April 30, 2004
Gun Safety DEA Style DEA Agent Shoots Self During Gun Safety Class . Title pretty much says it all. Thanks to Boone for the link and the laugh. Bwahahahahahaha!
Posted by Arcterex at 01:49 PM
Half Life Two Screenshots Found They're gone from their original location, reported on shacknews, but still around. Someone has some links in the shacknews comments which show the as-yet-unreleased FPS looking pretty good.

I grabbed 'em anyway though :)

Some are pretty huge, recommended a browser that automagically scales down to your browser window size :)
Posted by Arcterex at 07:42 AM
April 29, 2004
Best Fark Thread. Ever. The best ever fark thread, and it's sucessor. Caution, do not read at work unless you can a) contain laughter without passing out and b) your co-workers are used to you either bursting out laughing or passing out randomly.

You've been warned.

Posted by Arcterex at 03:57 PM
Nifty Digital Rebel Wiki Found a nifty DigitalRebel wiki out there.
Posted by Arcterex at 01:48 PM
April 28, 2004
Best Trilogy Ever? One Trilogy to Rule Them All is a great one from pointlesswasteoftime.com, examining which is the greatest trilogy ever (of star wars, lord of the rings, or the matrix movies). An example of can be found in his in depth and honest examination of the special effects from the various movies:
No complaints. The rubber Neo dummy the good guys use to distract the gang of Agent Smiths in Reloaded is rendered in meticulous detail.
:)
Posted by Arcterex at 02:36 PM
Fox Viewers on Canada Dan pointed out something that gave me a huge laugh this morning. It's more of the fallout from Fox news commentator taking exception to comments from a Canadian newspaper, and the backlash it created from Fox "News" viewers, who wrote into the Canadian paper to show them just how they felt. I've seen stuff on this before, but never saw the letters themselves. They are hilarious. Truely showing... well, I won't go on lest Bill O'Reilly get pissed off at me :) The link has some of the backstory as well. Well worth the read!
Posted by Arcterex at 09:51 AM
April 27, 2004
Burning Annie Trailerr The site for the movie Burning Annie looks pretty nifty.... the trailer makes it look like an interesting movie. The references to Kevin Smith helped as well. Via Newsaskew.
Posted by Arcterex at 04:30 PM
Open Source Software and Interface Design Acts of Volitation has a great article on Open Source and Interface Design, where basically he says that while OSS was once the great example of crappy design, there are some large projects that stand out now as clear examples of design done right.

Open Source software is regularly criticized, often fairly, for lacking in ease-of-use and polish. When a developer wants a new feature - he can add it to the software, and if it gets checked-in by the project owners, it will be there for all to use.
[...]
[But, Firefox] provides a better browsing experience than it’s ancestor, Mozilla Navigator, despite having far fewer features and functions. Smart default settings and an overall better understanding of the experience of using the application by the developers helped make it better for everyone.

Hopefully my quoting hasn't mangled his point too much. Just go and read the link :)
Posted by Arcterex at 09:18 AM
April 26, 2004
Athlon Powersaving with Linux Found a nifty article on powersaving on athlon on Linux. The main site seems to be down now, here's the google cache.
Posted by Arcterex at 02:28 PM
Upgrade KDE Easily Konstructing a New KDE Desktop is a neat article which introduces a better way of upgrading KDE to the latest releases.
Posted by Arcterex at 11:48 AM
Rejected NHL Hockey Rules Some rejected NHL rule changes for you hockey fans.
2 minute penalty for racial slur.
REASON NOT CHANGED:
To many penalties would delay the game.
Posted by Arcterex at 11:24 AM
April 25, 2004
Getting rid of WISPTIS.EXE Doing a bit of looking around on my system and noticed a strange process running... wisptis.exe. After a bit of research I found it's part of the tablet input system. Being that I don't have a tablet, I figured it's not really supposed to be there. I found these instructions on how to get rid of it. Simple huh? Just delete about 80 uniquely named registry keys. Oh don't worry, they're all easy to read/remember, like :

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F0291081-E87C-4E07-97DA-A0A03761E586}

See how easy that is? Ok, that's the first, only 79 to go!
Posted by Arcterex at 11:22 PM
Kids Art Critiqued Ever want to tell someone's kid just how good their drawing really is? This guy did. Of course, he's probably going to hell, but it was amusing for the rest of us :) There's a lot of other amusing stuff on the main site. My only surprise is that I didn't discover this sooner!
Posted by Arcterex at 08:51 PM
Gentoo Linux Matrix Wallpaper

Found some sexy gentoo themed matrix wallpaper in the Tutorial included.

Posted by Arcterex at 09:49 AM
April 24, 2004
Mac Hall Comics Some great artwork for you to enjoy.
Posted by Arcterex at 09:42 AM
Lots of Fonts Found this post in the gentoo forums with a script to suck down a whole wack of truetype fonts. Use it to give your boring old desktop (or powerpoint presentation) some new life!
Posted by Arcterex at 09:39 AM
April 23, 2004
Inplace CSS Editing for Mozilla Erik is right about EditCSS, it is pretty damn funky. Basically a sidebar for Mozilla/Firefox which lets you do inplace, realtime CSS editing on the page you're on. It auto loads the CSS file in and affects the page as you type. This looks especially good for complete CSS n00bs like me to help showing exactly what you're doing as you're doing it, instead of the standard edit, save, reload, look loop.
Posted by Arcterex at 10:49 AM
April 22, 2004
Safari Skin for Firefox Pixelperfect 0.2 is a pretty sexy looking skin that'll make Firefox look like Safari. Hmm.... this looks like something that you need window blinds for. Oh well, still looks nifty.
Posted by Arcterex at 04:06 PM
April 21, 2004
Panoramas of the World The World Wide Panorama is a collection of quicktime panoramas from around the world, from everywhere from vancouver to egypt.
Posted by Arcterex at 04:25 PM
April 20, 2004
In Depth "Axe Effect" Experiment Dave has a nice personal and detailed account of Davezilla - Come for the clean humor; stay for the filthy comments >The Axe Effect and his experiments with it. Funny read :)
Posted by Arcterex at 11:02 AM
April 19, 2004
The Men Club Commandments The Men Commandments are oh so right. As someone who has had long conversations with Foz and Engel about the Man Club, this is just hilarious.
Posted by Arcterex at 04:19 PM
April 16, 2004
Perl Filtering with Bloom Hat tip to random($foo) for his pointer to perl.com's article on Using Bloom Filters. Basically a much less expensive way of using a hash for doing existance lookups on large amounts of data.
Posted by Arcterex at 10:01 AM
New OS/X News Aggregator Well, Erik has finally let go of the secrecy and has announced what PulpFiction is. A very nifty looking news aggregator for OS/X. Mail like interfaces, persistant storage, etc.... go read the page and check it out.
Posted by Arcterex at 07:56 AM
April 14, 2004
Unreal 3 Demo Video

Not sure how long the link pointed to by this Boing Boing post about Unreal 3's amazing detail will last. Let me know if it dies, I have a copy :) All I can say is "wow" and "wish the video was high res". Unreal 3 will kick ass visually, it looks like Doom3 on steroids. They are showint it off only because of the new nvidia card, which is the first card (at $900CND approx) that can handle the engine. However, the millions of polygons and all realtime lighting and detail are no doubt worth it, and we'll all be upgrading in a year or three when Unreal 3 is released. Just wish Doom3 would hurry up and arrive :)

This is where the link goes.

Posted by Arcterex at 03:47 PM
IRC to IM BitlBee has a nifty looking IRC <--> IM (jabber, yahoo, msn) network setup.
Posted by Arcterex at 10:59 AM
MySQL Performance Talk Jeremy has a good overview of MySQL/InnoDB Performance from a talk at the 2004 MySQL users conference. Good stuff, and links to the OSDL database test suite.
Posted by Arcterex at 09:15 AM
April 13, 2004
Tea Time GNOME Panel Applet This has to be the coolest idea for an app ever.

Teatime is an applet for the GNOME panel, that reminds you if your teais ready. You can select from prediffened and user configurable teas anddrawing times, different tea cups and the kind of alarm (visual and/orsound) if drawingtime is reached.

(Site seems to be down now, I'm sure it'll be back RSN though... until then hit the wayback machine's version).

Posted by Arcterex at 11:04 PM
Howto Photoblog Fun with MT Photogallery is going into the 'to read' pile for me.
Posted by Arcterex at 01:50 PM
April 12, 2004
Photo Equipment Review PhotoZone looks like another site to suck up my free time. Reviews of equipment, info on digitals, forums, technique. Lots of neat stuff.
Posted by Arcterex at 03:55 PM
Understanding Polarizing Filters A bit of something for the photo buffs. A good article on Polarizers linked from one of the photo sites I read.
Posted by Arcterex at 02:40 PM
April 11, 2004
Minor Fixes In a flurry of small amounts of activity this weekend, I managed to fix a couple of things that had been bugging others for a while now. First of all, http://mail.ufies.org will now correctly forward to the right place, where the root cert will work nicely. No more bitching that "mail.ufies.org doesn't match ufies.org".

The second part will help those to access mail via imaps and pop3s... the right cert is now loaded by the system so that it's no longer localhost, but the proper domain name.

Posted by Arcterex at 10:52 PM
XP Slowing Down? Stuck in PIO Mode? Not along the usual fare for this site, but a tidbit I thought I'd pass along anyway, as it just helped me while trying to figure out why my windows machine was a bit slow. I noticed that my hard drive controller was in PIO mode, and after a bit of research, found that this was the reason. Ok, fine, how to go about solving it? This post helped out. All you have to do is go into the registry via regedit, edit a key, set your controller to PIO mode and then back to DMA if available, and you're golden. The solution is the post by Aeolus, titled "Another Solution".
Posted by Arcterex at 10:50 PM
April 09, 2004
Nice Gentoo Wallpapers http://www.dreamshade.net/gentoo/ has a very nice single and dual screen gentoo wallpaper.
Posted by Arcterex at 11:28 PM
April 07, 2004
Office vs. OO.o Interoperability Mark has a good post about how Openoffice.org works better with Microsoft than MS Office does. It's funny cause it's true of course. I especially like his conclusions at the end :) Glad he's enjoying his job!
Posted by Arcterex at 10:24 AM
April 06, 2004
Anime Maid Case Mod I honestly have nothing I can say about this. It's far too bizzare for words. Other than "wow, people are nuts".
Posted by Arcterex at 04:54 PM
Statement of GNU/Linux Security Debian, RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE and Mandrake have released a Joint Statement about GNU/Linux Security in response to a report on Linux security. Basically it points to flaws in the original reports methodology (considering every vulnerabilty as having the same danger), and says that closer investigation of the reports conclusions should conducted.

This has always been one of the problems with examining security between Windows and Linux (or any different OS)... high profile or low profile, root exploits, local, remote, etc all come into play, and you rarely see a comparision where all these factors are taken into account.

My way of looking at it is how comfortable would I be putting a box of either type connected directly to the internet without a (separate) firewall? Hint. Not windows :)

Posted by Arcterex at 03:18 PM
Monkey Vs. Tiger Video This video curtesy of my coworker. Two tiger cubs, one monkey, whawt could possibly happen?
Posted by Arcterex at 01:38 PM
April 05, 2004
Profont Programmers Font Craig's search for ProFont for Windows, for Macintosh, for Linux is over. I'm pretty happy with the default terminal font in OS/X, but I'm looking forward to downloading this when I get home.
Posted by Arcterex at 11:37 AM
Seinfeld and Superman, Together at Last The Adventures of Seinfeld & Superman is an Amex commercial, but very well done and very amusing.
Posted by Arcterex at 10:50 AM
Thunderbirds Movie Trailer My only real exposure to the Thunderbirds was through a book I got as a kid from a second hand store. Heck, I might still have it around somwhere. I was very happily surprised though when I saw the Thunderbirds movie trailer. Not only did everything look just like I remembered it, but even some brief glimpses of some scenes tweaked things deep in my memories.

The movie itself looks very disney-esque, like spy-kids, not the adult version of the kids series, but who knows, it might not suck!

Posted by Arcterex at 10:07 AM
GMail Screenshots Some screenshots of google's GMail app have been posted on fury.com, showing some of the things we'll get to see when it's out of closed beta.
Posted by Arcterex at 09:49 AM
April 04, 2004
Gnome and Debian, Happy Together An interesting article entitled The Perfect Desktop, which looks at GNOME and Debian from a Mepis install. Nice screenshots, and while I'm not sure that any particular distro is better than another, it's still a good read.
Posted by Arcterex at 02:23 PM
Kernel 2.4 and 2.6 Changes Nice summary article of a Linux Kernel Comparison: 2.6.4 vs. 2.4.25. Of course, 2.6.5 was just released, but this is still relevant, and good reading.
Posted by Arcterex at 08:59 AM
April 02, 2004
State of the GNOME The State and Future of GNOME is an excellent article on the current state of GNOME and it's apps and the future. Highlighted are some comparisions betwen GNOME apps and the similar offerings from MS and Apple, and some of the new and upcoming technologies that'll be arriving soon.
Posted by Arcterex at 03:52 PM
April 01, 2004
The Cruelest April Fools Joke of All... Some friends got me with things that got me all excited and happy for them, websites did silly things that were pretty obvious, but I found the cruelest joke of all on this page.

Those bastards. That's not even funny. Having Duke Nuke'm Forever on the label, that'd be funny :)

Posted by Arcterex at 01:57 PM
April 1st It's april 1st, so remember, believe nothing! nutink!

That is all.

Posted by Arcterex at 07:58 AM