The FBI agents investigating attempt to shut the site down, but every time they find the originating server, the site moves it's hosting to another IP, all of this, of course in countries outside of US Jurisdiction (China, Russia, etc). Presumably when this is done the website operator updates the DNS information such that www.killwithme.com will resolve to the new IP address.

So my question is why not exploit DNS to stop people from visiting the site? The FBI could go to IANA or whoever controls these things and have the 13 root DNS servers updated to resolve the domain to an FBI webserver? All the root servers are under "American control" and would most likely be able to comply. Or fail that, you could ask the countries largest ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Roadrunner, Qwest, etc) to remove the entry from their DNS cache. That would probably keep a very large percentage of US citizens from being able to view the site.

http://volumeconv.appspot.com

Anything missing? Please contact me at pete {at} stoltenow {dot} com.

Old faithful is a Apple Macbook (black) 2.0 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1 GB of RAM, circa mid 2007. I recently realized for the low price of approximately $20 USD, I could double the memory. And while the 2 year old machine still seems to be fast enough, for only $20, why not?

I could have gotten 4GB for $30, seems like a good deal right? Unfortunately, the laptop only "officially" supports 2GB of RAM. Doing some reading, it seems 3GB *may* have been possible, but for my web browsing, 2GB will probably be alright.

All went well with the upgrade, the little dude seems to boot twice as fast.

The old memory (2 x 512 MB SO-DIMMs)



The new memory (2 x 1 GB SO-DIMMs)



Battery Removed, Ready to upgrade memory



Inserting the new memory DIMMs

When a program is selected and starts streaming, the Roku box decides what is the best quality level you can get with the current internet connection. 1 star for the slowest connections, all the way up to 4 stars for the best speed connections, which is typically cable internet. (They're not actually stars, but I like to think of them as such)

I have a DSL connection (Qwest) with a 1.5 megabit download speed. When I first plugged in the Roku player about a year ago, my 1.5 megabit DSL connection, I would typically get the "2 star" level of quality. Occasionally, it would give me the horrid "1 star" level of quality. But I would never see anything above level 2.

Well in the past few weeks, I've been seeing "3 stars" of quality, over the same speed internet connection. Once I even got 4! I didn't change anything, and yet suddenly I'm getting better quality streaming video? And It looks great. It's on par with VHS quality, if not a touch above.

I can't be sure, but I *think* the audio quality has gotten worse. Could Netflix be sacrificing audio quality for better video?

That seems like a firmware problem. Looking at Netgear's website, there have been a few hardware revisions of the FVS318, a version 1, version 2, and version 3. This one was a hardware version 2, which means it could only be updated to firmware 2.4, which is the version it already had. I tried to go back to older versions, but it wouldn't take them. Nothing really else I could do.

The router was headed for the trash, when I figured something out. The device has 9 RJ45 jacks... a single "Internet Port", and 8 LAN ports. If I connect the cable from my modem to one of the 8 LAN ports instead of the "Internet Port", the device functioned as a simple switch.

So the FVS318 has now been given a second life as a 10/100MB, 8 port switch. Kinda a waste of such full featured firewall/router, but better then winding up in the landfill.

But now everything fell under the header of "Beyond Next Month". How amazing, I thought! Outlook knows about emails I haven't even sent yet.

As it turns out, I had accidentally changed the Windows clock earlier in the day; it had been bumped forward a year. When I set the system clock back to today's date, everything went back to normal.

So much for telling the future.

(I'm thinking this will go towards a new Apple Macbook)

Although they were supposedly giving these coupons out as early as February of 2008, it didn't make much sense to get one until recently. The DTV converter boxes weren't even available in stores until maybe late March. Now a days you can stroll into your local Walmart and pick one up without a problem.

Coupons can still be requested for a limited time. Go to https://www.dtv2009.gov to do so. Below is a copy of what was sent to me when I requested 2 coupons.

I arrived at the local middle school for the republican caucus shortly before 6:30pm. The crowd was very large, with little room to move. We were supposed to come in through the lobby and register at a small table, but with the amount of people, it was not possible. We were told we could register later, when we broke into smaller groups. First we were to all meet in the auditorium as a large group. The auditorium held about 900 people, and with the overflow, it was estimated that there was over 1000 people in attendance. I'm not sure when things were supposed to start, but they didn't get going until after 7:30.

The event started with the pledge of allegiance, and a prayer. Next the chairwomen for the local party gave us a short history of the Iowa caucus. There was applause when she noted how seriously Iowans take their roll in the presidential election. She then introduced representatives from the campaigns to speaker on behalf of the candidates. There were speakers for Fred Thompson, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Ron Paul. The man speaking for Mitt Romney was his older brother, Scott Romney.

Next she introduced our state senator, who gave a state of the senate address. This was followed by a short speech from a women who was running on the republican ticket as our state representative, and then a man who solicited attendees for the Marshall county republican steak fry fundraiser. Finally she announced directions to the rooms where we would break up into smaller groups for the actual vote.

My precinct was located in a small science class room at the other end of the building. Of the 1000+ voters that turned out from Marshalltown's 8 precincts, only 21 were from mine. I suspect this is because I live in a heavily Hispanic area, and many of them can't vote. The precinct Captain told us that we would need to elect 2 delegates to the county convention. Two people willingly volunteered. We then elected a secretary, and a helper for the precinct captain. The precinct captain then said that if any one person wished to have a secret paper ballot vote then we would do so. No one requested this, so votes were taken by a show of hands, and written on the white board. The results are below.

Mike Huckabee 8
Mitt Romney 7
Fred Thompson 4
Ron Paul 1
Rudy Giuliani 1

That was all, and everyone left. The helper stayed with the captain to call in the results, and to be certain it was done correctly according to the vote.

1. Support for wide screen displays

I have a Dell 2005FPW 20 inch widescreen LCD monitor. It has a native resolution of 1680x1050. This is getting to be a more and more common screen resolution. And yet Ubuntu doesn't use this resolution "out-of-the-box". Ubuntu set the resolution to 1280x1024, which looked squished. And it didn't give the option to set the resolution to the native 1680x1050, it only detected that the best the monitor supported was 1280x1024.

It's not just my monitor (which I think is a very common model), other 20 and 21 inch widescreens with 1680x1050 resolution cause the same problem.

2. Hard Drive Removal

When I did this Ubuntu installation, I did so with an extra HD drive attached. This had all the data from my old install, which I could copy onto the new install. This extra hard drive was mounted somewhere similar to /media/hd1. I point that out because this drive contained no system information, no partition was mounted as /home or /usr or something important. It was just a one partition drive with lots of media files on it.

When I had copied everything from the extra drive to the new install, I powered down and removed the IDE drive. On the next startup, Ubuntu displayed all sorts of drive mounting errors, and booted into the terminal interface. No GUI. I understand where the mounting errors came from, but no GUI? Windows handles this in a much more clean manner. When you remove an extra drive (of course, not the primary partition with the Windows install on it) Windows simply ignores the fact that the drive was ever there. It keeps on working fine.

3. Super User File Manager

Shouldn't this be available? I understand and agree with the arguments that a user should have a limited access account. But there are times when you need to move files around outside of your home directory. Say I want to drop a new icon for an application I installed in /usr/share/pixmaps. Or drop a program's executable binary I downloaded or built from source into /opt. I know this can be done from the command line, but someone coming from a Windows background will expect to do this in the file manager. All the other distributions have a super user file manager available in the menus. Any reason Ubunutu can't? The solution to this is to run "gksudo nautilus" from a command line window, or create a launcher with the same command.

4. Dual Monitor Support.

Ubuntu should detect this and have tools to configure it. There's no way to use dual monitors on an out of the box install. You shouldn't have to go edit xorg.conf. Or install additional programs or the restricted drivers. More and more users will be using 2 or more monitors, and it should be better supported.

Foo2zjs is an open source printer driver for printers that use the Zenographics ZjStream wire protocol. What is the ZjStream wire protocol? You can read more about it here. For trouble shooting, or to donate to the author (I did), visit his page here.

Go to http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer

The site will know you're running linux and present you with the appropriate installers. DO NOT download the .tar.gz. It will not work.

Instead right click on the .rpm and select "Save Link As...". Save the RPM somewhere in your home folder, like your desktop.

Go find the file. If you're running Gnome, right click on the file and select "Open with Install Software".

You'll be prompted for your root password. Enter it.

The Software installer app will soon present you with a list of packages to install with only one item. Flash Player 9. Click on Install.

When it's done, restart your browser and browse on over to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/ to see if it worked. There should be a test flash object embedded in the page. Click on about to see your current flash version.

1. Azureus

http://azureus.sourceforge.net/download.php

2. Second Life

http://secondlife.com/community/linux-alpha.php

3. Google Earth

http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html

4. Picasa

http://picasa.google.com/linux/download.html

5. Wine

http://www.winehq.org/site/download

6. VMware Player

http://www.vmware.com/download/player/

Free images of operating systems are available for download here:

http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/

7. Smart Package Manager

http://labix.org/smart

8. Opera

http://www.opera.com/download/index.dml?platform=linux

9. VLC

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

10. Skype

http://www.skype.com/download/skype/linux/

Do you have any others that should be included in the list? Post your thoughts in the comments below.