ForeverGeek has some Impressive New 'Rage' Screens to Ogle. Really looking forward to playing this one.

Fedora 15 Changing The Network Device Naming Scheme

The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, a sort of race condition develops at every system boot and the ports may get their names in an arbitrary order. Suppose we have two Ethernet devices - eth0 and eth1. It cannot be ensured that eth0 will remain as eth0 and eth1 will remain as eth1 after the next system boot. The names will be allocated arbitrarily. This is generally not a problem in personal computers because there is only one port. However, some servers have multiple Ethernet ports and this naming scheme creates problems in such cases.

Makes sense, but not sure I like it. Kudos to OSNews for the original link.

The big question is will other distros adopt this as well.

I agree with this Joystiq article.... there probably was some sort of dark magic used to recreate Halo in Minecraft.

This stuff is not helping me with not buying the game you guys.

Good to hear that the dudes over at Codeweavers have released Crossover and Crossover Games 10.0 for Mac and Linux.

In a cool diversion from the standard "you can do it, follow your dreams!" type articles, UnicornFree says instead Don't Follow Your Passion:

It's an age-old story: Boy meets passion, boy follows passion, passion turns out to be a mirage and/or actually a big pain in the ass, despite how rosy it may have seemed from a safe distance.

Now, it's not so cut and dried, or depressing, but it's a different take on things that anyone with entrepreneurial endeavors should take a look at.

A Continued Commitment to Security is the Facebook blog post on how they are enabling HTTPS security on their system.

Starting today we'll provide you with the ability to experience Facebook entirely over HTTPS. You should consider enabling this option if you frequently use Facebook from public Internet access points found at coffee shops, airports, libraries or schools. The option will exist as part of our advanced security features, which you can find in the "Account Security" section of the Account Settings page.

If you're concerned about security, things like Firesheep, and not allowing people to get into your facebook account fairly trivially, then this is a good thing. Head to the settings page on your facebook account and enable this now.

Microsoft's iPad Response is Too Tepid, Too Late - Great article by Paul Thurrott, noted MS guy, noted as telling it like it is, even when it means bashing MS a bit.

Microsoft, I'd like to introduce you to reality.

In reality, Apple sold tens of millions of iPads last year and is on track to sell tens of millions more next year. In reality, people are buying iPads. In reality, they're not buying Windows 7-based tablets. And in reality, they never will.

Wow, hearing that Oregon Trail is turning 40 this year makes me feel oooooolllllllddddd.

I first played this game in grade 7 when the only computers we had access to was a mobile computer lab (basically a trailer that was shared from school to school with about 20 computers (probably mac 2s or something)). I remember playing hours of Oregon Trail and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, looking up at the poster of flags of the world to figure out where Carmen had gone that had a red and white flag.

Well named site with lots of good things that Mac users might just not know yet.

Cool video put together about the Egyptian Revolution that's going on right now. Pretty freaky stuff.

If you're into Ruby on Rails and are one of the 10 people in the world who aren't using TextMate, you might want to look at the new stuff in the JetBrains RubyMine 3.1 Early Access build.

From the release:

• Autopopup code completion -- no need to press keyboard hotkey to invoke the code completion. It autopops up instantly as you type and works for Ruby, JavaSctipt, HTML and other files. You may want to tweak it -- check IDE Settings | Editor | Code Completion section.
  
• GitHub integration -- you can open projects in IDE right from a remote repository, or share your project as a new GitHub repository right from the IDE. Read more in IntelliJ IDEA blog.
  
• Command line application ('mine') -- you can open files and projects in RubyMine from command line now! Just enable the script by running File | Create Command-line Launcher and you are good to command.
  

Got iOS 3 or later? You can use Google Cloud Printing. Course, you'll need to deal with doing the setup, but still could be handy.

Cool version of Little Big Planet done in Papercraft. Thanks Reddit.

Update: Grizzled also shared this out, so cred to him as well. Also related: comic - make anything.

Video called Creating A Hit: 8 Hour Challenge. A testimony to the crap that is top 40 music these days.

While seeing new Duke Nukem Forever Trailer and Screenshots is cool, but after almost 14 years I'm going to default to "I'll believe it when I see it". The trailer is intriguing for sure though.

Kevin Smith, of Smodcast, Clerks, and QuickStop fame is going to head out to join the Westboro Baptist Church in protesting Red State at the Sundance Film festival.

Fans of Smith will remember he did something similar back in '99 protesting Dogma. One can hope that they get way more turn out. He also tells a great story about how it all came to be and his disappointment in the protest turnout at Dogma.

Argh, my mistake, looks like he's joining the counter-protest, not the protest. Bummer. Course, the Westboro people are some messed up folks who don't need any more encouragement than they have from their current endeavors.

If you wanted to see what life would be like if you moved somewhere, check outifitweremyhome.com. You could see, for example, that Comparing Canada to The United States you'd have more babies if you lived in the US, but pay more for health care. Very cool site! Thanks to @milesforrest for the link!

GNOME 3.org is up and available, filled with details and bits of information (all still alpha) about the next generation of GNOME.

If you're an EMACS user and are sad that only Textmate and Vim people seem to have the fun and cool Rails development stuff, be sad no longer! Emacs 24 Rails Development Environment - From *scratch* to Productive in 5 Minutes goes through setting up the latest EMACS (with a bunch of copy and pasting) to customizing for full Ruby on Rails lovin'!

You know you're a fan when you remodel your bathroom to make it look like it's a home to the Horde....

Looking at the biteSMS for iPhone features, it makes me ask two questions.

1 - Why aren't these sorts of things built into the core of iOS by Apple?
2 - Is this something that I'd jailbreak my phone for?

Obviously #1 is apple's uber-control of things, but #2 is a definite "maybe" from someone who hasn't seen anything in the Jailbreak world that has made me want to void my warranty (so to speak).

Original reddit discussion thread.

Just a funny pic of the guy who jailbroke the Windows 7 Phone.

We all know that while bittorrent is "peer to peer" it still relies on trackers, directories, etc. Seems that what claims to be a Truly Decentralized BitTorrent Downloading Has Finally Arrived.

BitTorrent is a great technology to share files both quickly and efficiently, but like most other P2P-technologies it has an Achilles' heel. The download process relies in part on central servers that can crash or go offline for a variety of reasons. To address this vulnerability the first truly decentralized BitTorrent/P2P client has been developed, meaning that no central trackers, or even BitTorrent search engines are required to download movies, software and music.

And later on in the article on why this is different that Kazaa, Limewire, etc:

Many readers wonder why this is new compared to Kazaa, Exeem, LimeWire, Gnutella, eMule. Well, that explanation is a bit technical, here it goes. All these client either contain spam or use servers. For instance, Limewire Cooperation was sending out digitally signed instructions to block anti-piracy companies and spammers in general (157 pages of details).

Great stuff from torrentfreak.

Great video of Ben Goldacre at Nerdstock talking about placebos, studies, quackery, and all things involved. Hard to describe, great to watch.

There was a Reddit story on the new Portal 2 PS3 Steam features, including a free PC/Mac copy of Portal 2 with every purchase of the PS3 version, and cloud based storage of savegames. To those familiar with the Steam "ecosystem", this makes complete sense, you buy a game and get access to it on whatever computer you have steam installed on. Still, awesome to know that Steam will continue to be awesome on PS3.

Dropbox has a nice little contest going - Dropquest 2011 which will let you have lots of prizes and some free extra space. If you don't have dropbox yet, get on it! Thanks to @hawkeye @halkeye for pointing me to it.

Cool stuff sent over from a buddy at work... The audience is listening to this Kinect hack which lets you control that "the audience is listening" THX intro thing. Looks very fun!

If you needed an excuse to get an iPad, you'll be happy to know that Old Sierra On-Line games are now available on iPad via the web thanks to some pretty cool resource extraction and logic conversion to javascript.

Now who has an iPad I can have, I want to see if I can get Larry to take that girl's clothes off....

Cool video - Confessions of a Disney Employee. Stolen from Nigel.

Bloody hell mate.... this Video of an Australian flood sweeping away a parking lot full of cars is pretty brutal. The commentary from the people taking the video is the best. "Glad I parked at the front today" and "think we should move the cars?".

The craziest thing is the degree to which the flood was at before they started to get worried. It wasn't until the cars were starting to be swept away before they started to get worried, but up until then it was more like "wow, what a quaint little river we have running through our parking lot." Course, in an insane a place as Australia with their man eating birds and 8,000 types of things that can kill you, this is probably normal. Bonus points to the guy who went into the flood to drive his Range Rover away.

Cool article on Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else. Short story: Many free themes hide spammy links or potentially evil code in them.

Interesting project.... ESFS, the encrypted steganography filesystem, implemented (currently) entirely in Python.

So you like Ubuntu and GNOME and have played with the various "elementary" themes. If so, you might be interested in the elementary Project, essentially a Ubuntu "complete mod" using the elementary look and feel, and eventually including various custom built elementary apps to replace nautilus, rhythmbox, etc.

Interesting interview by Jon-o-Bacon with some Ubuntu devs where they talk about the "Unity" development, and what's going to be going on for the next Ubuntu release. If you're unfamiliar with Unity you can get more information about it.

A post on Hudson's future shows that they are working hard to get out from under Oracle now that Sun has been bought.

Caught on video is the new (and not yet officially acknowledged) PlayStation Phone. I was a bit skeptical of running PlayStation games on an Android platform, but you get all the advantage of the Android ecosystem, and just have to run a MAME-like app to pull in the PlayStation ROMs (or whatever they use). Double-bonus is that it doesn't look like the "joystick slider" makes the phone that much more bulky for using it like a normal phone.

Well, it's finally officiall.... the Verizon iPhone has been announced and launched. I'm sure if you hit any of the apple or tech blogs you'll find more info than you can here.

Next questions, what will happen to their network, and what will happen to AT&T.

The title of Bet You Can't Do That Twice pretty accurately describes the bandsaw skill shown in this demo.

The full Paul movie trailer is out, and it looks good. Hard to go wrong with a funny alien creature and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

Looks like the latest jailbreak for iPhone (untethered) is out. Redsn0w 0.9.7beta6 Released.

So the rumor mill is thundering with talk that The Verizon iPhone is Coming after a invite to a Verizon event at 11:00 on 1/11/2011 went out. This may (and I do emphasize may) be the introduction of the iPhone on the Verizon network. If not, as my friend Bryan says, everyone should just never talk about this again, as it's been said to be coming "just around the corner" since the iPhone was introduced in 2007.

Interesting to wonder a few things though. Most importantly, will this mean a huge upsurge in iPhone adoption as all the people whining about "I'm not getting an iPhone when it's on AT&T" shut up and get an iPhone. I also wonder if the US will have any issues with the iPhone on multiple carriers. We in Canada have had iPhone on Rogers, Bell, Telus and Fido for years now without issue, so I hope not. Also will the Verizon network crumble like AT&T's did under the weight of a huge influx of new iPhone users and their hefty data usage?

Or will they just be announcing a new tablet or a new pricing model for evening minutes?

Funny little video of Michael Caine doing Michael Caine.

Great funny answer on Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality?

Why is Dropbox more popular than other tools with similar functionality? E.g. Windows Live Sync, etc, which are free.

Via reddit. Of particular note is this comment which parodied the "made of meat" classic funny story.

I don't completely understand why, but I have to say the presentation of the death of the Ruby Hash Rocket Syntax ("=>") is pretty awesome. Not sure if this is going to happen in future Ruby 1.9 releases or if both versions are valid now and the hashrocket syntax will just be deprecated.

My buddy H threw over a link for this: Vizio 'Versus' offers two-player head-to-head gaming on one screen over at Joystiq. Basically it uses 3D tv technology to allow two players to view the same screen and play head to head, both with a full screen view of the game (my biggest complaint about console multiplayer gaming).

If you have any care about the Apple and Mac world you'll know that Mac OS X 10.6.6 with the new software app store has been released. I only had a few minutes this morning to play with it, and the only change I could see in the OS was the addition of the app store. The app store itself is very iOS and iTunes like, the only thing I don't know if I like is that when an app is downloaded it's automatically put in your dock, which may or may not be what you want. Course, you also know where the app is and can move it to where you want it from there.

9-5 Mac also noted a huge bonus that you can get apple's Aperture photo editing and management software for only $80. I'm a Lightroom fanboy, but that much of a discount makes me say "maybe it'd be worth it if only to keep from having to try to find ways to get around the 30 day trial limitation!

Flickr has announced that Flickr for Windows 7® and Windows Phone 7® will be released soon.

OK, this Viral Chinese time travel commercial has to be the funniest thing I've seen all day. Combined with the XKCD time travel joke it's great. Kudos to JTStrocel for the link.

Seems the next generation of Android OS needs it's own trailer. Looks cool, makes me want an android tablet to be honest :) Guess we'll see what comes out before or around when the iPad 2.0 appears.

Someone started a kickstarter fund to have a mission to put a monolith on the moon. Agree with Gruber, best idea ever, especially when you think about how it worked and why in 2001.

I am not a fan of blogging every bit that comes out of CES (lots of other sites do that far better than I can), however I had to post this from Notion Ink as well as the Adam hands on that Aryk sent me.

Some might say that the James Van Der Memes site is just a rip off of the classic Eric Conveys an Emotion, but as a fan of Dawson's Creek from back in the day (and of course Katie Holmes before she went insane and married someone other than me), I gotta pimp his site a bit. Cool stuff and a great idea.

Pretty damn funny video sketch comedy from the BBC show The One Ronnie - My Blackberry Is Not Working! Man BBC has some good stuff.

Via Twitter comes some Incredible Space Pics from the ISS by NASA astronaut Wheelock. Amazing stuff, love the one of the astronaut working outside.

Eye-Fi has announced a new set of cards with a new Direct Mode which allows wireless transfer of images taken on your camera (with Eye-Fi on it of course) to your iOS device running the Eye-Fi app. 9-5 Mac has a good rundown.

My only reason for not getting the Eye-Fi card is the monthly cost for their geo-tagging service, however with a vacation on the horizon, I might change my tune :)

Update: Looks like I was wrong about the geotagging cost, some cards come with a lifetime included geotagging service.

Gotta say that the new (old) DOS UI on stopwilson.com is pretty nice.

Cool 7 minute video on Vimeo on The Making of Tron: Legacy. Amazing what they can do these days....

Nice list of tools and techniques to Get a Windows 7 Snap on Windows XP and Vista, OS X, and Linux. Anyone who knows me knows that the window management that Windows 7 has in it is my go-to "oh man if only they had this on Linux/Mac" comment.

So my first thought when I saw the SmartBook: Tablet, netbook, MID and more in one was "wow, that's cool", and my second thought was "this is the exact opposite of what apple is doing with the iPad".

The design has some obvious pros (tablet, laptop, etc all in one) and cons (all in one means you take it all everywhere (why not just have a laptop) or have to leave or take parts (what if I forget the keyboard part somewhere when I need it). What's more interesting is it runs Android, both a cool thing, but if you've got a kitchen sink for a device, why not give it a full Linux or Windows OS, otherwise users may feel hobbled having a "full" computing device that "only" runs a smartphone/tablet OS, Android.

Any of you find this intriguing? In the "I'm going to buy it" way I mean, or are you like me and really want to see how it works and looks in real life before even considering it?

HandBrake 0.9.5 is out, with a ton of changes.

A great link from @spolsky to a checklist on what to do if your server has been hacked. I'm sure there are other things, but it's definitely a good place to start, and the users on Server Fault know what they're talking about.

If you are lucky enough to be one of the people to get one, you'll be happy to know that you can Install Mac OS X on a Cr-48 Chrome notebook. Not sure what the performance is like though, I've seen OS/X on a netbook and I must say that with less than 2G of ram, the Mac OS is not a happy camper. Course, you're getting a Mac(ish) notebook for a very small cost (well, if you got it free from Google you get it... well, free!).

Ok, it's a bit late for the real start of the new year, but watching this Burnout FAIL over on failblog gave me the first chuckle of the day. Still getting used to this whole "waking up in the morning" thing, so stay tuned for more link goodness.

Fantastic video of Boardwalk Empire VFX Breakdowns, showing what you can do these days with computer technology and a green screen or 7.

A second photography related link tonight, check out this Firmware Hack to Bring 4K Video to the Canon Rebel T2i/550D. If you have one of these cameras, and are a bit brave, you might have fun playing with this. 4K video is .... well, damn high resolution lets just say :)

Just in time for the videos you might be making over the holidays, Further Research into Using Chickens as Steadicams has reached a point where you probably want to read the page. Oh sure it's all for fun, but still, it's pretty damn cool :)