- luv-talk - luv.asn.au

Re: [luv-talk] New Motherboard/System Selection
by Hiddensoul (Mark Clohesy) 05 Jan '13

05 Jan '13

Hi Andrew On Sat, Jan 5, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Andrew Voumard <andrewv(a)melbpc.org.au>wrote: > Hi, > > It's a Cirque PowerCat GDB450 (it's a TouchPad), and no, there is no > Linux driver on their site - but - they did release internals to a > Why not just use a USB to RS232 adaptor like this http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/USB-to-RS232-9-Pin-Serial-DB9-Cable-Converter-Ad… I am in no way endorsing this seller or product but he was the first in the list and is just used as an example. Most of them just work with *nix as a serial device and should be transparent to the touchpad protocol as it is just a serial port If that does not work there is always a PCI to Serial port card like this http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/NEW-RITMO-PCI-TO-DUAL-SERIAL-CARD-CCT25-/1406575… again no endorsement of seller or product just an example > Sorry if I picked the wrong list. I don't know how to switch this to > luv-talk but if it can be done then sure, otherwise continue it there or > here ? > > just change the reply to address when you send the reply from luv-main to luv-talk's address ie luv-talk(a)lists.luv.asn.au -- Mark "Pockets" Clohesy Mob Phone: (+61) 406 417 877 Email: hiddensoul(a)twistedsouls.com G-Talk: mark.clohesy(a)gmail.com - GNU/Linux.. Linux Counter #457297 "I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code" "Linux is user friendly...its just selective about who its friends are" What is the quickest way to push* ifconfig down *then* ifconfig up* to 5000 or so workstations? "Power Cycle the building"

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Fake Wikipedia entry on Bicholim Conflict finally deleted after five years
by Andrew McGlashan 04 Jan '13

04 Jan '13

Hi All, For those that think Wikipedia has all the answers and is _the_ resource to quote --- Russell ... anybody else? Fake Wikipedia entry on Bicholim Conflict finally deleted after five years » Consider this another cautionary tale against believing everything you read on Wikipedia, or the Internet in general. Wikipedia's volunteer editors recently removed an elaborate article that purporte... https://plus.google.com/105492284418862345045/posts/7YxKUGcVAFu Cheers -- Kind Regards AndrewM Andrew McGlashan Broadband Solutions now including VoIP Current Land Line No: 03 9012 2102 Mobile: 04 2574 1827 Fax: 03 9012 2178 National No: 1300 85 3804 Affinity Vision Australia Pty Ltd http://affinityvision.com.au http://securemywireless.com.au http://adsl2choice.net.au In Case of Emergency -- http://affinityvision.com.au/ice.html

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Re: [luv-talk] Fake Wikipedia entry on Bicholim Conflict finally deleted after five years
by Trent W. Buck 04 Jan '13

04 Jan '13

Since no one has mentioned it yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia My favourite part is this block quotation: WebMD is the only news source whose coverage of chemical risk is regarded as accurate by a majority (56 percent) of toxicologists, closely followed by Wikipedia's 45 percent accuracy rating. By contrast, only 15 percent describe as accurate the portrayals of chemical risk found in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.^[6]

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Retro.asn.au - a special interest group for people who enjoy collecting and playing retro video games
by David E Payne 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

If any of you might want to go this meeting if it was on another date I'd suggest you point that out ASAP. But as I can't see a link to email on the website http://retro.asn.au/ I'm Bcc: ing this to a co-convenor. Either he can tell me an email to post (won't be for some days) or he can check luv-talk(a)luv.asn.au for comments or I'll check for comments in a few days. I always recommend groups go for the last *day of the month because sometimes that's the 4th & sometimes the 5th which could mean some folk can get there who otherwise never could. But nearly everyone goes for the first 3 weeks of the month. Dav(e/id/o/y) Will Romney become god of his own universe? www.mormonthink.com

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Ingress Enlightenment team
by Russell Coker 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

Anyone interested in an Enlightenment team meet in the CBD? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: [luv-talk] headless PMP recommendations
by Trent W. Buck 23 Dec '12

23 Dec '12

Somebody wrote: > How are you finding the PMP you got? Looking at one for a friend for > Christmas, so a quick reply would be good. I'm thinking that one > fits what he uses it for pretty well. Sure thing! I was wondering whether I should bother, since I doubted anyone would be interested - apparently someone is :-) I'm a grumpy curmudgeon, so feel free to infer glowing praise for any aspects I neglect to bitch about. Short version: not as good as my old PMP, but tolerable. Would buy again at A$25, but not worth A$60. Long version: Most annoying thing, hands down, is that in top-to-bottom menus, turning the dial clockwise (forward) means "up", and turning it widdershins (back) means "down". This is completely counterintuitive. FM radio reception is poo, presumably because it has no whacking great antenna. In Hawthorn, 3PBS and 3RRR have static drifting in and out over the signal, though it's still intelligible. I've gotten the hang of using back, forward and play/pause/off while it's in my pocket, but it's very hard to hit the other buttons accurately without looking. This is partly because there are buttons both sides of the device, so you can it the wrong side by accident when trying to get leverage to hit the other side. It's also easy to hit the "zappin" button instead of volup. It is not feasible to switch between mp3 and radio without looking, because it takes five key presses. When turning it off or switching to radio and back, it *is* smart enough to remember what radio station you're on and what track and folder/genre/whatever of MP3 you were listening to. Rather than getting data from a 4-pin 3.5mm to USB, it has a USB A male on the end of it. (And a cap, which I haven't lost yet.) The device is bulky enough that I can't e.g. plug it into the front of an x360, but I can plug it into the back port. When listening to an MP3 audo book, if I turned the device off and back on again, it resumes imperfectly -- it seems to be within ±10s of where I actually stopped listening. Simply hitting pause without it turning off, doesn't exhibit this issue. When I accidentally hit "forward" partway through a 100min book, it took me a long time to find my place again, because the fast forward and rewind don't increase speed logarithmically as you continue to hold them down. When playing music, you can play by folder, or by genre and some other stuff, but it's tedious to look through it. It doesn't appear to have a randomize order / shuffle function. If you say "play everything in this folder" or "play absolutely everything", it uses one line of the two-line display to tell you that's what you picked, so the other line has to marquee back and forth to show you the track name and artist and so forth. This was annoying when I was trying to find out the artist and the LCD backlight turned off before it marqueed past the track name. When you mount it, it's a FAT of some sort, and you can just drop MP3s into anywhere in the tree. When you next boot it, it'll spend a while crawling the directory tree and generating an index. This took a couple of deciseconds after I half-filled it. The default filesystem is full of FOO.EXE and FOO.IDX type files that I am, frankly, scared to delete in case it bricks it. One bug I found: turn it on, don't select a radio station, but choose "Delete Preset" and it'll say "CANNOT EXECUTE". The "zappin" button is purely annoying. AFAICT the idea is that you can easily find the song you want while not looking at the screen; it does this by playing the a ten-second sample of each song in order, and when you think "that's the song!" you hit "zappin" again and it starts playing that song from the beginning. Haven't investigated firmware upgrade yet. Oh, and the manual is online, but as an individual HTML file per page, rather than a single wgettable PDF. This is annoying. Whew, all done. HTH, HAND &c.

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LCA 2013 - transport to Canberra
by Daniel Jitnah 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

Hello All, I am considering driving to Canberra for LCA 2013, last week of January. The intention is to leave on Saturday 26 and be back the following weekend. I am offering to take 2 (or may be 3) passengers along for the trip and/or back, share fuel cost (and possibly driving). It is ok to take the offer one-way (either way), but preferably I would have passengers both ways. The reason I am considering driving is to have access to a car while in Canberra, as otherwise for one person, coaching or even flying is probably cheaper. Sharing cost for car ride is however cheaper per person. (@$1.50/ltr I estimate it will cost $120 each way for fuel. So with 2 passengers+driver = $40, each and 3 passengers+driver = $30) You will of course have to organise your own accommodation (I happen to have relatives there I can stay with) If anyone is interested please let me know offlist. While am here, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all!! Cheers, Daniel.

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Re: [luv-talk] Linux Australia Name Change?
by Rohan McLeod 20 Dec '12

20 Dec '12

Bianca Gibson wrote: > On 17 December 2012 14:28, Lev Lafayette <lev(a)levlafayette.com > <mailto:lev@levlafayette.com>> wrote: > > Although a name change does *imply* a change of focus of the > organisation, > that it will become "Free, Libre, Open Source" technology > organisation, > rather than a Linux organisation. > > > It does not imply a change of focus from what we are now (imo). It is > intended to bring our name in line with what we currently do. > More details: > http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2012-April/019454.html /begin rant Personally I think changing names of organisations ( commercial and non-commercial); to better describe function or simple novelty as often seems the case; involves a miss-understanding of the function of names ! The function of the name is not essentially to describe the function of the organisation, but to uniquely represent the organisation. All that such badge-engineering does is obscure identification. Even advertisers recognise the commercial value of brand recognition ! /end rant regards Rohan McLeod

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Re: [luv-talk] Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Russell Coker 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Jeremy Visser <jeremy(a)visser.name> wrote: > Deployment is also modular -- "Dism" is a recent package management > system for adding/removing Windows components. [0][1] And of course, > Windows Installer can be fully automated/managed too. Used wisely, these > two tools can be just as powerful as any Linux package manager. Do they support dependencies and versioned dependencies? In past times when I've been forced to deal with Windows systems there were all sorts of nasty problems with ordering of installation. For example installing IE and installing MS-Office would both write some shared libraries so you had to make sure you installed them in the correct order. The correct solution to that problem is to have them both depend on a package that provides the library. Then there was the foolishness of shipping DLLs from MSVC with your application which needed to be renamed to avoid version conflicts with the same DLLs from a different version of MSVC installed by a different program. Having library version numbers in file names was too difficult for MS. Not that this has anything to do with the original issue of whether MS might use a Linux kernel. > Basically what I’m saying is that changing to a model with a minimal > Linux/Unix base wouldn’t gain anything, because they already have a > minimal modular system to that does everything that Microsoft needs it to. Developing and maintaining a kernel is still a major task. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: [luv-talk] Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Rick Moen 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Quoting Peter Ross (Peter.Ross(a)bogen.in-berlin.de) > AFAIK NetInfo has nothing to do with Sun. Heh, OK. It sure felt like a mutant Sun invention, right down to the RPC portmapper dependency. (I was a NeXTStep admirer back in the day, and ran the Intel port for a while, though I never splurged on any of the very pretty black-cube systems.) > I still consider a lot of NeXT stuff as very good - and NetInfo was > easier to handle as other /etc/files replacements (NIS, NIS+, LDAP) > and came with a good set of GUI tools to edit NetInfo too. Probably. It's been long enough since I had to administer NIS that the hate has faded. ;->

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