Review: iTrip

Most everyone with an iPod has heard of the iTrip, most likely one of the most useful iPod accessories available. It’s an FM transmitter, which allows the music playing on your iPod to be broadcast onto the FM radio station of your choice. This is great for people who would like to listen to their iPod in the car, but don’t have any way to connect their iPod. There are a few different devices that perform this function, but the iTrip is the best known, and for a good reason: the iTrip rocks!

I’ve got a running Jackass!

After a few minor problems (my fault) I was able to get my Jackass! Gentoo system up and running. I will finish the how-to from the previous post soon. Right now it’s installing xorg-x11, and after that will be getting some xfce4 love.

How to install Gentoo Linux with a Jackass! Toolkit

Any reader of this blog will know that when it comes to Linux, I recently made the choice to not use anything less than Gentoo. However I recently became aware of more optimized (read: faster) toolkits for Gentoo, which use upgraded versions of GCC, Glibc, and Portage, and also is built entirely with NPTL threads instead of linuxthreads. These are the Jackass! toolkits.

Song of the Day

“The Suffering” by Coheed and Cambria. This is just one of those “get pumped” songs. Listen to before or while you do some work or chores.

I’m back from ASP!

I just got back from my ASP trip. ASP = Appalachia Service Project. I had an amazing time helping a family with their home. We built a porch and put up siding, along with digging a drainage ditch. In fact, I had such a great time that now that I’m home, I’m kind of sad about it. I wish I was still there.

Enlightenment DR17: Not bad for pre-alpha software

I'm not sure exactly what motivated me to try out the Enlightenment window manager. There wasn't exactly anything wrong with Ratpoison, it was just kind of boring. So after over an hour of compiling from the live CVS repository of Enlightenment, I now have it running on my desktop.

Expanding my Horizons: Learning Vim

I decided when I started using Gentoo again that I would try to learn the Vim text editor. While nano has always been my Unix editor of choice, mainly for its simplicity, any person who has used Unix for a little while knows the two most powerful editors are Vim and Emacs. I knew eventually I would need to learn one of the two.

I give up on Suspend2

I tried to give my laptop hibernations capabilities, but I'm giving up because it is just too unstable. I compiled a suspend2-sources kernel with, as far as I can tell, the same options I used in my gentoo-sources kernel. I then had trouble booting this kernel, maybe some problems with fbsplash (which is so cool). When I finally got it booted, I gave the hibernation a go. When I resumed from hibernation, after about 10 seconds my keyboard stopped working. After that I couldn't even get that kernel to boot up. It would keep hanging at the loading of the sound card.

Thus, I have returned to just plain old gentoo-sources 2.6.17. It boots, and it works. 

Firefox is now compiled from source

I left it running overnight, and when I woke up it was done. Goodie! I immediately unmerged the binary version, and now I have a slightly snappier web browser on this system. It's kind of weird though: all the fonts (including those in the GUI) are slightly smaller than those of the binary version. Not sure why, but I kinda like it. I'll take all the screen real estate I can get.

mtsend.py: Command-line blogging

I was really getting tired of the WordPress.com web interface for this blog. The problem is that it is lagging on my computer. The fancy HTML editor is too slow, and sometimes when I backspace it deletes two characters instead of one. In short, it's really irritating.