Jedi Mind Tricks A great node on E2 describing how to use Jedi Mind Tricks on state troopers. Probably not recommended (well, as much as listening to Billy the Mountain on repeat for 3 days in a row), but funny as hell.

High Quality Digital Music Collections I've had a fairly large mp3 collection for a while now, and it has been an interesting learning experience finding the tools that are needed to do quality checking, renaming, methods of file naming, and the whole works... in fact, I plan to write a little mini-howto someday about this all. What I'm wondering is how would one go about starting a digital music collection? Not collecting from the net, but from CD. Some fundamental choices have to be made right from the start, and I don't know the answers. IE: mp3 vs. ogg, high bitrate vs VBR, what encoder to use, etc etc. Any audiophiles out there that can throw advice out to the community?

United Linux Well, it looks like Caldera, Conectiva, Suse and Turbolinux have created a "standards based" linux distro called United Linux. Some of the technical highlights are:

• KDE3
• Gnome2
• Postgresql
• CUPS
• Mozilla
• Vim :)
• Ext2, Ext3, Reiserfs, JFS
• LVM and RAID
• VPN using IPSec

Extreme Programming Via Foz comes a good article on extreme programming on salon.

Harry Potter DVD Yup, it's out, and if you're in the fraser valley, rumor has it that Safeway has the cheapest price ($19.99 CND with the customer tracking card for the DVD). Anyway, if you're wondering how to get the extra footage, head over here. BTW, be careful, there is a fullscreen version and a letterbox version, make sure you get the right one! Sadly I have no idea how to tell the two apart by the outside packaging....

Doom III Shots Yup, it's almost time to start spooging again. They showed it at E3, there's the video out there with some in game footage and interviews, and now the shack has nicely collected the high quality screenshots here. As you will note from the Carmack article below, the game was only running at medium visual settings, not "best." Still damn impressive, especially when he says "... we screwed up..." :)

ESP Via Webpage From Raskal

check out http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/esp.html

 .... freaky ....

Episode 2 to Poop on! A friend send me a link to this, and I put it up here, cause this is the funniest thing ever. Remember Triumph the insult comic, dog funny thing? Well, he visited a Star Wars Episode 2 line up recently....

Halo PC QandA Seems that the shack finally got the time to ask MS about the status of the once promised (and touted) PC release of Halo. As you may remember, Halo was originally going to be released for Windows, Linux, and Mac. Then someone bought them out, and got Halo going as the premier game for the X-Box. Obviously the chance of getting a release of the Linux and Mac versions is pretty near 0, but the PC windows version is still possible. The interview basically says it's still planned, but there's no timeframe. Sounds like evasive salesdroid-speak to me though.

World's Smallest Website http://www.guimp.com even has space invaders and pong, and a html and flash interface. Thanks for the link VW Derf!

The best business plan ever And in fact, the only business plan ever. Required reading for any friends of mine who are looking to start up their own business, read the Epiphyte Corp.'s business plan.

Episode II extras Good find by cuvarack, who threw me a link to this force.net site for AoTC, with such coolness as hidden images, hidden scenes, and info on digital projection locations.... Speaking of digital projection, anyone know if there'll be any real difference seeing it in DP vs a normal theater? Other than (presumably) slightly crisper images?

Episode II Misc A la trainspotting/adminspotting, we have jedispotting. Read on, but be warned, it has some dirty words... (Original link here) Choose Life. Choose a Master. Choose a Lightsaber. Choose a Clone Army. Choose a fucking big holo-projector, choose sonic showers, land-speeders, and electrical R2-D2 openers. Choose good health, low midichlorians, and blaster insurance. Choose fixed interest moisture farm repayments. Choose a starter smuggling ship. Choose your Jedi. Choose robes and matching sandals. Choose a three-piece body armor on hire purchase in a range of fucking alloys. Choose sitting on that Bantha-hide chair and watching mind-numbing, chain choaking slave girls, stuffing fucking slimy worms into your mouth. Choose rotting away in the belly of the Sarlack, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up aprentices you spawned to kill all your breathren and take over the galaxy.

Or another vesion:

Choose the force. Choose a lightsaber. Choose a career as a Jedi. Choose no family. Choose a fucking big space cruiser. Choose washing droids, speeders, death star plans and blasters ..... Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting in that cantina watching mind numbing, spirit crushing cantina bands, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last on miserable Tattoine, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up Anakin you trained to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose to defend the Republic..... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

Ad-killing CSS A post on slashdot suggested using http://freak.aagh.net/code/user.css as your user stylesheet (an option in browsers such as galeon/mozilla and opera, probably others). Basically it just looks for banners of a certain size, and doesn't display them. Under galeon you get a bit of a jerk as the banner is removed, but it's still a cool idea, similar to bannerblind for mozilla.

Gentoo Interview Interesting interview over at OSNews with Daniel Robbins, of gentoo fame. A good interview that addresses a lot of the good (and not so good) of gentoo, as well as their future direction, and what they are doing as a company.

The Coolest Case-Mod Ever Gully's Aqua Tank could be the coolest case mod I've seen yet... really makes me want to give something like that a try :) Probably need a taller case though.... wonder if the colo guys would mind me coming into the server room to feed my fish though :) I also really like the way he handled not taking enough pictures too!

VIM Script Lovin' Slightly related to the last entry, I've been going through some of the scripts and tips at vim.sf.net and have compiled a small list of ones I've started using, or think are amazing/incrediable/life-changing.

• Function Listing
• Auto-close XML and HTML tags
• A better IDE for file choosing
• :CVS <command> support
• Quick switch from .c -< .h and back
• Smart tab completion while in insert mode
• Obscure text instantly

Hope that helps any Vi(m) people out there who want to extend their editing power!

Buffer Love Everything you wanted to know about buffers in VIM but were afraid to ask.

Worm-rampage Cool, the Arrogant Worms (fav Canadian Comedy group) have a new album out (well, it's a 2001 album, but I just noticed it now). So everyone go out and check out Idiot Road!

UF Splash Screen for KDE3 Found this while hitting KDE-Look... a very cool User Friendly splash screen featuring a great comic of Pitr!

Clean Clients We all know about Kazaa Lite, the no spyware, no illegal distributed computing, no extrashitnoonewants version of the populare file shareing program, well how about a page for other cleaned clients. They have links to many popular spyware-ridden p2p clients that have the spyware removed.

UFies.org mailing list Ok, I finally got around to setting up mailman and have created ufies-announce, a mailing list that is intended to allow people who have sites hosted, or mail, or anything like that to keep up to date on things like planned outages, upgrades, or any other major changes to the UFies.org server. This is a announce only, very low traffic list, so if you're interested in signing up, go and do it.

The MS Hate Page Hadn't seen this before, but it's got a nice collection of pics and screen shots for all your Microsoft hate needs (can anyone spot the familiar figure in there? :)

Oooohhh published Big cheers go out to Tig for getting himself published somewhere other than his own website!

• CSS for Boneheads
• Convert your site from tables to CSS

Both great articles, good job Tig!

Green Goblin's Last Stand "As seen on slashdot (and quickly slashdotted), I have a local copy of "The Green Goblin's Last Stand" for your viewing pleasure!

Spider-man! Yes, it's here! It's here! Matinees to late shows, the glory (or POS, I haven't seen it yet :) is here for all to enjoy. Anyone seen it yet and want to share how it is?

On a side note, tomorrow is free comic book day, a way of getting people interested, or back into, comic books. It seems simple, just go to a participating store (there is a store locator for the US and Canada on the site) and get a comic book. It doesn't sound like you can get *any* comic book, there is what seems to be a list of what you can get (I just finished reading the "Ultimate Spider-man series to June 2002, curtesy of Oneiros, I recommend it).

NetHack Via Tig, a Diablo style version of NetHack, Falcons Eye. Very well done, I'm playing it as I type this! :)