The Centro Sucks

I have now changed my mind about my new phone. At first I thought it was fancy, but that's only because I've never had a smartphone before. The Palm Centro and anything that runs Palm OS is a complete piece of shit. Don't ever buy anything with Palm OS. The OS is very unstable and outdated. The phone randomly restarts and locks up. It has even done it during phone calls which is completely unacceptable.
And what really sucks is that Palm no longer provides java for Palm OS. I had to install a pirated copy. It didn't do much good because Java on the Palm is very unstable as well. it also has no bluetooth support, making bluetooth hax impossible with j2me apps.
I have been wating axiously for Palm to finish up their Linux OS. The fact that it is not done already is COMPLETELY unacceptable! Linux is not that hard. And a stripped down phone version of Linux is even less hard. It should be done and it's not. I have completely lost faith in Palm. They have completely fucked themselves by not getting their act together. Android is here now. It's open source and anyone can use it, modify it, and put it on their own devices.
Palm devices are a thing of the past. They belong in museums, or better yet... a dumpster.

Free Shells

There's a new place that is offering free and paid shell hosting. It pwns a lot. Check it out:

http://unixserve.org

http://unixserve.blogspot.com

Palm Centro

So a couple months ago I bought a new phone, the Palm Centro from Sprint. It was a big improvement over my Nokia 6275i from Cricket. It has a shitload of features, it's a smartphone after all.

There's a lot of software for it. It runs pretty much everything made for Palm OS. I've loaded this phone with all kinds of crap. It has a pretty decent Xscale processor that is fast enough to run a super nintendo emulator. I installed tcpmp which allows me to play almost every video format. I've got PalmVNC so I can use my desktop computer away from home. I was even able to install Java so I could run many MIDP apps, including an SSH client. However, Palm no longer provides java and the copy I installed was quite buggy, causing the phone to crash and reboot. After installing a centro update so I could use the "my location" feature on google maps, java would no longer work. sad. :(
It has a touch screen which is really awesome and easy to use. I've gotten so accustomed to it that I keep trying to touch the screen on my other devices, which only leads to failure :(.
It's a very nice phone and I'm pretty satisfied with it, but it has a few problems...

• Palm OS is very buggy. Sometimes I'm watching video or using some program, and it just randomly reboots. the boot up is very slow.
• The Palm OS interface isn't exactly pretty. It looks the same as it always has.
• The battery life could be longer. Although it's probably more than adequate for the average user, it has a lot of features that I like to play with all the time. I drain the shit out of it. It charges fast though.
• Java does not work after updating the centro software. It just causes the phone to reboot.(please let me know if you manage to get it working)
• The browser is decent but also sucks in a lot of ways. Opera Mini does not work.

It's still a very nice phone. It does a lot and is very affordable, but get the treo instead if you have the money.
I'll keep the phone until the end of my contract, but then I'll look into something else. I'd really like to have an open linux based phone or maybe something using Google's Android.

lol Homeless Dude

It's been a very long time since my last post. I've been busy with work and laziness. I'm going to try to start posting more often. For now, here's some pictures of a homeless dude here in Denver.


As you can see, Denver is very committed to ending homelessness. Instead of giving moneys to the homeless peoples, we just put it in these meters. It makes the homeless people very sad because they can't get it out of the meters. It is major LULZ.

Now whenever a homeless person comes up to me on the street, asking for money, I can just point at the meter and LOL.

I think all cities should have a system of lulz such as this. It will bring people together and hopefully keep the pesky homeless people at bay. Contact your city today and ask them to start some lulz projects of their own.

If this post has inspired you to give to a worthy cause, send me an email. I have a paypal account set up for donations towards new hard drives for my rackmount server.

New Computer

I got my new computer built! Yay!
Here's the specs:
Motherboard: Intel D975XBX2
cpu: 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
ram: 2GB (another GB is on the way. Will be here today or tomorrow.)
Video: Nvidia GeForce 8500GT (PCI Express)
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 4 (also have integrated Intel Audio)
Drives: 250GB SATA HDD
LiteOn DVD burner
Fans: 4 LED fans, 1 regular fan.
This computer is very fast. The only problem is that the CPU gets very hot. It idles around 48 - 55 degrees Celsius. XP and Kubuntu both scream on this thing. Holy crap. Games are very fast too. Doom 3 and Warhammer can both be run on the highest settings with no problems. Haven't tried RE4 on here yet but I'm sure it'll do fine.

Ok... I did something bad. I installed Windows Vista Ultimate. It installed in about 16 1/2 minutes. XP took 12. Not bad considering how huge Vista is.
I'm very ashamed to say this.. but Windows Vista is actually pretty nice. Its a lot more stable and probably faster than XP (if you have the right hardware). My only complaints about are that it asks you permission for every little thing and that Telnet was removed from the command prompt. I use telnet for my router. They could have at least replaced it with SSH. Anyways.. I installed Putty and took care of that problem.

In other news, Dell is now offering Ubuntu computers. Yay! Check it out. http://www.dell.com/ubuntu

Feisty is Awesome

I got my Kubuntu Feisty CDs in the mail a couple of weeks ago and holy crap it's awesome. They've really made things a lot easier. One thing I really like is that if you type in a command for a program that isn't installed on your computer, it tells you what you need to install as opposed to just letting you figure it out on your own.
Here's an Example:
donkey@kubuntu:~$ fglrxinfo
The program 'fglrxinfo' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install xorg-driver-fglrx
Make sure you have the 'restricted' component enabled
bash: fglrxinfo: command not found

Also, all of the software is very up to date and there is much more software avalable in the repositories.

But I must say, the greatest thing about this release is that it required less configuration to get it working the way I need it too. It 'just worked'. It even loaded the 686 kernel by default. Who uses 386 anymore? However I did have to edit my xorg.conf. It still sets my resolution to the maximum supported by my monitor. It's a 17 inch monitor but it supports 1600x1200. (I've even seen it go higher with some distros)
It's hard to read anything at that resolution.

I'm not using ATI's driver because the open source driver is pretty nice in Feisty. I was able to get AIGLX and Beryl working with the open source driver without any problems.
Then... I did something bad. I installed all kinds of stuff to make my Kubuntu look exactly like the evil Wind0ze Vista. I didn't do it because I think Vista is nice. Vista really sucks. However it does look halfway decent and I'm getting the aero experience for free. I also did it to prove a point. Aero requires a very powerful computer. I'm running Beryl on an 8 year old computer with the following specs without any problem:
CPU: Intel Celeron 1.1GHz (coppermine) - 100MHZ front side bus
RAM: 384 MB PC133
Video: Radeon 9250 (AGP)
Sound: Sound Blaster Audigy 4
240 watt PSU

It runs great. I haven't tried Vista, nor do I plan to. I know it wouldn't work on this computer. I am planning to build a very high end computer withing the next two weeks that would definitely be able to run it (Core 2 Duo and Radeon X1650), but I certainly wont be installing Vista. I don't even have Vista. It's expensive and crappy. I also hear the pirated versions aren't that great. Windows is good for only one thing - games. And the only reason for that is because it's the platform games are made for. The same games could run even better on linux using OpenGL. I really think game and software developers should get together and decide to completely drop support for Wind0ze. Focus on an operating system that has a future. Also, don't forget the Mac. OS X is just as capable as linux (mostly).

Well.. that's enough of my M$ rant.

Update: Since writing this I have ordered the parts for my new computer. I went with a Geforce 8500GT instead of ATI. I'm expecting it to be here in about a week. It all cost me about $884.
I'm poor now :(

Dude. You're going to hell.

Yeah, it's happening. Sometime in the next couple of months Dell will be offering desktops with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled as an alternative to Windows. This is great news for the linux community and for people planning to buy a new computer. Dell already makes cheap computers. Offering Ubuntu as an alternative and subtracting the cost of Vista or ecks pee will only make them cheaper (also faster and more stable). The first version they will be offering is 7.04 feisty. I just hope they hurry and get it out before the next release. I wonder how Dell plans to keep up with the 6 month release cycle. It's going to be a lot more work than keeping up with Wind0ze. I wonder if they will also give customers a choice between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. Will They combine them and simply allow the customer to pick when they turn on the computer? We'll see.
Up until now I've hated Dell computers. Mainy because of the BIOS, but also the preinstalled Windows. Dell is on their way to becoming my favorite computer company. They just need to get rid of that damn Dell BIOS.

All of this is thanks to their site, Dell IdeaStorm, where thousands of people stated that they want Linux on the desktop. Go there and vote for it some more. http://www.ideastorm.com/popular/

Here's a link to Dell's Ubuntu section