Tuxtype's looking for help...

sjh, have you considered taking on Debian package maintainership of tuxtype? Afterall, your skills as a typing tutor for linux.conf.au 2005 proved you have what it takes! :-)

tech/linux | 29 Jun 2005 | #

Logo Update

p.l.o.a. has a new vectorised logo. Gone from

tech/linux-australia | 28 Jun 2005 | #

Stirling, SA.

We had a restful weekend away at a nice B&B situated next to the Downer family estate in Stirling, nestled away in the Adelaide Hills.

Stirling is a small town with a lovely country town feel about it - very relaxing - complete with a Saturday morning country fair and a protest march against further development.

Eating was a treat over the weekend with the local Siemers Indian Restaurant providing good spicey fare, and the not so local Sammy's Seafood which served up a massive 2 person banquet - delicious! The movie we caught was the fluff Mr & Mrs Smith.

For me, the highlight was our visit to Mt George Conservation Park - a great spot for a walking and seeing some magnificent views. I will be returning with my camera and tripod before summer, that's for sure.

travel | 27 Jun 2005 | #

Yahama DVD Region 4

mikal and sjh comment on my Yamaha DVD purchase, and suggest that all DVD players are sold region-free nowadays in Australia.

If that's so, why is there a region 4 logo on the outside of the box?

tech/IP | 24 Jun 2005 | #

Region Free

So I decided to buy a nice new Yamaha Amp and was convinced by the salesman to buy a matching Yamaha DVD player. Of course I didn't think about region-free at the time - everything was soooooo shiny :-)

I spent not a few hours googling for region-free codes, now that I have the unit back home. No luck. Grrr.

Then I found this (see the comment labeled "...but what about the picture?"). Hmmm, could my unit be region-free out of the box? (Despite saying it was region 4 only on the box itself)

Tried it last night and it was so. A name brand DVD player that is shipped being region free by default. Cool - my collection of Baby Einstein DVDs purchased in Chicago are still playable! :-)

tech/IP | 24 Jun 2005 | #

Adelaide LUG, huh?

Pia seems to be suffering from post-marital stress syndrome. Or something.

Does she mean Armidale LUG instead of Adelaide LUG (otherwise known as LinuxSA)? Or is this some thinly veiled attempt to overtake the efforts of the incumbent cool organiser? :-)

tech/linux-australia | 22 Jun 2005 | #

jhbuild just works

So tonight I'm using jhbuild for the first time in what has to be over 12 months to build all of GNOME from cvs (as opposed to just building the bits that I needed to play with).

I've forgotten how cool and automated it is. Well done jamesh and GNOME community.

tech/GNOME | 17 Jun 2005 | #

Hackergotchis take 2

So the early adopters of p.l.o.a. hackergotchis are up and running, with a couple of interesting results.

Just as additional information, please make sure your PNGs are transparent, or else they get butchered like our fearless leader's did by a GIMP wannabe.

tech/linux-australia | 14 Jun 2005 | #

Hackergotchis on p.l.o.a.

Due to popular demand, Planet Linux Australia is now supporting hackergotchis. So send through your 70x74 PNGs (and IRC nick) to planet@linux.org.au and you'll soon be added.

Thanks again to the Planet Hackers - this little addition was already in the code base.

Update: Please send through your IRC nick as well. We might as well do it all :-)

tech/linux-australia | 14 Jun 2005 | #

LinuxSA June 2005 - Building and Running Linux on Embedded ARM Hardware

  Hi all,

  Time for the LinuxSA June Meeting announcement...

  The usual details:

    When:   7:00pm-9:30pm (doors open 6:45pm) on
            Tuesday, 21st June, 2005
    Where:  Senior Secondary Assessment Board
            of South Australia (SSABSA)
            Boardroom (1st floor)
            60 Greenhill Road
            Wayville SA
    Cost:   FREE
    Who:    Anyone and everyone.
            No pre-registration necessary.

  Presentation:

    Paul Schulz will be talking about "Building and Running Linux on
    Embedded (ARM) Hardware": Linux (the kernel) runs on a large number
    of computer platforms, from desktop PC's to Supercomputers to small
    dedicated processors -- Paul is currently working with a
    commercially available embedded ARM Processor platform used in
    dedicated computer systems.  The platform and the development
    environment used are GNU/Linux.

  Pizza:
 
    After the meeting, please join us for pizza at San Giorgios (cnr.
    Frome Street and Rundle Street in the city).

  For more information:

    Email:        organisers@linuxsa.org.au
    Web Page:     http://www.linuxsa.org.au/
    Mailing List: linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au
    IRC:          #linuxsa on irc.freenode.net

tech/LinuxSA | 10 Jun 2005 | #

Sarge released

Old news by now - Sarge Releases. Congratulations all!

Just about everyone who reads this will of course know this fact already, but the real reason for me writing is to publicly distance myself from claims from silly claims that Debian never releases :-) AJ can now stop sending evil glares in my direction.

tech/linux | 07 Jun 2005 | #

Apple moving from PPC to x86

Wow.

Who would have thought that just as Apple gains momentum with their products, they take a huge risk and change processors?

Given the unavoidable teething problems in both hardware and software that'll come, I can see them struggling to makes sales for 12 months at least. I mean, who'd buy a Mac today? - no future in your hardware or software purchase. Who'd buy a 1st generation x86 Apple when they come out? And the 2nd generation stuff x86 couldn't be available until at least June 2007 - and that's 2 years away!

Apple make nice kit, and if they supported an open-source DRI-enabled graphics driver for xorg I would have bought a powerbook already. That's definately off the cards. Now the switch has been made, Apple will need to be become very price competitve - no-one's going to buy a similarly spec'd laptop for $AUD1500 more just because of an Apple logo. I guess that's a good thing for Mac OS X aficionados.

I hope Apple survives all this - they do nice hardware. I just hope they also realise they need to better support the future of computing.

BTW, this has new meaning now.

tech/misc | 07 Jun 2005 | #

HTML Validation

This plugin allows you to do HTML validation inside Firefox.

This is very cool.

tech/misc | 03 Jun 2005 | #

Not the first

D'Oh, AfC just told me he covered this first.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 03 Jun 2005 | #

Fair Use recommendations?

Linux Australia is looking for opinions from members and interested parties on what sorts of things "Fair Use" legislation in Australia should allow. See Rusty's message for more information - email Rusty at his email address in the message to make your opinions heard!

Speak now or lose the chance of ripping your CDs to your iPod! (and other similar things considered fair and reasonable)

tech/IP | 02 Jun 2005 | #

Echo

Echo... echo... echo... echo... "Rapid Application Development with PyGTK and libglade" at GUADEC looks like a simpler python version of my talk, "Rapid Application Development using C# under GNOME" which I gave at linux.conf.au 2005.

Good to see cool GNOME stuff getting talked about... Just wish I was there in Germany to hear it :-)

Note to self: Must get slides and software up on web.

tech/linux-australia/lca2005 | 02 Jun 2005 | #