, you won't be playing Crysis like games on Linux anytime soon, however there are plenty of quality games out there.I don't play games as often as I used to, but it would still be nice to have good games available when I get bored or need to relax. It's not very easy finding games for Linux, they tend to be scattered...

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Google Chrome: First Impressions

I've went ahead and downloaded Google's new browser, after spending a few minutes playing around with it my first impressions are: it's fast and very light.Unfortunately there is no Linux version as of yet, only the windows version has been released. There was a noticeable speed increase when loading most of the sites I went on compared to Firefox and IE 7. Didn't notice any big differences between Chrome and Opera, they were both very fast. One...

Google Chrome Browser

Google has released a comic to tell you about the browser its been working on, you can see the comic here. Chrome, as its been called, is based on the open source Webkit engine. Google claims to have created a browser for the 21st century with a fresh view on security, stability and speed.Some of the features of the new browser include:New JavaScript engine called V8V8 is a JavaScript Virtual Machine built from scratch to improve browser speed and...

Sunday, 31 August 2008

Feng GUI: Free Heatmap Service

Feng GUI is a free heat map service which unlike other services, generates its heat maps using algorithms. A heat map is visual representation of how people interact with a website, it shows areas where people pay more attention to as being 'hot' and low attention grabbing areas as being 'colder'. There are several ways to generate a heat map; you can track peoples eye movements, track mouse clicks or, as Feng GUI does it, use algorithms which try...

Sunday, 24 August 2008

Right Brain or Left Brain

Here is a little trick to determine which side of your brain is dominant. If you see the dancer turning clockwise, like I do, you use more of the right side of your brain and if the dancer is turning anti-clockwise your left side of the brain is more dominant. It's a weird feeling to know that other people are seeing this moving picture differently. However, if you concentrate you can see the dancer go the opposite way. It took me about a minute...

Wednesday, 20 August 2008

Tuesday, 19 August 2008

Mathematics of Beauty

Researchers at Cambridge university have found that the closer a woman's hips to waist ratio is to 0.7 the sexier her walk is. This is one of the reasons why Cambridge is one of the best universities in the world. So, a woman with 25 inch waist and 36 inch hips, has all she needs for a perfect walk. You may not be surprised to hear that Jessica Alba has that magical ratio. For men, a ratio of 0.9 has been shown to have a strong correlation with general...