TechgnosisWeb Prime

j0.. sorry about the publishing delay. Happens to all of us (go check out some other weblogs sometime, you’ll see it’s true). Anyway, I know I should’ve been posting up a lot int he past few days, but general laziness, combined with the need to catch up on my video games, have kept me away from the site. Not that I’ve just been lazying about, though.. there’s a lot of videogaming to be done! Had to ty and get ahead on Xenosaga.. and I’ve got Final Fantasy Tactics Advance calling to me every chance I get.. then I had to play and review Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (read my full review of that one over at AniGaming!), and more. Combine that with my usual work duties, and you can see why I haven’t been around that much. But don’t worry, I’ll post up more today and this week. Got some stuff I think y’all will like.

So, i’ve been working on this machine that Freddi from IndymediaPR left me before he left to Cuba to study filmmaking for a couple years. It’s an old PII 333Mhz, A fairly decent machine, but not exactly a speed demon. It came with WinXP, but I’ve a feeling it was pirated anyhoo, so I decided to clean it out and do the Right Thing ™: install Linux on it and make it fully Open Source and Free, all the better to fit in with the community ideals of the IndyMedia collective for which it will be used. So I started looking at different distros and seeing which one I might try.. I looked at most of the most popular distros like Mandrake and RedHat, some of the more user friendly ones like Lycoris, and was very tempted by Gentoo.. but finally, thanks to the advice and constant prodding of several online friends, I settled on Debian, the (arguably) best Linux distro of them all. Besides being complete, wholly dedicated to the F/L/OSS ideologies of the FSF, and all that, they mostly said that apt-get was worth the pain of installation.

When even its hardcore fans warn you that installation is gonna be a bitch, you should know what to expect. I downloaded CD1 of Woody, the current ‘Stable’ Debian distribution, and tried to do an install with it. It worked.. at least in part. But by the end of the installation, though I had a working Linux system, a lot of stuff was broken and was beyond my skill to repair. Then I remebered something: a little voice telling me one word… ‘Knoppix’.

I remembered that Knoppix is basically Debian, all gussied up and ready for the prom. I remembered that Knoppix has incredibly l33t hardware detection sk1llz, j0. And I remebered that you can install a Knoppix distro right onto a hard drive where it bascially becomes Debian, with a whole host of preconfigured applications and all your hardware properly detected and configured. So I cleaned out the botched Debian install, brought up my Knoppix 3.2 disk, and ran the HD install script. One flawless, hour-and-a-half long install later, I had a perfectly fucntioning, fully loded and user friendly Linux desktop staring back at me. Debian, only easy. Wonderful.

Now it was time to test the wonders of apt-get. One of the beautiful things about apt-get, besides being able to install any of several thousand excellent applications by simply typing in one command, is the ability to instantly bring your entire system up to date by simply issuing two commands: ‘apt-get update’, and ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’. I knew there were some minor details, though, before I could do that, since this wasn’t a *pure* Debian install.. but a short while later, having found a tutorial that explained how to switch the few minor glitches you might find, I ran the two magic commands. It’s currently downloading to its heart’s content, upgrading my entire system with just a few keystrokes.. not just the OS itself, but every application, every package, all brought up to date. Debian truly is a work of art, apt-get is a gift from the gods, and Knoppix puts it all within reach of a mere mortal. I humble myself before the mighty penguin.

Allright, so that title got your attention. Here’s the long and short of it: I was at Borders (Carolina) tonight, and bored out of my skull. They were having some sort of student sale, 20% off pretty much anything in the store with your student ID. I don’t have one, but Natalie does, so we headed over with our friend Josie (a.k.a. Hussy) and meandered through the aisles seeing if there was anything we really wanted and could afford with the discount. Didn’t really find much, since the stuff I found that I wanted, I could get cheaper elsewhere even with that discount (ie., the AD&D 3.5 books from Amazon, natch). So while the girls went around grabbing things, I wandered aimlessly for a while. Bored, I suddenly found myself doing the oddest thing: as I would pass behind people in the store, I would ever so casually whisper the word ‘Anus’ in their general direction. About 99% of people didn’t notice they had just received what I termed a ’subliminal anus’, and those few that did look up, just sort of seemed puzzled for a moment, maybe looked around, and then went back to what they were doing.

I wonder if it will have any effect later on. If they’ll be walking down the street, or talking with someone, or at a meeting at work, maybe years from now, and all of a sudden that subliminal anus pops up and invades their thoughts or speech. Hehe… I said anus.

You. Yeah, you. Yu need to go visit puggie.com: home of the best pug stuff on earth, and you need to do it right now. I love pugs. There such silly, ugly creatures. I want one. I’d like to meet the man who first thought to himself, “Self, I want to breed a dog that’s short, stumpy, grunts when it walks, and has a face that looks like an ass.”, and shake his hand. Pugs 0wnz0rz j00.

Hopefully all of you noticed my previous entry about RJ Tarpley’s Mozilla Coffee and how they’re donating money to the Mozilla Foundation for every bag of certain blends you buy (or for anything you purchase from them if you mention that you want your purchase to benefit the Mozilla Foundation). It was a good cause, and though I haven’t had the opportunity to taste it yet (though you can bet I will soon), hopefully good coffee as well.

Well, I just checked my comments, and Mr. Tarpley himself put up a comment thanking me for running the story and spreading the word. I gotta tell you, that’s pretty darn cool of him. A lot of companies want you to spread the word for them about their products and promotions, and don’t even give you a bit of thanks in return. This guy, however, actually tracked down my little blog and went to the trouble of posting a comment to thank me for mentioning it. Other merchants should take note: that’s how you build a customer base. Personal touches like that. My hat’s off to you, Mr. Tarpley. You’ve made a loyal customer out of me.