kw502 : A history of Transformers with @Jaspio.

Jan 17

We warp back into our childhood and go off the deep end in the land of Cult and Sci-Fi. Expert wiseguy Jaspio tells us about the history of one of the most popular toylines of all time : Transformers. We celebrate 30 years of Silicon Civil War with this great interview and bring you music from Scann-Tec, brought to you by Ultimae records. Don’t forget that this episode is also available as a Google hangout recording.

Shownotes.

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Mcvries makes Evernote Cross over … with Crossover.

Jan 15

Evernote, oh evernote, how I have come to love you. And to be annoyed by you. No linux Client, seriously?
Ah well, but there is everpad, which works reasonably and there is the website, which works reasonably well ‘as well’. But reasonably isn’t always good enough, now is it. And as a cross platform slider, even with an ever so slight Linux preference, you want the same experience everywhere.

 

So, ever heard about PlayOnLinux  or Crossover? What they both do? They Wine!  🙂 PlayOnLinux does it for free, only on linux. And crossover is a paid application which runs on linux and on Osx.

Wine, is an application for linux helps you running Windows applications on linux without installing a full windows machine, be it virtual or not. So you will have a smaller footprint on your HDD. Wine is the hardcore, console driven, text file editing, parameters eating core of both applications. So if you are a really hardcore, text file editing  parameters eating kind of console guru (in which case you’d probably rather die than using any Microsoft software) you could just use Wine. But if you are a happy Linux Camper, not to hardcore into the console, loving your rig, but you just gotta have that ‘One application’, (even just because you can)  PlayOnLinux or Crossover can help you out. Big Time.

I used both to run Evernote on my system, and the latest installation was done in Crossover. The people at codeweavers every now and then give their software away for free and I jumped on the bandwagon, just to see how it ran. Well, I stuck with them so far, so they must be doing something good.

So how does this work? Download and install crossover from their site, and while you are at it, download the latest version Evernote. My setup uses 4.5.10.7427 at the time. An installed version of Crossover gives you some menu options, and one of them is ‘Install windows Software’. Hit that one. We are going straight to our goal here, so we choose to use an installer file of our own and we create a bottle which mimics aWindows XP machine. Crossover will prepare the bottle and it will install Evernote into that ‘Bottle’. Which are these bottles I talk about? Well, ever heard of sandboxing your applications? A bottle is a Sandbox. A self contained environment just for that application. So you can copy the whole application to another machine with Crossover and pick up where you left off. Crossover will make some menu items for you where you can start the Windows application so in my case, running Evernote was a painless experience.

Just these things to consider : within Crossover or PlayOnLinux choose XP as a windows environment, and use Wine 1.4.1.

And after a while I took an MS office cd, edited my existing Evernote ‘Bottle’ and installed Word and Excel alongside Evernote. Opening the dreaded docx coworkers share with me went great, without any formatting issues. Don’t bite my head off, sometimes the easiest way takes some non open software.

Links : Crossover.

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McVries is an I.T. professional who tries to avoid the dreaded Vendor Lock In as much as possible by means off open source solutions. Hit him up on twitter @mcvries_ , GooglePlus or visit his blog on www.mcvries.nl

What applications are holding YOU back from making the switch .. and could Crossover be a solution ? Tell us in the Comments Section.

 

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The dawn of Mario and the history of Nintendo.

Jan 13

With the advent of Nvidea’s Shield project, their days might be numbered, but Nintendo has written a big  page in our collective history. From the first barrel thrown by Donkey Kong to the last time you smacked your sister in law out cold with your Wii-Mote .. Nintendo made a mark on all of us. So sit back and enjoy a short history lesson in 3 minutes.

 Links : Nvidea Shield.

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Carry ‘Switchblade’ and save any PC.

Jan 12

Live Cd’s are a blessing. Whenever you arrive at that family dinner and get shuffled into a stuffy corner to fix another dinky pc.. You KNOW you need help. Sure, there are plenty of live cd’s out there (The list in Distrowatch is quite endless) and each live CD has its own specific skills and thrills.  However not all of them are geared towards “fixing” a Windows PC.

Enter Switchblade, A 220 megabyte gift from whatever digital deity we pray to. The simple ‘push here to preform instant magic’ interface  to this “live application” that you can run from a Usb drive, will have you fix the most common quirks and aches any pc might suffer from.

With the ability to backup drivers, install Windows patches, Ccleaner or quicky find drivers online, Switchblade can save you enough time to make it back to the dinnertable for the main course. In combination with the Ninite installer and some handy automated command line commands ‘ chksdk c: /f /r ‘ and ‘defrag c: -f ‘ you will have the PC crunching numbers while you get to much down on potatoes and yams. 

Links : Switchblade 

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How about a Citrix session in Ubuntu on a Macbook Air.

Jan 11

The one upside of being a slider is that you can do whatever the hell you want with your computer. I mean, its not only thinking outside the box, its like thinking about the box outside the box before there ever IS a box. The fun part of doing all this is that you can hack your hard and software the way YOU want it to work for you.

one does not

As you know I have an 11.6 inch Macbook air that I drag around everywhere. It would be quite dull if it ONLY ran OSX. Of course it doesn’t. Since the day I got it I fought, tweaked and tinkered right up to the point that I had it running exactly like I wanted to. In my case : on Ubuntu 12.10. After tweaking the fans, the keyboard, the screen illumination and the function keys, I had trained my Macbook to behave like a Mac, while still running Windows.

The only time I had to really boot back into OSX is when I wanted to access our work Citrix server. Since I take my little bundle of joy to work from time to time, but also work from home, it was always a little sad to say bye bye Ubuntu, JUST to use the silly Citrix client.

And when you tell me I HAVE to use a CERTAIN operating system JUST to use a CERTAIN application .. I get antsy and start looking around. So my new goal for the week was : Get a Citrix client working on Ubuntu .. ( on a mac ) and access your work deskop (A Windows 2003 Terminal server environment).

After finding this brilliant howto on installing the 64 bit Ica Client under Ubuntu I had the Citrix client running in no time. The only downside came when I started typing.

Remember : This was a Windows 2003 session I had open, with a Ubuntu operating system and a Macintosh keyboard. So when I started typing it looked …. Fracked up.  So how was I going to fix it.

After some searching in my home folder I found the Ica client config file.  in  /home/%username%/ICAClient/wfclient.ini

The first lines in the config file pointed towards the keyboard layout looked like this.

KeyboardLayout = (User Default) 
KeyboardMappingFile = automatic.kbd
KeyboardDescription = Automatic (User Profile)
KeyboardType=(Default)

I remembered I had kinda the same problem when I tried to run the Citrix Receiver client on my Mac (under OSX) and got a wonky keyboard. The solution there was to also look for the config file an change the keyboard settings to FRENCH (Since I have a French Macintosh keyboard layout) So I changed the first line.

KeyboardLayout = FRENCH

Now everything works perfectly ! I can now happily run my work “Windows” session under Linux on my Macbook Air. Sliders rule !  

Link : Ubuntu howto on running the ICA client.

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