Linux

It’s the January of 2018, and the sickness is upon me again. Sometimes you can feel it coming, like that first head fog that warns of a coming cold, or the klaxon of a stomach churn that alerts you to an impending flu.

Well, after many years of posting my nonsense on the internets, I have finally made the transition from shared hosting to a VPS. This last week, I migrated this site over to a Linode VPS, and I must say that the whole experience has been pretty painless.

Okay, if you still have your box configured to allow remote logins as "root", then you deserve anything you get. Otherwise, start using strong passphrases (not a password, those are too easy), or if you can swing it with your work flow, use an ssh key rather than a text-based login.

Wow, where the hell have I been?! It’s two days shy of a month since I last posted, which is an eternity online. As is probably obvious, I’ve been really busy with work and all the other interesting things that life can throw at you.

Skype has released a new version for Linux with ALSA support built-in, which allows it to run even with other sound applications. Hurray! Get it here! However, it is important to note that the original HOWTO I wrote on recording Skype conversations won’t work with the new version.

Not everyone has use for this kind of feature, but I use it almost every day for a wide variety of uses. For example, I can check on a lengthy compilation process, test a theory using a one of the applications native to my Linux system, or to bypass a corporate internet filter when it has mistakenly blacklisted a site I need to access for code reference.

What can I say? I’m in love.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution. I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it.

The purpose of this guide is to show you how to record your Skype conversations for legitimate purposes. Remember to respect your local laws regarding the recording of telephone calls, and to respect your local copyright laws in any recording endeavor.

I recently came upon a Boing Boing post regarding a new online store serving up digital media for the public. The store is Common Media, which has been supplying free fair-use media for a while now, but as a commerce site it comes in two flavors: Common Tunes and Common Flix, which are music and video stores respectively.

I am really a very lazy person. This may not always be apparent to the casual observer because they may see me at work, where I am very focused and willing to help out with anything.

Well, I am finally starting to understand the way Linux works, and I am getting better and better at using and navigating it every day. This is really good, because although my friends and coworkers have this image of me as some kind of computer guru, I have secretly known that I am really just a retarded man-child among computer geeks.

Okay, I should have been in bed a couple hours ago, but I stayed up to try out a new Linux installation. SuSE 9.3 rocks my socks off. Not only does it support my sound card (a problem I had with other distros), I can even access ALL the files on my Windows partion from here without booting over to the other side!