The Pirates Who Don’t Buy Anything

I saw this comic and I found it amusing:

You can view the original post here: link

Shut Down PC at a Specific Time

Maybe you are going out or you are downloading something but you don’t want to watch your download.

This is how to shut down your PC at a certain time, without the need of you being there.

First Here is the code:

AT 12:00 Shutdown -s

It’s as simple as that. That code will shut down your PC at 12 o’clock. Change the 12:00 to whatever time you want, remember it must be in a 24 hour clock format.

If you want to just run this, go to Start > Run
Then paste that code in.

If you want to create a shortcut for quick use. Open notepad, paste in the code, Save as Shutdown.bat or whatever you want to call it, make sure it’s a .BAT file. Then just run the batch file & there you have it.

It’s invisible but if you want to view the shutdown you can go to Start > Programs > Accessories > System tools > Scheduled Tasks

There you can delete or edit it.

Chuck Norris is No Match for Charles Nelson Reilley

Weird Al’s latest song, CNR, reveals to the world the pure awesomeness of Charles Nelson Reilly. (CNR) In fact, it even shows that CNR is a lethal killing machine far superior to Chuck Norris.

If you look closely, you’ll see that CNR has Chuck Norris’s head mounted on his wall.

Notice Chuck Norris's head mounted as a trophy

Look out Chuck, you have competition…

You can watch the video here

Google Squared Announced

Google is announcing a number of new search-related products at its second annual Searchology event in Silicon Valley today. Among them is a souped-up search option called “Google Squared.”

Understanding Google Squared

Google Squared goes beyond tracking down Web pages about any given topic. Rather, it puts together a virtual dossier of facts from numerous sources based on your search query.

Search for “small dogs,” for example, and Google Squared would give you a table on various small dog breeds. Data ranging from the animals’ heights to weights would be included in (what’s designed to be) an easy-to-digest, organized format. From there, you could click onto any section of the table to get more information from its specific source. You could even save the custom table for later use.

“It is something that pushes search in an entirely new direction,” stated Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience. “It is a hard, computer science problem to take this unstructured information and present it in a structured way.”

Google Squared is expected to be made widely available within Google Labs before the end of May.

Via The Inquisitr

Verizon’s New Device Allows a Personal Wifi Hotspot

After a flurry of interest last December, the Mifi personal Wi-Fi hotspot is about to be delivered and thankfully, it’s coming from network coverage-king Verizon.

The Mifi is a tiny, battery powered EVDO modem which sits in your pocket and turns the incoming 3G radio waves into a small Wi-Fi network, enabling you to hook up your laptop, iPod Touch or anything else with a Wi-Fi radio. This last is pretty exciting on its own as it effectively turns an iPod Touch into an iPhone without a phone.

The difference with the Mifi is that it is so tiny and, according to the New York Times’ David Pogue, ridiculously easy to use. It’ll run for 40 hours in standby, much like a cellphone, and when you hit the single switch on the side it springs (or rather, stirs) into life, firing up a little 30 foot bubble of Wi-Fi around you. Once on, the battery will give five hours of surfing but can be plugged into the power as it goes to re-juice the batteries.

Of course, its a cellular modem, so you have some rather low data caps. The $40-a-month plan limits you to just 250MB (yes, megabytes) and jumping to $60 gives the industry-standard 5GB. You can share the connection with up to five devices, so if you’re generous with the neighnors on the Muni, for example, you could burn through that pretty quick.

Gripes aside, this looks to be an amazing device, freeing you from a specific connection for all of your internet-abled gadgets and just covering your personal space with a personal connection. I wonder if this will end up in Europe anytime soon — we have, apparently, excellent 3G coverage.

Wi-Fi to Go, No Cafe Needed [NYT]

Verizon Launches MiFi Hotspot Without Subscription [PCmag]

Via Wired

What I’ll Miss in Ubuntu / How Windows has Scarred Me

Windows haves given me a disease. To accurately describe this disease I will be coining the term WMAD or Windows Maintenance Anxiety Disease. On my Windows desktop, I always am running a defrag tool or the disk recovery utility when I am away from my computer, so I can use my wasted time to improve my PC’s performance.

Unfortunately, there is no need for a defragger in Ubuntu and the disk space recovery tool takes just a few seconds. It makes me feel uncomfortable leaving my computer running without it doing something for me.

I remember someone’s comment on a blog I read, “It’s amazing how a filesystem can be so screwed up that you have to use a program to put the files back together again.”

Things I’ve learned from Linux #2

I own my computer.

With Linux, I have the power to do whatever I want with my computer. If I want to delete a file, linux never questions my competence. It faithfully deletes that file, without any objection, even if I tell it to delete itself with “rm -rf /” (Note: DO NOT RUN THIS!).

There is no “Are you sure…” dialogue for any task less than dangerous. Want to delete a file? Done. Install a program? Done.

Of course this method allows you to destroy your system. But I CAN destroy my own system, because I own it.

Things I’ve learned from linux #1

I’m going to try and share with you what Linux has shown me what computers can do.

My first lesson is that even after updating 76 megabytes of critical system files, no restart is required. Now my Linux laptop hardly ever is turned off; it just hibernates. While on my windows pc, I have to restart a lot. (keep in mind that since I am using ubuntu 9.04, I get critical file updates almost every day.)

I’ve heard of hotswap (or something like that in Vista) that applies updates without restarting, however, it doesn’t work for all files and even restarts in the middle of a movie. Is that really necessary?

We now have a twitter account!

If you are a fellow twitter-er, we now have a twitter account!

You can view it here: www.twitter.com/clintthewookie

Unfortunately, at the moment it is filled with my failures with the installation of the ext4 filesystem…

Upgrading Fluxbuntu 8.10 to 9.04 Alpha 6 (My Experience)

I apologize if the format is a little confusing, but a stream-of-consciousness-like format seems the most effective way of conveying my thoughts… Oh, and we are not responsible for anything you do wrong; it worked for us, but it may not work for you!

Today, I decided to take the plunge and update my Ubuntu 8.10 laptop to 9.04 alpha 6. Here’s how I did it and my experience:

1. I opened the update manager with the command “update-manager -d” (Note: you need the update manager to do this, get it by running “sudo apt-get install update-manager”.
2. I was notified that 9.04 is available, so I clicked the upgrade button.
3. I was then greeted by a distribution upgrade window which appeared to do the whole process for me.
4. Unfortunately, I did not have enough space. You need about 924 free mb to do the install, I only have 567. I have some work to do…After I ran the command “sudo apt-get autoclean”, I removed about 500 mb of partially downloaded packages on my system. That’s a lot of wasted space that I desperately needed! (Don’t worry, I believe most of the space required for the install is freed after installation, it’s for all the files you have to download)
5. Now I tried to update again… and it seemed to pass the test, notifying me that I will be removing 12 packages, installing 76, and upgrading 687. Let’s go…
6. I almost forgot, for an upgrade, it needs the Fluxbuntu 7.10 CD. It looks like it got some files from there. What I don’t understand is why; it’s 2 years old! Not really an update if you ask me…
7. After downloading all the files, it decided to not read my fluxbuntu disc, so it canceled the whole thing. I will be trying again once I clean the CD.
8. This time it worked and it is installing packages with 2 hours and 30 minutes remaining. Looks like my laptop is pulling an all-nighter.
9. An important note! The process is not all automatic! Your experience may vary, but I had to allow the install to replace custom files about 3 times. So the install stopped at about 2 and 22 minutes remaining. So it just wasted all night waiting for me.
10. Luckily, those 2.5 hours go by in about 20 minutes (on a really old computer), so *almost* it finished before I left in the morning.
11. Unfortunately, it had to ask me about a setting so my beautiful little “Ida” sat paciently waiting for me, for 10 hours.
12. When I returned home, I answered the prompt and it finished. After the restart, it took a little longer to boot (I think), but the laptop runs much faster. On a cold start of Sakura, my terminal, it opened almost instantly. That’s pretty incredible.
13. But because old technology is not cool, I decided to update the laptop to the ext4 filesystem (The install does not do this for you). I started the process by running “tune2fs -j /dev/DEV” (Note: DEV should be replaced with your primary partition, eg: sda1, hda1) At the current time we don’t not recommend updating to ext4, “Ida” died

For now, that’s my experience. Ida may be currently offline; but when she returns she will be 9.04. WITHOUT ext4.