Archive for the ‘tech’ Category

Linux Browser Shootout with Peacekeeper

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Some time ago, I discovered a great tool from Futuremark called Peacekeeper. Peacekeeper is a browser benchmarking tool that gives you the ability to benchmark as many different browsers as you like, save the results and compare them to one another as well as some other common browsers.

Given some of the grumblings about Firefox performance on Linux, and the current debate about WebKit vs. Gecko, I thought it might be fun to take a handful of popular Linux browsers and see how they compare from a purely performance standpoint. (more…)

7 Cool Things to Do With Linux

Friday, January 16th, 2009

So you’ve taken the plunge and installed Linux. You’ve followed all the HOWTOs all over the net. You’ve got your wireless card working flawlessly. You’ve got your video card working (and you’ve begun to loathe that spinning cube). You’ve installed all the “restricted” software like Adobe Flash, Sun Java and Google Earth. You’ve got all the patent restricted codecs and even DVD playback working just like you want. Now what? You want to know what you can do with Linux outside of the surfing, emailing, chatting and media consumption you normally do? Well, here are a few things to keep you busy. (more…)

Have we exhausted meaningful Linux-related content?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

I’ve been sitting here clicking through pages with StumbleUpon for quite a while now. I also subscribe to the Linux/Unix feed over at Digg, and it seems like it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen something new. It seems like every other page is either a table of Windows/Linux equivalent software or the top however many packages to install on clean Ubuntu install. Maybe I’ve just be into it for long enough that this information doesn’t seem useful to me, but I really think it’s approaching absurd levels of redundancy.

Eh, I’m probably just being overly negative. I just want something interesting to read for a change. Come to think of it, can we please do away with the “Top 10…” thing all together? It’s pretty played out and annoying at this point. Just like the overuse of the adjective “quietly” in headlines. Just take a look at Digg or Google News. “Apple quietly intros this…” “Microsoft quietly does that…” Please, stop.

Screwed by Windows, once again

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Over the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a song. Not one of my own, mind you, so no reason to get excited or anything, but it was interesting nonetheless. Jon recorded a band a while back (I’ll refrain from naming them here, but they sound kind of like a mix between AC/DC and the Toadies… with more sexual innuendo, if that’s possible) and asked me if I’d do a completely stereotypical and distasteful dance remix of one of the songs. I’d love to!

See, I haven’t really worked on music much lately. I got burned out on it pretty bad after I moved to Nashville, and it wasn’t really enjoyable for a long time. I’ve worked on a few little things, mostly tuning vocals for a song here and there, but nothing really big. In the midst of this gigantic hiatus, some interesting things have happened. Namely, the release of REAPER. Ever since I heard about it, I’ve been dying to get the chance to do some real work with it. This remix was perfect for finally getting to dig in and start learning some of the nuts and bolts.

The workstation I’m using is an Athlon FX62, 2GB of RAM… it normally runs Ubuntu Linux and works as a home theater PC. But, for working with REAPER, I needed Windows. Thankfully, some months ago when I set the computer up, I had enough foresight to know I would want to do this and installed Windows Vista. Now, Vista was not my first choice. I wanted to install Windows XP. Unfortunately, Windows XP needs a driver floppy for my SATA controller. Not only do I not have the driver floppy for it, I don’t have the floppy drive to put it in. So, XP thinks I don’t have any hard drives. That leaves me with Windows Vista. And really, it wasn’t that bad. I used it to play through Call of Duty 4 (which, incidentally, is the greatest game ever in the history of everything) and a few other things aside from playing around with REAPER.

Fast forward to last week, when I started working on the remix. I was having fun, learning my way around REAPER, exercising some musical creativity and whatnot. Everything was good. Until yesterday that is. Yesterday, Jon came over to hang out while I finished the track up (I was going to turn it in today). As it turns out, Microsoft pushed out an update for Vista that locked my computer into an endless cycle of reboots. Turn the computer on, it says something like “Installing updates state 3 of 3 0%” or something and then reboots. Microsoft have not offered a fix other than to reinstall Windows. How ridiculous is that? They pushed out an official update that kills who knows how many thousands of people’s computers and essentially all they can say is, “Oops.” Needless to say, the song wasn’t finished. I haven’t quite decided what to do with the 45GB of new hard drive space I have now that I obliterated that Vista partition. Maybe you have some suggestions.

I’ve always had a distaste for Microsoft products, but I would use them as a necessary evil to partake of some of my favorite software… things like REAPER and CoD4. But, not anymore. I’ll just run REAPER in Wine from now on and if I want to play games, I’ll buy a PS3 or a Wii. Microsoft will not be getting any more of my money.

There’s also a Yahoo News article on my issue if you’d like to read a little bit more about it.

bibleshark.com

Tuesday, December 11th, 2007

Andy Hill and Derek McCallum have just launched their site, bibleshark.com. It’s a very fast, customizable, online parallel Bible featuring 10 different translations. Here are a few examples of what you could do…

Definitely a great resource, and without the painful load times of other online Bibles. Thanks for the great work, guys.