Another upgrade, another glitch with the package maintainer’s version of Pan
Newsreader! As I stated back in my post in 2009, I enjoy browsing Usenet newsgroups in my spare time.  This last week, I upgraded all of my PCs to run Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot.  In doing so, I started to once again have issues with the way pan displays images!  This time, it was decoding correctly, but was displaying the image twice.  A minor glitch, to be sure, but we like perfection…so…

It’s high time I posted a new set of instructions about how to build Pan Newsreader (for complete n00bz)!!! Read the rest of this entry »

So Apple came out with a big announcement today – they have (finally!) reached an agreement with Apple Records that will allow The Beatles’ music to appear on iTunes.

**YAWN**

This MIGHT be an exciting announcement to anyone who isn’t a Beatles fan already, and who didn’t already have most of their albums on vinyl and/or CD. It’s not like iTunes doesn’t already rip at amazing bitrates & sound quality!

Way to go, Apple. I think I’ll go back to sleep now.

So a buddy and I were chatting today about Ubuntu and their naming convention, and decided that we needed to come up with a bunch of possible names for the upcoming Ubuntu 10.10 release, which is due in October!  Sometimes we springboarded from one adjective/animal to the next, so you’ll see some closely-related names…

• Maudlin Mantis
• Morose Manatee
• Mellow Manatee
• Mossy Manatee
• Marauding Mongoose
• Marauding Mudskipper
• Magnanimous Moose
• Morose Moose
• Maternal Macaque
• Miffed Meerkat
• Majestic Mammoth
• Moody Martin

Also seen on the Ubuntu Blog: Masturbating Monkey!  :-)

Post your original creations (or links to your favorites found elsewhere) below!

There is an updated version of this tutorial for Ubuntu 11.10!

For years, I have been a big fan of the usenet newsgroups. I think it’s one of the best little niches left on the internet, and it has one of the best ranges in content…  On usenet, you can have civilized, academic conversation, or unruly flame-wars between fanatics. You can also find some of the coolest binaries available on the net…hard-to-find music, out of print books in e-text, and pictures ranging from serene wallpapers to…well just about anything.

When Ubuntu’s newest version, Karmic Koala, came out, I was very dismayed to find that the distribution of the Pan newsreader available via the Synaptic package manager was broken.  Basically, any image that was posted as multi-part refused to load in the default window.

With some help from the folks on the pan-users mailing list, I was finally able to compile the code from a source repository being kept up by K.Haley, pan’s volunteer coder.  But I thought it might be nice to provide a step-by-step guide for newer linux users, as the whole process of downloading source from a github repository, the tracking down of the necessary development libraries, and the entire compilation process can be daunting.  Therefore, I came up with the following list of commands to run to get a patched version of Pan running from a normal install of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m starting to design a Amateur Radio Contest Logging program for Mac OS X.

So, in essence, this is a shout-out to any Amateur Radio Operators out there who use OS X…what features are important in a contest logger.  What features would be on your “nice to have” list?

I definitely will be working on features important for Field Day usage, but what other contests do Mac users participate in?

My intent is for this to be a no-cost, open-source program. Please keep in mind that I will be starting out slowly, then building in more complex features later.

The following graphic was taken off of a local Cincinnati news site.

Can YOU spot why this computer won’t get Conficker?  HINT:  It’s not because of an Anti-Virus program!

This coming Sunday is my favorite Sunday of the year: “Selection Sunday”, and that means that I’m tweaking my yearly NCAA Auto-Picker! It’s currently using generic teams, but all that will change when the committee announces their picks.

What is it?

It’s a webpage that auto-generates a bracket for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament (also known as “March Madness”).

Why did you make this?

Picking a mediocre bracket is easy! For each game, pick the team with the lowest number (the lower seed, or the “better team”) as the winner. In later rounds, you might have equally-seeded teams up against one another (two #1 seeds might meet in the Final Four, for example). For those, you can either flip a coin or watch ESPN to get the conventional wisdom. However…every year there are teams that buck the conventional wisdom and beat teams with lower seeds. This makes it very very difficult to pick a GREAT bracket – one that will win your office tournament. I SUCK at picking great brackets, so I made this page to help figure out which upsets might be likely. Plus, I’m lazy…

Read the rest of this entry »