Google+ Added to Accounts

Hey there, long time no see! I’ve been rather busy this summer (also known as video games and procrastination), so I’d like to remind the few hundred readers I get from Google searches about GNOME that I am still alive and well. I’m planning a couple new updates, including a review of “Weird Al” Yankovic’s new album, a review of Neon Genesis Evangelion (I finally got around to watching it) and other interesting things that I think of. I’ll definitely get those two articles in before the end of the month, and expect more to follow!

By the way, as the title of this post says, I now have a Google+ account! If you have one, add me to your circles so you can get random updates on my life and interests, as well as blag updates (I’d personally prefer RSS for blag updates, though). If enough of the people I follow switch over to Google+, I might as well quit the Twitter/Facebook business, but I’d most likely keep Identi.ca because of the geek culture that surrounds it. See you next update!

Why so little third-party support for Nintendo?

I love video games. In fact, I believe you could call me an otaku of sorts in the world of gaming. I play games virtually every day and I have an incredibly large backlog of games to get through eventually. One thing about my gaming habits that’s notable, though, is how I’m a bit of a Nintendo fan. I have a SNES, N64, Gamecube, Wii, Gameboy Color, GBA, DS/DS Lite, and my brother owns a 3DS. The only consoles we own that aren’t Nintendo-made are our PS1 and PS2, and we have barely any games for those. Because I’m not exactly a connoisseur of games besides the ones released for Nintendo’s systems, I always got rather upset when people asserted how the Wii “doesn’t have any good games” or how the Wii’s selection was “lacking”.  I have a rather large library of Wii and Gamecube games, so I naturally took offense to this claim. Today, due to boredom, I decided to do some research on the claim instead of the supposedly unfounded assumptions of the other gamers… and it ends up that I was somewhat wrong.

My blag now has this many views:

Thanks everyone that browsed my blag! I love you all :D!

“Princess and the Pony” and RiffTrax

Earlier this past week, I found out about the steaming pile of B-Movie madness known as The Asylum, a studio that pushes out movie upon movie every year with extremely low budgets, with a good chunk of those movies being knock-offs of more popular movies and concepts. For example, Transmorphers, a version of Sherlock Holmes where he battles robot dragons and dinosaurs in London, The Day The Earth Stopped, The Da Vinci Treasure, Snakes on a Train, Sunday School Musical, and Titanic 2.  Not every one of their films is a knock-off, though, since they’ve got a surprising number of generic sex comedies and even a few family-friendly films. One of the films that I saw they made was so cheesy and bad that I had to look it up, and it turns out that we could watch it on Netflix… so I did! Readers of my blag, let me tell you that this movie is so cheesy and badly done that it has to be seen to be believed.

New Blag Background

I’ve decided to give my blag a makeover, and changed the background. The background is “Spaceflare” from GNOME 3’s default background selection, which I’ve blogged about a few times before. I hope it brightens my blag up a notch and makes it more enjoyable to read!

Those Danged Automobiles…

Horses are the simplest and most efficient way to get around, plain and simple. That’s been the way of the world for years and I do not see how something like this should change. We’re good enough as we are right now, but some people who love “change for the sake of change” are pushing the stupid idea of “automobiles”. It’s pointless, it’s inefficient, and it’s destructive of the ways we’ve had for years! Why do I say so, you ask? I’ll tell you exactly why I’m so cross at this idiotic “innovation”:

How To Tweak GNOME 3 To Your Needs

I’ve written about GNOME 3 before, specifically how much I love it. I do not use any extensions or third-party tweaks whatsoever as GNOME 3 feels very complete for me out-of-the-box. However, some users aren’t so easy to please and their habits don’t quite mix with the overall design of GNOME 3, even after approaching it with an open mind. Until the project is more mature (3.2, 3.4 maybe), there are several workarounds to many of the common “problems” that I’ve seen users have with GNOME 3:

10 Things I Love About GNOME 3

There’s a famous quote that goes something like,

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘a faster horse’.” -Henry Ford

As you most likely know, Henry Ford’s company popularized the automobile. Naturally, automobiles are very different from horses and if you get too used to how a horse works, you might find it awkward to adjust to using an automobile. Automobiles, obviously, are much better than horses, but they no doubt caused complaints from horse riders who were too used to how things worked as they were and have worked for years. GNOME 3, being released tomorrow (Wednesday April 6), is having a similar problem: how do you innovate without annoying long-time users who are used to the way things are done now? The short answer is: you can’t. Changes must be made that might seem awkward or even stupid at first to some, but you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

Fortunately for GNOME, their latest version of their popular desktop environment manages to break very few eggs, if any, and still magically makes omelets regardless of that. GNOME 3 designers and developers have had a lot of time to think and plan about the design of the latest desktop and it shows very clearly in several areas. Some refinement and improvement could come in future releases (and that is actually being worked on right now), but for now I am loving the GNOME 3 desktop as it stands today just fine. Why? I’ll give you 10 reasons:

LinFreeze – “Deep Freeze”-like Software for Linux

A few years ago at my middle school, they gave each student a laptop loaded with Windows XP and locked it up with Deep Freeze by Faronics, a program that prevented permanent file changes and re-set the filesystem to it’s previous state upon a reboot. It does this, I believe, by saving all file changes to RAM or something similar using a tmpfs-like mechanism. Well, after I graduated from the school, I offered to provide voluntary computer service once each week. I showed them the awesomeness of open source software and they actually started using GNU/Linux distributions, OpenOffice.org, Clonezilla and the like in their computer systems which I taught them how to use. I noticed, however, that there was a rather large hurdle to cross for them to switch to Free Software on the workstations and laptops at the school, and this was the lack of a Deep Freeze-like program to prevent permanent file changes, so I took on that challenge with LinFreeze.

I noticed a couple flaws with the Deep Freeze model that I actually tried to improve on with LinFreeze, however. For example, Deep Freeze only “froze” the entire system, not specific folders or user directories, thereby requiring a reboot into “un-frozen mode” to install software or make changes. I changed how that worked for LinFreeze by only allowing individual folders to be “frozen” in time, including user home directories. That way administrators can install software without needing to reboot, and all that would be needed to secure that would be to restrict installing software to administration accounts (or the root user), a relatively simple thing to do.

When I first wrote LinFreeze it was very basic and simple, but late last year I decided to work on the project again and put it up for public testing and contribution. So far it hasn’t exactly gotten the audience it deserves, so I decided to write this article about it. LinFreeze is written entirely in Bash and modifies the /etc/fstab file to work, so it’s inherently a very risky program to use, though I believe I’ve ironed out many of the potential bugs over the past six months.

You can download it at its GitHub page and read the README file for information on how to install and use the program. After installing, you can read it’s man page by typing “man linfreeze”. Enjoy, and any contributions (especially translations) would be greatly appreciated! 🙂

My woes of remote Arch Linux installation…

Before I begin, I am going to assume that you know what a lot of common *nix commands and programs are. I’ll try to explain some things, but if you don’t know about Linux, SSH, port forwarding, or ISOs, then steer clear of this article until you know about them.