SkyHorse.Org

Zonbu – The Zen of computers, or is it?

Zonbu is what I call a YAW2.0C (yet another web 2.0 company).

Take a product (computer), hype it up a bit with new-age marketing bullshit (“low carbon footprint”, “silent”, “under $99″) and sell it not as a product but as a service ($12 a month). There you go, your KDE-based linux mini-box with 4gb flash-drive and a lot of usb connectors. Oh and don’t forget the eye-candy website and a funny name that reminds people of Star Wars characters.

Funny they never mention the lack of monitor, keyboard or mouse, but hey that would be so 1.0…

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Ubuntu: the true meaning

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘I can’t configure Debian’…

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Fixing open DNS servers

Ok, there seems to be a *lot* of posts and threads about this issue and I think a simple page is appropriate.

Lets start with the problem. Check the report for your domain here: http://www.dnsreport.com/tools/dnsreport.ch?domain=YOUR_DOMAIN_HERE.COM

An open DNS server is one that replies to a query about a domain it is not responsible for, to anyone who asks for it. For starters, that is just a waste of processing time, but it can be worse if it is used for flooding. See, since a DNS query is (much!) smaller in number of bytes than a DNS response, if it is spoofed it can be used to perform a DoS attack on a computer with several times the bandwidth of the perpretator.

I’ve posted a solution to my obscure cPanel guide, have a look if your interested:
Fixing Open DNS servers

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GNU Radio: hacking the last frontier

Imagine a combination of hardware and software that could receive and transmit at any frequency.

Imagine you could have an FM radio that turns into a GPS receiver that turns into a RFID reader. Or a Radar. Or a Digital TV Receiver. Or a mobile phone. Or a Wi-Fi scanner. All at the click of a button.

Imagine the political, social and economic consequences.

Welcome to GNU Radio: the last frontier where hacking can be found in its true form.

Note: not for the faint of heart.

GNU Radio

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Linux: What you should have on your Ubuntu lady

This is my attempt to put together what I consider the “essentials” if you’re new to Ubuntu and/or don’t have time to scout around for all those things everyone is talking about but you haven’t got the faintest clue (like what the hell is “glxgears” and why is it *not* a benchmark and why you should still check those results!)

Quick and dirty:

EasyUbuntu 2.3 (for “breezy” a.k.a. 5.10):

Easy Ubuntu allow you to:

* Add extra repositories for installing a lot of additional software.
* Install multimedia codecs for reading all videos, musics and DVDs.
* Activate the “audio preview” feature in Nautilus.
* Install the most needed Firefox plugins: Flash, Java, Real, videos. Adds Microsoft fonts, GNOME’s Firefox buttons, officials Firefox icons.
* Install archiving support for RAR and ACE.
* Install the most used peer-to-peer softwares: aMule (a clone of eMule) and Azureus (for Bittorent).
* Install the Skype voice-over-IP software. (Warning: at this time Skype is not packaged for Breezy so install don’t work)
* MSN: Install AMSN cvs with webcam support.
* Num lock: Active the num lock at system startup.
* Replace the GNOME foot logo with Ubuntu’s logo.
* Install the NVIDIA or ATI driver for 3D support.

Ubuntu forums thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=64629
Home Page.
http://placelibre.ath.cx/keyes/index.php/2005/09/29/45-easy-ubuntu-23

Neverwinter Nights:
Linux support forum: http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewforum.html?forum=72

Follow instructions on how to make it run under linux.

Essentials:

nwnmouse (enables hardware mouse acceleration under linux)
http://home.woh.rr.com/nwmovies/nwmouse/

if you happen to have an ATI card and you find your memory usage going up and up and up to the point where your game starts getting very slow and/or nwn simply exits, you probably have a memory leak problem. Read this:
http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=405580&forum=72

There’s an entire thread on ubuntuforums.com about glxgears ‘scores’ (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=39349)

On average, my ATI Radeon 9000 gets 2000 FPS with glx gears.

skyhorse@skybuntu:~$ glxgears -iacknowledgethatthistoolisnotabenchmark
10291 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2058.139 FPS
10262 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2052.398 FPS
10260 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2051.876 FPS
10220 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2043.961 FPS

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