The new puppy...

I've got a new puppy...
He's small but nimble. And he can boot and run from a CD, 128MB flash drive, compactflash or SD card.

I'm talking about puppy linux, a new, small (70MB) distribution. Barry Kauler started playing around with the idea around 2003. He just recently released version 2.02, and it's a very, very interesting idea.

I've played around with linux for a short time in the past. I've tried Red Hat and Corel Linux early on, but was quickly turned off the products when windows seemed to be the easier choice. Colel Linux installed well, but I had problems looking for software (WINE) wasn't very popular at the time and everything just seemed more complicated. Same with Red Hat, which didn't install at all.

But puppy...i downloaded the .iso image, burned a cd, rebooted - and there it was, running on my PC in about two minutes! I was astounded at how easy it installed. Then I tried to setup my DSL - and it worked! It's not just small and fast, but also easy to use and fully featured.

I've been inspired by the pup to rediscover my geek side. It's an interesting alternative to Windows - it'll work with old hardware with very minimal resources - It doesn't even need a hard drive. Just about the only quirk it requires is a relatively generous amount of RAM - 128MB is recommended. It can also use a swapfile on a hard drive if RAM is insufficient. (But that means you need to have a hard drive) Now 128 MB is standard for today's computers if you run XP. If your setup is older (pre-XP) then you can easily add on memory. Prices of 128MB PC-133 are around 500 pesos, used, so its not that expensive.

It can run as a live CD/DVD - if your computer has a CD or DVD burner, you can run a multisession CD (the ordinary 10 peso kind) it will boot up, and then it can save your user files on the same CD. Or on a network, or a thumb drive or compact flash card on USB. One can have a computer with just a motherboard and a stick of memory. All you need is a large enough (say, 1 gig) flash drive and you are good to go. No floppy drive, no HDD, NO CD drive necessary.

It's fast and zippy. It's a puppy!




Check out the puppy at this link

Happy Birthday Nathan!

Small Worlds: Fun with photoshop

I've been creating my own small planets. In Photoshop, that is.

The basic technique:
Find a photo with plenty of negative space in the top half of the photo, and preferably a level horizon. (You can add negative space onto the top if needed)
Crop or resize the photo into a square.
Rotate the image 180 degrees
Apply the Photoshop "Polar" filter
Apply some image editing to stitch the edges together.

(thanks to dimsumboy of pinoyphotography.org for the idea)


See the photos below to have an idea of how if comes together:

ORIGINAL PHOTO:

"PLANETIZED" VERSION:

MORE PLANETS:

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Chickens and the internet.

clueless clucker. sariaya, quezon, 2006

I was laughing hard when I was reading engadget this morning. The post was about inked eggs. Some British company developed a dye that was used to mark eggshells that takes the guesswork out of boiling them. If you boil one of these eggs, the dye would appear when the eggs were done. You have a choice of soft, medium, or hard boiled eggs.

Photo from BBC News

The comments on engadget were hilarious:


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"Wonderful, now its even easier to enjoy one of the nastiest foods on the planet. Not to mention the unthinkable amounts of cruelty behind each and every one of them.
Yay for technology that makes the exploitation of animals even more fun!"
Posted at 3:58PM on Jul 31st 2006 by Paix247

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Fuck you, hippie!
Posted at 4:08PM on Jul 31st 2006 by thedvs01

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@ Paix247
There are plenty of free range chicken farms in the US, that DON'T feed chickens meat, and DON'T stuff thousands of chickens in small cages.

@ thedvs01
Why don't you try learning what happens to the chickens you eat before replying with such a comment.

They are boiled alive, have their beaks cut of to facilitate forced feeding, fed growth hormones that make them grow so fast their bones break, stuffed into cages barely larger than the chicken itself, fed ground up chicken meal (think about how "mad cow" disease started, by feeding cows, well, cows)

KFC and many other restaurants should be ashamed of themselves for condoning this type of activity.

Posted at 4:18PM on Jul 31st 2006 by Jacob

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Stop! you're making me hungry!!

Posted at 4:46PM on Jul 31st 2006 by mikep

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I really don't care if chickens are force fed, or boiled alive. I know that makes me a 'bad person', but I really don't. There is way too much human suffering in the world for me to even start to think about chicken suffering. Like it or not, chickens are not humans, they can not think, they are creatures of instict. I no more care for chickens feelings, than I do for the ant I just crushed.

Posted at 4:47PM on Jul 31st 2006 by Bryan Jackson

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Thank god chickens are too stupid to complain, and too tasty to ignore.

Posted at 4:53PM on Jul 31st 2006 by Octavus

LINKS:

Engadget
BBC News


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The Children of BASECO