DoomBook

So I just noticed -ck attached to a bitcoin client and low, behold, it’s the same Con Kolivas who used to maintain the -ck Linux scheduler. Check out the CGminer bitcoin number crunching client if you’re interested.

Con’s done some outstanding work in scheduler development on the Linux kernel. He’s always backed up his claims with actual graphs and numbers unlike so many (not specifically Linux) developers who take a “well it should work” attitude. It’s interesting to see all that applied math going into tweaking a number cruncher.

Looking for a way to replicate PPA repositories into your Debian squeeze or wheezy install? Anantshri has you covered with a quick shell script. Note that it may break your installation horribly and kill puppies wantonly.

For installing Bisigi Themes for the gnome desktop? Worked for me.

Looking for something to run on a Linux system to log onto Vent voice chat servers? You couldn’t do much better than Mangler. It integrates nicely with Gnome’s (probably KDE and XFCE4 as well) desktop and offers up all the VoIP chatting you’d expect.

Okay, so, the Minecraft HD pack we’re using is here and you’ll need to grab MCPatcher to make it work.

What it’ll give you is some amazing high definition Minecraft textures and add in the ability to easily run other mods and patches.

These are both updated to work on the recent 1.8 Minecraft release.

Bitcoins are heading down along with the stockmarket. Which lends credence to the bitcoin supply currently involving a lot of speculation.

Something to note, though, is that the number of available bitcoins is still in flux while people are mining them. It doesn’t feel like it’s leveled one way or another on exchanges just yet.

Also, mining itself hasn’t tanked to nearly the extent that the price of bitcoins has.. which would lead one to believe that the mining portion of bitcoin creating isn’t driven entirely by speculation on the future value. Even when prices went from ~30$ to ~6$ the amount of mining going on increased slightly.

But we’ll see how that washes out in the coming weeks if values stay depressed.

Sources: http://mtgox.com http://virwox.com

So you’ve got a serial device that needs printing output sent to it and you’ve installed Ubuntu 11.04. Cups responds with an Unable to open device file … Permission Denied. Well!

Ubuntu has thoughtfully explicitly denied access to /dev/ttyUSB devices through apparmor. No reason you’d ever print to serial devices in Ubuntu, eh?

So to get your receipt printer, Okidata 320ML serial printer, or whatever working you’ll either need to uninstall apparmor (I imagine) or change a line in the file /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.cupsd from “deny /dev/ttyUSB*” to “/dev/ttyUSB*”.

That should do it.

Game: Puzzle Agent 2
Publisher: Telltale Games

Puzzle Agent 2 from Telltale Games brings us back to Scoggins, Minnesota to delve into the unresolved secrets of the first installment. The FBI’s sole agent in charge of the US Department of Puzzle Research, Nelson Tethers, has decided there’s a puzzle left unsolved.

Graham Annable returns with his sketch-art animation and folk-lore hidden people. The animation and story board are a good bit of the selling point for the Puzzle Agent series, with Graham’s ability to pack emotion into a fairly low-detail form of art. The art’s fun, unpretentious, and surprisingly engaging.

Audio in the game sets the mood nicely, complementing the gameplay and settings without being overbearing. Voice acting is on par with anything I’ve watched. The best complement I can pay any game not about music is that I don’t remember the soundtrack, only recalling that it was good.

And that’s the case here.

Too many titles wedge in music that undercuts the gameplay rather than underscoring it because someone “did music” or they’re trying to get an extra sales angle in.

Puzzles in Puzzle Agent 2 are slightly easier than in the first game. Some of the aspects that could make solving puzzles irritating have been altered. I really didn’t find them hard, more along the lines of a brain-teaser or Saturday newspaper puzzle than MENSA material.

There are also abundant hints available if riddles are a bit too challenging. Or if you don’t have knowledge of a particular subject.

Coming in at about 4 hours of playtime, Puzzle Agent 2 is a bit longer than an episode but shorter than a traditional long-format game. Which is about right for a ~10$ pricetag.

I liked the game. It was fun all the way through. With the sketch animation style, puzzles, and clean content Puzzle Agent 2 delivers.

Footnote: you should play Puzzle Agent first, since Puzzle Agent 2 is somewhat of another episode. It’s not going to hurt to start on the second chapter, but why would you want to?

Nelson Tethers is back for another installment of puzzle solving and chasing small red gnome’s around Minnesota. Just picked up a copy of the game, and half-way in it’s still interesting. While you’re not going to get any Mensa puzzles in there or Hollywood cut-scenes, it’s cute, fun, and probably a great game to play with kids (or remind you of games you played when you were a kid).

The series features pencil-on-paper animation and offers up some decent voice over work. No emotionless anime-dub voices here.

I quite enjoyed the first Puzzle Agent, and I’ll post up a full write-up once we’ve finished the game.

Puzzle Agent 2 Website

Agent Tethers Scared by .. Something

Android devices are great unless they’re not. One of the ways they’re not-great is when you don’t have Android Marketplace installed for whatever reason and need to get applications to them for install.

So if you’re looking for a solution to getting files over to your android device in relatively secure style, an SSH server is probably the way to go.

Two of the options that I’ve picked out that that work are:

SSHDroid: A free ad-driven application that allows you to open up a somewhat configurable compile of the Dropbear SSH daemon.

DroidSSHd: this one is ad-free but doesn’t include sFTP support. It also didn’t like SCP running through it, but that may have been due to where it dumped the client in the directory structure. If you’re looking for a clean compile of Dropbear sshd for android, they’ve also got that, along with instructions on how to cross platform compile sshd for android yourself.

So you’ve got yourself an ISO and you want to turn it into a thumb drive. Sure, you can hack that thing together yourself.

Or you can use unetbootin. It’ll whack out a USB thumbdrive running a handful of Linux distributions and bootable utilities such as Parted Magic, Ophcrack, Gujin, or Freedos. All automatically downloaded for you after choosing a couple of options.

Even if you’ve got an ISO image that you need to load up onto a thumbdrive that isn’t included in the list unetbootin should be able to handle it. The more you know!