Category: technology-and-computing

Gwibber is an open source microblogging client for GNOME that supports Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Pownce, Identi.ca and other popular social web services.

Yes I know its not Tweetdeck but hey hello, it supports more account types than just Twitter and Facebook. Its also got interesting support non microblogging services for Flickr, Brightkite, Digg and a few others. I've been pretty vocal about knocking Gwibber's stability in the past but now its rock solid. Currently I have 7 different accounts running through it and it doesn't even blink. So solid, that I have dumped the Air app Twhirl. The only thing which I have seen which is close to Gwibber is Eventbox/Socialite which is mac only. There's already talk about making a QT version of Gwibber which could work on the Windows and Mac platform too. I expect most people will look at it and say, yuk. But to be fair its using my own custom style from ubuntu, and it will get better. The concept of Gwibber and how it works puts it a few steps in front of a crowded microblogging market.

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So I upgrade my dell XPS laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 pretty soon after the launch of 9.10, and to be honest its been pretty good to me. However I have had a couple of problems. The first major problem which still needs to be solved is shutting the lid doesn't send the machine to suspend. I had this problem way back in the 7 series and Glyn fixed it for me by creating some custom script. I got a feeling that script might be causing problems now, so hopefully it won't be too much of a hassle to fix. I just have to remember to set it to suspend beforehand till then. I have no idea if hibernate works but I don't really use it anyway.

I have reinstalled Ubuntu 9.10 twice already, once because the display got really messed up (no idea why and all my messing with xandr made no difference) and the first time because there was some major problem with finding partitions in fstab, from my previous 9.04 install. Each time, a reinstall has been pretty easy, pop the disc in give it 20mins and we're back to scratch again. Nothing lost except the applications. All preferences and personal files stay untouched which is ideal.

There's not a lot of new stuff in 9.10 from what I can tell, instead I'm getting a real feel that things are getting very stable, ready for 10.4 which is rumoured to be a LTS (long term support) version. I've been using Firefox with between 20-30 tabs over the last few days and its been pretty flawless. During that time I've been using Youtube like a fiend for reasons which I may blog about later. In the past going page to page with so much flash would cause all type of chaos and slowdowns. But its not only Firefox which seems fine, everything seems super tuned. Memory usage is way down on previous versions, even with 30tabs open, evolution, gwibber, skype, pidgin, banshee, rhythmbox, tomboynotes, specto, keepass, etc all open at once, my memory usage just hit 1.1 gig of physical memory.

Compiz feels solid as a rock now, don't get me wrong its been good and worked well but now it feels impossible to crash. Pidgin, Gwibber, Evolution and Gnome-Do all seem very stable too. Not only that but Gwibber 2.0 is cleaned up and and I have now dropped using Twirl and Tweetdeck because of Gwibber 2 (I might do a blog post about just that alone). Specto and Conduit have added new social features which makes it extra useful with tracking things like RSS feeds. Generally everythings good and the day in day out applications are solid.

Heck even the battery monitor reports the time better that ever before, not only does it know my battery is screwed and only shows theres a maximum of 25% capacity counts down correctly from that point in minutes. Theres a few new things I've noticed which I've not really had time to play with yet. Pulseaudio has been tighten up and now includes support for Apple airtunes and DLNA/UPnP devices. I had a quick try to see if XBMC would pick it up but it didn't although I can see its working on other machines and the UPnP discovery tool. The general style of Ubuntu and user experience has also gone up in the latest version. Software centre bugs me a bit but its much more usable that add/remove apps. I still have my own custom themes (sandy box and jade garden) but I've left the default boot and login screen alone as there very attractive. Oh yeah and boy does Ubuntu boot up fast.

The last sting in the tail is the external display. For some reason external displays have changed since 9.04. There seems to be some kind of autosensing which picks up anything plugged in and tries to sync with it. Hence 2mins before starting the BarCamp welcome talk, everything went very wrong with my laptop. I have since installed the Grandr which is a gui for RandR, I hope to have this issue under control.

So all in all, a good upgrade but be careful, its not all blue skies

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I have been changing around my home network storage recently because I don't really want to loose a load of data again and I don't think the home server setup I have is the best. (Although to be fair fair I've only lost data in the last few year because I stupidly formatted the wrong hard drive when switching from Freenas to a plain Ubuntu install. I have never had a disk failure in my storage server yet)

Freenas was good if you just wanted a replacement NAS setup but it lacked any multimedia, backup, services. So I started running Ubuntu on the box and installed everything myself (Samba, SSH, Webmin, etc). The machine physically has 6 drives and I was planning to put them into a RAID formation but didn't see the point when I could use LVM (logical volume management) which has the effect of loads of drives looking like one. Yes I know if one drive goes down i loose stuff but its a risk I take and I tend to run Spinrite on the server and all my machines once a month so I can work out if theres any problems coming up. Oh yeah and I looked into the UnRAID stuff but it seemed to be more trouble thats its worth. For backup I then copy everything important worth keeping to a external drive which I place away from the computers (aka its only powered on when I'm backing up or restoring). But this isn't enough, I need to really look into serious remote cloud storage but I've found them to be expensive in the past.

Looking at Backblaze's solution, I'm certainly amazed and am reconsidering cloud storage again. 5 dollars a month is about 3.50 pounds a month which is good for unlimited data storage. And I can see why its so cheap compared to the others, although I was surprised to find it uses some application and it only works on PC and Mac. The problem I've always had is the word unlimited, when doing some research – unlimited has been restricted to just typical website files, not allowed archive files, backup files, etc, etc. For example check out Dreamhost's upfront unlimited policy. I already have a free dropbox account which is great but its not really a backup service like I need. I did use Jungledisk for a while with Amazon S3 for a bit but the pricing starting adding up. I've heard good things about Spideroak and they support Linux well. The last option which has me thinking is my ISP recently starting offering a online backup service, unlike the rest it uses standard protocals to do the transfering but unlike the rest the pricing model is not clear. Actually so unclear, that I can't even find it.

What do people do for backup? What services do people highly recommend? Should I just try building my own backblaze box instead?

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I was thinking the other day how I enjoyed the Digital bits photostream by Will Lion. But its not exactly the kind of thing you look at all the time, even in my RSS reader it doesn't really work. So I found the perfect place for it, as a screensaver. I looked for a Linux Flickr based Screensaver but found very little. Most of the blog posts suggest downloading the photos then using a standard Linux screensaver to display a folder of the images. The blog I was looking at suggested using a podget and a cron to pull down the photos everyday at 5am. This was ok but I didn't want to install another app when I thought Conduit could do a even better job. And I was right.

I setup Conduit to read from the Flickr RSS feed and download the pictures to a set folder, I then just told the screensaver to look in the same folder to pull in the fresh photos. All straight forward really but so effective.

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I've recently been playing with Conky far too much. After a lot of playing around, I got it to this state. So now I have RSS directly on my desktop, I do however wish there was a marquee mode (found), so I could build something more like one of Particls outputs or Snackr. Conky does support Lua scripting, so it seems possible but way above my head at this moment.

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I'm slightly excited about Sony's new PRS-300 ebook reader. Its out soon and goes for 199 dollars which is about 150-160 pounds. I expect after a while it will drop down closer to 100 pounds which is the ideal price for a ebook reader in my view. You don't get a lot for your money, no Bluetooth, Wifi or even a memory expansion slot. But with 440meg on board and a 5 inch display, its not going to be a bad general purpose ebook reader. I also hear Sony's play PDF's, HTML and Text files without any extra conversions.

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Jason Calacanis has wrote a extra long essay about why the love affair with Apple is over. Its a good read and hopefully adds to the mounting public pressure. The essay is broken dowin into 5 main points.

1. Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices
2. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications
3. Draconian App Store policies that are, frankly, insulting
4. Being a horrible hypocrite by banning other browsers on the iPhone
5. Blocking the Google Voice Application on the iPhone

Of course I've been writing similar things for a while but its always good to hear Mac fans coming to there senses.

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I got so fed up of trying to understand what the bloody hell was going on with these forms on my huawei MT820 ADSL modem that I ended up buying another router to control the firewall settings and do a number of other stuff too of course. Hopefully I'll be poping out live mixes again.

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When I upgraded to the latest version of Kdenlive a free software non-linear editor which runs on every platform except windows. I was honestly shocked, it was clean, crisp and professional. There's little doubt that open source and free software has somewhat left user experience and interface design concerns closer to the bottom of the pile but this is radically changing. I'm hoping to show some of the new look applications which are worthy of another look and your attention, starting with the new look Kdenlive.

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I love hak.5, its the perfect example of niche content. Every episode has something new and interesting in it for someone like myself. The ESXi virtualisation stuff has been pretty good, and the WPA hacking (i mean) self-evaluating almost got me writing. But what killed me was Kon-boot. I looked it up on darknet.org.uk and found this.

Kon-Boot is an prototype piece of software which allows to change contents of a Linux kernel (and now Windows kernel also!!!) on the fly (while booting).

In the current compilation state it allows to log into a Linux system as ’root’ user without typing the correct password or to elevate privileges from current user to root. For Windows systems it allows to enter any password protected profile without any knowledge of the password.

It was mainly created for Ubuntu, later the author has made a few add-ons to cover some other Linux distributions.

Entire Kon-Boot was written in pure x86 assembly, using old grandpa-geezer TASM 4.0.

How do you stop this happening? Add a BIOS password and Encrypt your hard drive. But look out, the cold boot hack is becoming actually possible for the seasoned IT professional. Shocking stuff, well done to the hak.5 guys for covering this stuff well.

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