jump to navigation

Walk Your Way to a Healthy Weight in 7 Steps October 11, 2008

Posted by toddp in : Clever Life, Health , add a comment

I’m a 5′11″ (180cm) guy. Back in 1997 I had enjoyed my college years to the point where I had gained a lot of weight. I topped out at over 230 pounds (104 kg), giving me a body mass index (BMI) of 32. Anything over 25 and you’re overweight - over 30 and you’re obese. Eventually I was able to drop down to about 160 lbs (74 kg) and keep it that way for many years. One of the keys to that was… walking. Yes, walking! A good walk will burn over 300 calories in an hour. A fast walk can burn 500 calories - almost as much as jogging!

Here’s what you need to get you going…

(more…)

4 Ways to Keep Linux Livey - Security, Speed, Cleanliness, Safety October 10, 2008

Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux , add a comment

Picture thanks to NathanFromDeVryEET

Picture thanks to NathanFromDeVryEET

As with any technology, it will treat you as well as you treat it. Getting your system up and running is only the beginning. Over time you’ll be installing (and uninstalling) software, installing patches, saving those critical files with the cure for cancer, and bulking up on downloads of pirated publicly licensed media. Just using your system can slowly turn your wicked fast system into something as slow and annoying as sucking peanut butter through a straw. So here are the four areas that you need to pay attention to.

1. Lock It Down

“Viruses? There aren’t any viruses for Linux. That’s for those Windows sucka’s!” True, viruses, malware, and the like are not as common in the land of the penguin, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get infected, nor does it mean that you’re immune from someone hacking your system.

2. Tune It Up

There are countless ways to tweak and tune your Ubuntu Linux system. Make sure you’ve backed up your key files (see Step 4 below) in case a tweak doesn’t work like you expect.

3. Clean It Up

Fixing broken installations, removing old package installs, and cleaning out unused files are just some of the things you can do to keep your system clean.

4. Back It Up

We all know the pain when we lose that special someone file and there’s no way to get him/her it back. So back up those files!

Bonus: Add a little style

After all the hard work to get your system clean and speedy, consider one of these fun things:

Have suggestions of your own? Share it with the group below.

Changes are Coming to the Penguin Trail! October 9, 2008

Posted by toddp in : PenguinTrail , add a comment

I am in the process of moving from Wordpress.com to my own site at PenguinTrail.com. By making this change it will be easier for me to post more stuff, have better features (e.g. bookmarking, commentLuv, etc.), and expand the range of stuff I talk about. In other words, I’m going to make the website bigger, stronger, faster!

Among the changes, you’ll see a new look to the site. Don’t fret. It’s the same olde goodness of the existing site only with the new coolness. So far things the transition is going well, but if you notice a broken link, let me know.

Have a suggestion on how to improve things or want that extra hot new feature on this site? Leave a comment and I just might do it!

Don’t Eat That Garlic Butter - It’s got DNA in it! October 8, 2008

Posted by toddp in : Cool Fun, Oddities , add a comment

“You even have some of my DNA in you now, as I had been double dipping in that dish for a good 10 minutes”

I Stumbled on to this Craig’s list post for this chap in London, Ontario (that’s Canada).

What is there even to say about something like this… maybe just: avoid the garlic butter at Red Lobster!

What would you do if you realized that you had been the one who asked him for his extra garlic butter? Freak out and wash you mouth out with soap? Ask what the big deal is because you always eat half-eaten food? Clap your hands that you had found your dream man??

Do you want McNuggets with your Whopper? October 8, 2008

Posted by toddp in : Cool Fun, Movies and TV , add a comment

If you read other parts of my blog you’ll know (or discover) that I spend a lot of time in Vietnam. During my last visit there I was walking through the backpacker’s area in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and wandered into a store selling bootleg DVDs, where I found these two gems that had be laughing pretty hard:

Disney (sort of) box set for sale in Vietnam

--Disney (sort of) box set for sale in Vietnam

Ummm, aren’t Daffy and Bugs Bunny Warner Bros. cartoons? Pixar movies were distributed by Disney for a long while so I suppose that’s passable. But, this one was even better:

--The Enterprise warps into the Colonial Fleet

The Enterprise warps into the Colonial Fleet

Evidently there was some sort of tear in the time-space continuum or some such thing and the Star Trek universe invaded the 12 colonies of Battlestar Galactica. D’oh.

Another head-scratcher was the Robert De Niro gangster collection that included classics such as Goodfellas, The Godfather, and Fahrenheit 911. Wait, wha?? I don’t know either. Then again maybe Michael Moore is in the mafia and wants to bring down the US government just as they did with Kennedy.

Restoring Windows MBR (Vista) - bootrec is also your friend August 22, 2008

Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux, Windows , 3comments

A lot of people have found my previous blog post about restoring your master boot record (MBR) helpful.  I did assume, however, that you were using Windows XP.  But, what if you (gasp), have a dual boot configuration with Windows Vista?  Vista has a different boot loader that can be quite annoying, and the tools to restore your MBR have also changed, but not a lot.  So, here are the steps.

Step 1

The first step is to pop in your Vista installation disc and boot from it.  This will bring you (slowly) to the first screen of the installer.

Step 2

When you see this screen, change the language or keyboard if you need to, and then click “Next”

Step 3

When you get to this screen do not click “Install.”  Instead, click on “Repair your computer” in the bottom left.  This will take you to the Recovery Environment (WinRE)

Step 4

The recovery environment will search your hard drives for Vista installations.  If you need a RAID driver or something unique, there is a button to load that driver (uncommon).  You should see your Vista installation on your boot drive.   Click “Next” to go to the next step

Step 5

There are two options here, fix it automatically or fix it manually by the command line.

Option A - Auto fix

With this option you just click on “Startup Repair” and let Windows check and repair the MBR.  This worked for me once, but it may not work for you.  I also think that it might reinstall the boot loader.  If you want only the MBR fixed but not the crappy Vista bootloader then you don’t want this option.  Once you run the fix, you can click “Restart” and let the system boot off your newly fixed hard drive.

Option B - Manual fix

For the aforementioned reasons I think this is a better way to go.  With this way you know exactly what you’re fixing (hopefully).  This is very similar to the FixMBR command that Windows XP has, which I talked about in my previous post. Here, rather than clicking on “Startup Repair” you instead click on “Command Prompt.”

Once it comes up, you type:

bootrec /FixMbr

With a bit of luck it will say that the operation completed successfully.  You can then close the command prompt window and click on the “Restart” button.

More details of the bootrec.exe commands can be found in this Microsoft KB article.

Hopefully this will work well for you, as it did for me.  If you encounter any problems or have more insights, be sure to add a comment below and I’ll try to incorporate them into this tutoiral.

AR

Where Have I Been? and the Summer of Hardy Haron July 7, 2008

Posted by toddp in : PenguinTrail , add a comment

Thanks to all of you that have been submitting comments.  I’ll try to research a few and update the entries.  I think there are a few tweaks needed for Hardy Haron too.  So, where have I been?  Well, it was the first year of my PhD program and I was buried in work and shuttling back and forth between France and Singapore.  It’s finally over and I will be enjoying some of the slower pace of the summer by moving to Hardy and trying out some new stuff: HD video, encryption, WEP cracking, bibliographic databases, etc.  If you have any requests for me to try to figure out, let me know!

Share folders via Samba without a password - easy! June 3, 2007

Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux, Windows , 23comments

samba.gif

Coming from the Windows world to Linux, one of the first things I wanted to do was to share directories on Ubuntu with my Windows laptop to easily transfer files. In Windows I can just right click a folder, go to sharing, and enable it. No users and passwords to set up. It goes without saying that this is not secure and you want to be careful doing it, but it’s a great way to share files between computers at home.

Sadly, it’s not yet that easy to do this in Ubuntu (let me know if there’s a simple way to do it with other distros). Ubuntu makes it easy to install the samba server. If it’s not already installed, you can right click on a directory and try to share it. It will ask you to install samba. You can also use sudo apt-get install samba or via the add/remove programs under the application menu.

Ubuntu, however, isn’t able to set it up for anyone to access without logging in, yet. It will only share with a login and password. So, to do this you’ll need to edit your /etc/samba/smb.conf file. Here’s how share a folder without a password or login:

  1. In a terminal type sudo gedit /etc/samba/smb.conf (kubuntu users type kdesu kate /etc/samba/smb.conf)
  2. Find the ### Authentication ### section (might be called Administration in older versions of Samba), where it says security = user
  3. Change it to security = share and make sure the line does not start with a semicolon. If it does, remove it.
  4. A few lines down from that you’ll see ; guest account = nobody Remove the semicolon at the beginning of the line.
  5. Scroll to the very bottom of the file and put in the following, adjusted for your own system[Share name]
    writable = yes
    path = /path/to/directory
    public = yes
    guest ok = yes
    guest only = yes
    guest account = nobody
    browsable = yes
  6. Save the file and quit gedit
  7. In the terminal restart the samba server to reload the conf file sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart

That should do it. If you want to try a more sophisticated way to configure shares, there is a GUI application called gsambad. I’ve found it overkill for just doing a simple share, but for others it might be quite useful. In Ubuntu you can download it from add/remove programs.

Enjoy!

Overclocking the Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 makes me happy! May 15, 2007

Posted by toddp in : General Tech, Ice Hot Tech , 2comments

In the last few years I’ve been running computers from Dell and HP, but when I first switched to PCs from the Mac about 10 years ago I always built my own machines. Back in the day of the overclocking my Celeron 300MHz processor to 464Mhz it was great fun. The Celery (Celeron) was cheap and you could very easily squeeze a 50% or greater overclock out of it with just a bit of tweaking and some better cooling. Heck, often you could get that without anything but the stock cooler.

Recently I sold my Dell Optiplex Pentium D system and decided to build a system of my own. I picked up an EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard, which is an amazing board. Fast, stable, and loaded with all the extras. I suppose that’s why it’s getting so many rave reviews. Reading up on the overclockability of the E4300 processor, I got one of those for now with an eye to a quad-core processor later in the year. I also picked up some nice PQI Turbo DDR2 RAM (2GB kit).

So today I finally got around to some testing. I only have the stock cooler on the processor and I haven’t fiddled with any voltages yet, but the results are impressive:

cpu-z-4300-ocd.png

I’ve got it running at 3.0GHz very stably with a 1.35GHz FSB. I ran the PCMark05 CPU and Memory benchmarks to see just what that means in terms of performance:

Stock Settings
9 x 200 = 1.8GHz CPU, 800MHz FSB 5-5-5-16 timing

Stock Speed
CPU: 4516
Memory: 4038

Overclocked Settings
9 x 337.5 = 3.0GHz CPU, 1350MHz FSB, 4-4-4-12 timing

Overclocked Speed
CPU: 7689
Memory: 6470

With that overclocking, I’m getting a 70% increase in CPU performance and a 60% increase in memory performance - for free! w00t!

How does that compare to other CPUs? Well, check this out. Sharky Extreme has a good review of the Core 2 Duo processors and the processors’ respective PCMark05 CPU and memory performance figures. The results are fantastic.  My overclocked $115 processor beats out the $970 Core Duo 2 X6800 Extreme CPU (well, at stock speed anyhow). Happy days! :)

My system / Core 2 Duo X6800
CPU: 7689 / 7515
Memory: 6470 / 6059

Running Windows in Ubuntu part 2 - VirtualBox rocks! May 3, 2007

Posted by toddp in : Uncategorized , add a comment

virtualbox.png

Following up on my prior post about running Windows (or other OS’s) in Ubuntu, I kept searching around for something better than VMware server. Why? I wanted something that was:

It seems like a tall order, but I found Innotek’s VirtualBox a few weeks back. It’s open source (GPL), easy to install and configure, has a nice GUI for configuring VM’s, virtual drives, etc. There’s no need for serial numbers like with VMware. It offers host accelerator drivers for Windows and other OS’s. Overall it’s been very stable for me. Oh, and they have good documentation! At present this is my recommended choice for running another OS under Ubuntu.

How to install:

  1. Download the .deb file of VirtualBox for your version of Ubuntu
  2. Use GDebi package installer (right click on the package from Nautilus), or you can use sudo dpkg -i *.deb where the asterisk is the name of the package file you downloaded
  3. This should install VirtualBox and any dependencies
  4. When it’s done you’ll need to add yourself to the new vboxusers group
    1. Open /etc/group with GEdit sudo gedit /etc/group
    2. Find the line vboxusers:x:1001:
    3. Immediately after the last colon, add your user name. For example, if mine is rando, then it would now look like vboxusers:x:1001:rando
    4. Save the file
  5. Having done that, restart
  6. Finally you can run VirtualBox from the command line and set up a virtual machine (an icon will also appear under Applications -> System )

I have skipped many options for pre and post-installation in order to give you a quick run-down on how to get up and running. For all the details, check out their excellent documentation.

Hopefully you’ll have as much fun with VirtualBox as I have!