Tuesday, December 22, 2009

gPodder review

Oh look, features!

If you use linux and podcast fan, then chances are you've heard of gPodder. If you're on windows, mac osx or and n800/n900 then you might not be as aware of this great little podcast aggregator.

Looks!

GPodder is an amazingly useful little tool, with a ridiculously large range of features to make using other clients or music managers as poscast aggregator. The UI is streamlined and easy to use, with a simplistic gtk style as an initial face and a heavy number of options hidden neatly behind the toolbar.

Features!

I find the features listed on the gPodder website too humbling, so here's all the features that I have found useful, big and small.

Easy 2 pane 2 tab management interface
Progress bar when updating feeds
RSS, Atom, Youtube and Soundcloud feed support
Numbers of downloaded and unplayed episodes to right of podcast name
Full window for episode details
Visit website button in menu
Ability to prohibit deletion of episodes
Ability to skip podcast when syncing to device
Ability to download from http/ftp when password is required
Supports album art well
Additional components such as iPod synchronization available
Search for new podcasts feature
Useful list of tech podcasts available to pick and choose from in search for podcasts
Ability to import from .opml
Ability to export to .opml
Google video and Youtube search
Ability to upload podcast list to your gPodder account
Ability to download your podcast list from gPodder account
Ability to hide toolbar and episode description
Populated wiki for help, support and how-to
Easy bug-reporting via launchapd

Preferences options

Easily allows you to change default video and auto player to options from a smart drop down list, or a custom command
Option to check for new episodes on startup
Ability to check for new episodes after a number of minutes set by the user
Ability to use proxy settings
Auto-cleanup option to delete played episodes after a certain number of days
Easily change download folder
iPod configuration options inc:

- Only sync tracks that have not been played
- Delete episodes that have been marked as played
- Delete episodes after synchronisation option
- Mark episode as played after synchronisation option

Filesystem based MP3 player configuration options inc:

- Same as iPod configuration with,
- Custom filename
- Create subfolders
- OGG support
- Sync folder

Show gPodder icon in system notification area
Only show tray icon when minimized
Enable notification bubbles
Start gPodder minimized
Auto download new episodes when gPodder is minimized
Heavily customisable advanced options

Summary

While you can clearly see all the features available, there are other factors such as it's speed, which for a podcast aggregator is fantastic. I'd thoroughly recommend the client and I think you will find it's easy to use UI and synchronisation features will make aspects of your life (specifically the podcasting aspects) immensely easier.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Days 13-19: Everyman sleep schedule

Well it's been about a week since my last post but my mornings are finally free due to the Christmas holidays. Since it's been a week I'll make an out of format review of the last 6 days.

Summary

Essentially it seems to have been a great success. I go to sleep straight away, get up (still with alarms though) easily enough and most importantly feel wide awake for the whole day.

Imperfections

Of course it hasn't been perfect over the last week. It was necessary for me to sleep in 3 and 4 days ago which fairly screwed up my system, making it quite hard to get back into the routine. I can say though that if you do sleep in after you've adapted to the schedule, even miss the schedule for 2 days, you can still relatively quickly go back onto it, aslong as you make sure you wake up and get up at the exact times needed. Yes this is what you've been doing the whole time, but it get so much more difficult after you sleep in. Luckily for me and hopefully for you, the horrible gritty feeling you get when you sleep is a big enough repellent to make you want to go back on the schedule asap. This feeling is the strangest thing of all. If I deprive myself of sleep, even off the schedule, if I simply don't sleep, it feels alot better than when I do. It's a difficult feeling to explain, but I can honestly say it feels like I'm addicted to the lack of sleep. I find it strange, but luckily it doesn't matter when I'm on the schedule as I'm getting a better sleep than ever.
One last little heads up too by the way is that for me atleast, when doing the schedule you adapt to your naps very quickly (ie. you adapt to going to REM phase after about a week) but only now am I starting to get out of bed easier. Some tips would be to get up the second you wake up, as usually tiredness wears off in about 20 minutes.

Don't give up

Just thought I'd make this to offer you a little reassurance. You will most likely sleep in a some point. I ended up sleeping in alot. In my 19 days I probably slept in for atleast an hour more than I should have on 8 occasions. But aslong as you keep going with the schedule and try your best, you will eventually get there.

That's all for now, I'll be making a tips and tricks post tomorrow morning which should offer some helpful advice, so keep reading!

Monday, December 14, 2009

Days 10-12: Everyman 2 sleep schedule

Info

Once again, sorry for not updating this on a daily basis. I have exams and once they are over will have alot more time to spend on the blog.

How I feel/Thoughts

It's difficult to remember exactly how I felt on each particular day. However I can say that on a whole, I feel alot better. I have no problems getting up in the morning, and I always feel fantastic after naps. I would put this down to 2 factors, my body adapting to the schedule, and a few tips/tendencies that have developed since starting the schedule that make sleeping and getting up much easier. I'll share these with you another time. As it is, the longer I do the schedule, the more efficient I become at it.

Friday, December 11, 2009

Day 7-9: Everyman 2 sleep schedule

MadsRH, a blogger with blogspot, has an excellently written and well presented blogpost on what he envisions Ubuntu Lucid will be like. He goes through some of the possibilities based on what has been said at UDS, making it alot easier to see what's coming in 1 centralised blogpost. This is very useful, and while some of the points aren't as detailed as you may like, I'm sure more details will present themselves with time.

LINK

10 good reasons to dislike linux

I have to say I really enjoyed this article, being an adamant linux user, I really think he hits home with some really hard hitting points. Of course, the article is written about his personal experience as someone working in IT, so some of his points may (and probably won't) be a factor for you. My favourite point is point no.10 where he comments on a serious (but in my opinion, inevitable) issue with free software and business.

10. Stability - For eight years, I owned and operated a computer consulting business and whenever I converted parts of my client's infrastructure to Linux, I basically hurt myself. I hurt myself by giving them something so stable and unbreakable that I found myself wondering why I had done such a silly thing.... It wasn't until I had several of my clients on Linux that I realized what I had done. I was killing my business.

LINK

Chrome OS now offered by Dell for MINI 10V

Good start for chrome OS as dell offers custom source code for their mini 10v. From what can be seen, not much has been changed, but it supports wifi out of the box and comes in the form of a USB image for easy installation on netbooks.

LINK

Of course you don't need this netbook to try out chrome, you can also install it on a virtual PC without any change to your hard drive. This has been well documented, but there's a great easy to follow guide here.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

MiKandi offers "adult" app store

Rob Jackson on pharanoid has an article titled "Android Porn Market from MiKandi", due to MiKandis new adult themed market. Great article, but I'm having questions about the title. An adult themed market doesn't need to be porn, indeed there's only so many games that can be porn related, and if people want porn, an easier and cheaper option would be to simply download it for free. On the adult side, any app or game that isn't entirely pg could be included, more ethnically questionable apps such as a juicy bittorrent client, or a particularly "gory" game. And what else could this app store be used for? well I don't see why they don't extend their app range to every app that would be rejected from the market. If developers realised they could make an app about anything with fear of rejection from the market, then this site could be huge success.

LINK

Day 3: Everyman 2 sleep schedule

Info

Day 3, half 6 in the morning, got up at 5.15.

How I feel

At the moment I don't feel tired at all, getting up was a bit of trouble, but an hour later I feel energetic.

1st nap yesterday For my 1st nap yesterday morning I had the weirdest dream I've ever had. It was like I was high. My body felt like it was floating or falling, but only at will. At 1 point I felt like I was beside a waterfall and I could hear the river bashing against the water, I knew I was dreaming, but was unable to make the noise go away. It was extremely odd, it took me picturing myself inside my bed to convince myself that I wasn't infact at the bottom of a waterfall. I wrote this after getting up after the nap so it's a fairly accurate description

Thoughts

Feeling alot less tired, as I did on day 3 the 1st time I tried the everyman 2 schedule.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Ubuntu 10.04 re-introduces 100 paper cuts

100 paper cuts is such a great ui improvement idea that it's actually embarrassing that it was never thought of before. The problems are so simple, but if they were fixed they would provide a seamless and professional initial experience. If you don't know, a paper cut is defined as:

a trivially fixable usability bug that the average user would encounter on his/her first day of using a brand new installation of the latest version of Ubuntu Desktop Edition.

So any issues you or someone you know runs into in their 1st day, you know the "this is stupid, why did they do that" issues that we may no longer notice, and that are so small nobody bothers to report them. My personal favourite example of this, is the error you used to get when you tried to run apt-get with synaptic open, you know the one ;)

Ubuntu geeks article

Google launches coupons in local search

This is a handy little story, that seems like a win win for everyone. Google now include coupons for shops, restaurants, bars and more in it's localised search. We get cheaper goods, google gets more business, the companies get more business. Good move by google.

LINK

Google testing out new interface, 'bout time

An article on Gizmodo talks about how google is testing a new interface on random users. It seems to have integration with google services, namely google maps, search suggestions and options and a more web 2.0 (but imo less attractive) centric interface. I think this is a necessary step for google, with bing obviously posing quite a threat with it's new and renovated interface. I can't help but feel though that the colour and button scheme remind me more of an ad site (the sites where you mispell the domain name) than a professional search tool.

LINK

Day 2: Everyman 2 sleep schedule

Info

It's about 5:40 am, I've been up since 5. -4 degrees Celsius outside.

How I feel

Quite tired this morning, as you'd probably expect. Getting up is the main problem, once your up you feel great, for a few hours atleast. As for naps I didn't get any sleep for the 1st nap yesterday and not too much either for the 2nd, but still felt good after.

Thoughts

Any negative effects? Well it's a bit early to tell, but feeling wrecked coming up to nap times seems fairly common and you look quite pale, not too bad I guess. I feel a bit dodgy driving too and have turned down requests to drive where I felt too tired.

Once again, not too eventful, just tired. I'll keep you posted with anything interesting. The great thing about having 3 hours extra in the morning though is being about to commit to your blog.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Chrome os benchmarked and compared

I don't like linking to slashdot articles as you've probably read them already, but I've been very interested in chrome OS recently, and some of you might be interested in how chrome os fared against Ubuntu netbook remix and Moblin. Another typically brilliant review from phoronix too.

LINK

2nd iPhone worm, targets online banking

1 worm rickrolls you, the other steals your credit information. It's not as bad as it sounds though, it's a simple phishing scheme, so most of you would cop on not giving your details to a random site. The worm works on the same basis as the 1st work, ie. it only affects jailbroken iPhones with the default ssh password.

Anyway, you should be using android ;)

LINK

Wikipedia losing volunteers

CNet have an article by Lanch Whitney about wikipedias decline in volunteers. The article is based on a post in the wall street journal about wikipedias decline and the reasons more people are leaving than coming, citing reasons such as arguements about content etc.

LINK

Rant about Gimp, F-spot, Mono and Ubuntu

Haven't given any links to the blogosphere about Ubuntu dropping the gimp (something I agree with btw, even as a regular gimp user), so here's a quick rant from YaManicKill.

LINK

Chromium bookmark syncing available on linux

This seems like a really handy tool. I like the author use xmarks to backup my hundreds of firefox bookmarks, but an official backup manager linked to your gmail account, on linux, is great innovation.

LINK

FOSS POV; 5 things about corporations

Steve Harms' has a nice blog post about 5 things he's noticed about corporations, from a linux dev/sysadmins standpoint.

LINK

Ubuntu firewall simple howto

I really like this, a blog by the name of "Shadows of epiphany" has make a simple yet pragmatic howto on setting up Ubuntu firewall, including setup and configuration for allowing peer to peer connections.

LINK

FSF ensures paypal stays free

Another one from tuxmachines.com today, paypal had always been a supporter of free software by not requiring proprietary software to use the site. However the fsf recently noticed paypal "had added a proprietary software license to its User Agreement".

LINK

13 semi-abstract linux howto's

A great blog post has been posted by tuxmachines.org which contain 13 abstract howto's, including setting up a firewall in Ubuntu, strong wifi authentication in Linux and handy terminal tips (the ones you never remember!).

LINK

Day 1: Everyman 2 sleep schedule

Info

Well I really started last week, but due to events that I hoped wouldn't affect the schedule, I decided to go back to the normal schedule for a few days and start on the everyman today.

My schedule is roughly as follows:
Core Sleep: 12.30am to 5am
1st nap: 8am (cheating really, but it's the only free time!)
2nd nap: 6.30pm

A bit of a gap between the naps, but it's realistically the only times I can make, and it also ensures I'm well rested before going to school/work.

How I feel

Well it's 6.00 am in the morning and I got up an hour ago, but I don't feel too bad. When you psych yourself up enough before going to sleep so that you know you will be getting up early the next morning, you generally feel more in control. The main thing to do is get up instantly, as there's quite a risk of going back to sleep.

Thoughts

It just feels like I had a bad sleep the night before. Not too eventful, I'll keep you posted.

Everyman 2 sleep schedule, polyphasic sleep

What is polyphasic sleep?

You may not know it yet but you're probably familiar with polyphasic sleep already, with the most famous schedule probably being the siesta. Polyphasic sleep is sleeping to a schedule in such a way that the amount of time you spend asleep is reduced, but the quality of sleep is increased, leading to a better overall sleep. When you sleep, the body passes through 5 stages on it's way to get the most important sleep, REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. The idea is that with polyphasic sleep, you can train your brain to go straight to the REM stage of sleep in 20 minute naps throughout the day. As it takes your body an hour and a half to reach REM stage normally, each 20 minute nap will drastically take away the amount of core sleep needed, and will allow you to feel like you've had a full nights sleep, in 20 minutes.

That's a brief intro, there's much more info on the web, and explanation I quite like is how to hack your brain, which is a really nicely presented page detailing the basics.

How does it work

As you can see from the page there are different schedules to suit your routine, and how many times you can take a nap in a day, from a siesta with 1 nap, to the uberman which comprises of 6 naps throughout the day (that's just 2 hours sleep!). The ubermanl is the best documented, however it is said to only suit the schedule of ~2% of people, and is very difficult to adjust to.

So what are you doing?

I'll be doing (I am doing) the everyman 2 sleep schedule. This is sleeping for 4.5 hours at night, and then 2 naps throughout the day. It may not be too extreme, but it's still 3 hours less sleep a night, and is the only one that I can fit into my schedule. The everyman 2 is perfect for me and I imagine most people as I can only guarantee myself 2 naps a day (if even) and the caveat about polyphasic sleep schedules is that you can't miss your naps or you will feel wrecked, and it will throw your entire schedule off. Also, the less intense a schedule you follow the more flexible it is regarding times, which is very useful as more than likely you'll get caught up doing something and miss a nap by a few hours. For example, my core sleep should start at 12.30 am, but if I go out that night, it mightn't start until 3/4 am. For more info on the uberman, check out here, an account from someone who's done the uberman for 6 months, talking about the everyman.]

My schedule is roughly as follows:
Core Sleep: 12.30am to 5am
1st nap: 8am (cheating really, but it's the only free time!)
2nd nap: 6.30pm

A bit of a gap between the naps, but it's realistically the only times I can make, and it also ensures I'm well rested before going to school/work.

Here's a list of the days, I should stick to it fairly well, except for 1 day this week when I can't avoid an event that will completely throw off the schedule. Also note, the posts during these times may contain spelling or grammatical errors, as I'm probably wrecked.

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Days 7-9
Days 10-12
Days 13-19

Finally, please feel free to comment any of my posts, you don't need to sign up and it's a great way for me to answer any questions or receive feedback. Thanks!

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Midori review

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Windows won't boot with Error 0x0000225; A working solution

Well recently I partitioned my HDD to allow space for my Ubuntu 9.10 install. So to do this I did as I always did, I booted parted magic and used gParted to partition the drive. Everything went normal and it took about 2 hours to reduce my 400 gig debian install to 110 gigs. I then decided as I had it open, I'd increase the size of my windwos vista partition by 30 gigs, as it was running out of space. So I did the same as I'd always done and not too long later the partiton was increased.

And of course, when I reboot the machine, all my OSs work perfectly, except for windows, which gives the following error (well, along these lines anyway) ;

Windows has failed to boot, insert recovery disk etc...

File: \windows\system32\winload.exe

Status: 0x0000225

Info: Application missing or corrupt

So I poked around, I mounted windows on my linux box (very relieved to find the filesystem was intact) and found the file was indeed there. After a bit of google I found a few solutions that didn't work such as copying the winload.exe file from another directory. In the end, I decided that I'd simply do what the error message said, boot a recovery CD and hit repair. now I didn't like the sound of this, mainly because everytime I'd use a windows cd to recover windows OS, it either overwrote the system or destroyed my bootloader (or most annoyingly, installed the windows bootloader on other HDDs making it impossible to use GRUB as my bootloader). So I found a link to the torrent on neosmarts blog and burned the iso to a dvdrw. Learning from my mistakes, I backup everything up on a seperate HDD and unplugged all the other HDDs from my PC. I booted up the cd, 10 minutes later it fully boots. Nervously I press repair, it nicely tells my my problem, and if I'd like to repair.

I went for it, and amazingly, it took about 5 seconds and rebooted as normal. I was met by my lovely grub menu, and windows worked as though nothing ever happened. This came as a big shock to me, as I figured it would ATLEAST overwrite my bootloader.

Anyway, this post is simply meant as a reassurance to anyone who get this error, that microsoft won't completely mess your pc, and not to be afraid to use their recovery disk. The problem should never have occured in the 1st place, but fair play to microsoft for changing nothing, and making what seems to be a useful tool.

To sum it up:

Download and burn iso image which can be torrented here
Boot from cd and click repair

Everything should now work perfectly.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Why we don't listen to Microsoft: New fud campaigns

You may remember Microsoft's "get the facts" largely biased campaign against Linux (now changed to the lower profile compare site). Well, Microsoft are back with new campaigns to lengthen the time before IE eventually dies. The site, found here, does a fantastic job of putting IE8 in a good light, with some very factual and non-biased (just checking I got the sarcasm across) arguments about how IE8 is superior to Firefox and Chrome (they don't seem to acknowledge Opera).

To briefly go through it's "facts". IE8 is the most secure browser because of its malware protection, it may have superior malware detection, but this is a comparison of web browsers, not antivirus, when it comes to exploits for browsers, most of them are for IE and the ones for the open source equivalents get fixed significantly quicker. IE8 also gets a solo tick for privacy with "in-private browsing", aka porn mode, this is something I don't understand as google chrome offers incognito mode which is effectively the same thing. The get a tick for ease of use, this is relative to the user, so I'll leave it alone. For web standards, they give all 3 browsers the tick. This is a load of crap, and they claim they deserve this tick because of their css 2.1 support, while even acknowledging that IE8 doesn't have support for new web standards such as css 3 and html 5. And seeing as html 5 uses an open source alternative to flash and silverlight, I don't think they ever will fully support it. I'll quickly go through the rest. IE8 gets a solo tick for reliability, which doesn't need arguing, sometimes IE8 won't even work on my box without the --no-addons parameter, admittedly it's probably my box, but still. They give themselves a tick for customisability, saying

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 – right out of the box.

Once again, this does not need to be argued, they're not mac, or opera, things don't work out of the box. The one to top the lot imo is the performance comparison, where all 3 get a tick. Now, I might understand the argument against Firefox, but against Chrome, there's no competition. The excuse for fast performance is

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn't tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

Anyone who has used IE8 knows this is a load of crap, and fairly contrasts googles claim that IE7, and IE8 similar, was 23 times slower than chrome in the sunspider JavaScript benchmark.

You may have noticed in the title I say "campaigns" plural. Well heres #2. Microsoft may not have the best products, but with the amount of money at their disposal the easy to get people to use their products is to bribe them. Microsoft is offering 10 grand (of Australian dollars) to Australians to locate the 10 grand, hidden in some site. To find the site, you have to follow the clues given on twitter, and of course be using IE8. I'm not sure what I think of this, from a marketing perspective it's quite a good idea, and even though firefox users can fake the IE8 user agent, I doubt many will. If you can't view the site using firefox (many firefox users are reporting this problem, I use arch so my user agent currently reads "grand paradiso", not firefox), you can download user agent switcher and put "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" as the user agent.
Thankfully google have responded to this with their own parody site, found here. It's great to see someone fighting back against Microsofts campaigns, and google have made things a little more classy than the FSFs not all that impressive bad vista campaign.

That's all from "microwatch" (thank linux outlaws for the soundbite), I'll get around to my Arch linux review soon, feel free to leave any comments on the topic, and I mean any comments, I'd even take spam now to get some interaction :P , gl.

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Chromium (google chrome) on linux - howto

You may have heard that the alpha version of google chrome is now available. Well google chrome is based on an open source project called chromium, so you can try out the latest chromium to test what will essentially be google chrome. This how-to will be done on Ubuntu Jaunty, in accordance with my Ubuntu Jaunty testdrive. Also, since I'm using Ubuntu, I may aswell do the how-to with all GUI tools, no need for a command line, no matter how much easier it would be with one ;)

Right, the first thing you need to do is go to their launchpad site and display the sources.list entries from the drop down list. If you're using jaunty, you can simply use the following sources:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/chromium-daily/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Leave that page there, now go to System->Administration->Software sources and click on the third party software tab. Now click the add button and add the lines of software repositories from the launchpad page separately. Your third party software sources should look something like this.

Then right-click on this and click "save target as" in firefox and save it under any name, or click on that link and copy and paste the content into a new file. Then go back to System->Administration->Software Sources and hit the authentication tab. Hit import key file and select the file that you just made/saved. Your Authentication tab should now look something like this.

Finally go to System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager and hit the reload button. Congrats, your sources are up to date. Finally, to install chromium, just click here and hit install. To launch chromium just click chromium web browser in the Internet tab. The broswer itself isn't near completion, but it's as snappy as chrome on windows, and looks to be on the path to success.

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Ubuntu 9.04, day 1

Decided to install ubuntu 9.04 today. My current distro of choice is debian by default, but since I haven't used ubuntu since 7.04, and that was on a much slower machine, I thought I'd give it a try. I've only been using it for a few hours, at intervals, so I'll give a follow up over the next few days.

1st things 1st, installation has come on a long way, and is very user friendly. I had some troubles trying to format my hdd with ext4, as it kept complaining when I deleted the partition and then made a new ext4 partition (as I would normally do), but it would work when I cleared the contents of the current partition and then formatted the drive, sorted. That doesn't really matter anyway, as ext4 is considered experimental and most people wouldn't notice. The actual installation was over in no time, a much quicker isntall than vista, but then again vistas dvd has about 5 times the content.

Bootup is very fast, slightly faster than Debian, and much faster than what I remember ubuntu being. It was quite a low profile bootup though, in contrast to fedoras beautiful plymouth bootup, but this shouldn't really bother anyone, you only see ubuntu boot for about 20 seconds.

Next you get to the login window (GDM naturally)... Dark, fairly sums it up. Essentially it's a dark screen with Windows 7 toolbar at the bottom (ie wide transparent toolbar) and a login field in the middle. Exciting. I think the gdm theme was created at the stage when the ubuntu devs were going to stop the brown theme, before quickly changing there minds back with the desktop. Nah I'm only joking, it's not too bad, and there are loads of great GDM themes available online and for selection in the login window manager preferences. Another thing that you instantly notice (well, I do anyway), it recognised my screen resolution by default (unlike vista) and the free graphics driver actually displayed graphics (unlike debian)!

Physically logging in and loading the desktop takes surprisingly long though, which is slightly annoying. The startup music is still there though, hasn't changed since 7.04, no problem there. The theme is brown by default, naturally, but the themes available by default are actually quite good, and people who complain about the brown have a great selection.

A quick word on drivers, they've come a LONG way. Ubuntu recognised all my graphics driver by default, and prompted me to install the proprietary drivers instantly, which is a great feature that could really help new users. What really surprised me though is that it recognised my motherboards wifi driver by default, while even vista, with the given drivers, won't recognise it!

And next of course the notification for updates comes, this is before the new drivers have taken effect, and it is the most frustrating thing to move your mouse over to the notification to try and click, only to have it continually disappear on you. I knew that it was going to disappear, but my gut instinct told me to try and click the notifications. This is probably just me though, and after I restarted my system, compiz and the drivers took effect and you can really see how attractive the notifications are. As for updates, the update was a pleasant 44mb, much lower than I thought, and they were installed without a hitch.

I haven't had time to do much in 9.04, but I'm quite happy at the moment. All the sound issues I've heard about are non-existent on this machine, and I've even been trying to reproduce them. Enabling compiz by default after I updated my drivers is another great feature by the ubuntu devs, as things do look alot prettier, and it's still quite smooth. Actually, now that I think of it, the only bad unexpected thing I can find in this release, is that ctrl-alt-backspace doesn't seem to log you out (what's with that?). Oh, and fluxbox still has an annoying moving windows bug, but I think that's fluxbox's problem.

At the moment, ubuntus come a long, long way, and really surpassed my expections for a mainstream OS.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Coded Penguin

Amazing the things you can find with stumbleupon :)

http://www.100mb.nl/

Online roulette - the mistakes

1st blog post, may aswell talk about the 1st thing on my mind. I randomly came across the world of online roulette about a week ago, I have to admit, it does look extremely promising, and if you're lucky, it is.

I first got caught up with the Martingale System, the system basically involves betting on the 1:1 bets (for example, bet a number will be a red, an odd, in the 1st half of the board etc) and doubling your money if you lost. So for example, you'd bet 1 on black, and red would come up, so you'd bet 2 on black, and red would come up again, so you bet 4 on black and continue doubling your money until it lands on your colour. Sounds great on paper right? If theres a 50:50 chance it's going to land on black, what are the chances of it landing on red 6 times in a row (that would be a $32 bet)? The answer is alot higher than you would think. You need to consider that in an offline casino the casino has a 5% house edge for having a single 0 on the roulette wheel, but on an online casino the casinos add a further 2.7% to this house edge. This leaves almost all the roulette spins extremely biased, and this is something you'll notice immediately.

So, I still went down to business, I started with just $20 and hit a winning streak, within 15 minutes I'd made $150. Needless to say, I got cocky and lost the lost in another 30 seconds.

Second go, I decided to start betting on the opposite colour after another colour came up 3 times. Sounds safe, and I got quite lucky, making $400 in 2 hours. I however foolishly thought that the more money I had the safer I was, and with $400 was practically invincible. So I hit a horrid losing streak, 13 reds came up, and I lost it all. I don't think there was anything I could have done to stop this, except to stop doubling when I had to bet $64 to keep going, after that I honestly do think the house edge increases the more you bet. This was awful disappointing though, and I'd felt I'd had enough, there was no reliable way of making money this way, and you could never know when to stop. You may think this is obvious, but making money can be so ridiculously easy you start to take it for granted.

Finally I wanted to recoup my losses. I deposited $50 and tried a different, purely luck based system. I bet 2 $5 bets on 2 rows, and hope it didn't come up on the row I hadn't covered. Doing this I win $5 each time, but lost $10 if I didn't win. Surprisingly I made $150 and completely recouped my losses.

I've stopped now as I don't think it's reliable, however if anyone's interested I'd thought I'd give you a few tips so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

Firstly, 13+ reds/backs, highs/lows, odds/evens have come up in a row more than 20 times when I was playing, so yes, although the odds of that happening are 0.002% (without online house edge) it DOES happen.

Don't bet more that $50 on a single bet. The largest bet I made was $180 and if I won I would've made a profit of just $2.

If you ever think to yourself "well it HAS to come up next time", just stop. Take a break, come back in 20 minutes, you've made a loss, move on, and don't make it worse.

For every $20 you make, withdraw $5. I find that this is the best way to guarantee a profit at the end of it. Or you could do something like "withdraw every win after $200", just make sure that if you lost it all you'd still make money.

The only roulette gambling system available that flips the odds in your favor without increasing your bet is the reverse roulette system. And I wouldn't recommend that unless you have a $1000 starting balance (I paid for the reverse roulette system, I won't link as I don't want to advertise for it, it's a good system, but you need a high starting balance). Don't pay for roulette software, most of it is useless. Always look up torrent sites first, if not there then ebay.

Only use REPUTABLE casino sites. This is very important, as many of them are illegitimate. I recommend http://888.com . They're one of the oldest online casinos available and deliver the money to paypal within 5 days, no fuss, no need to verify your identity.

Well, that's a short review of online roulette. It's not all bad, you can make alot of money easily, just remember, you CAN lose it all alot quicker than you can make it, but if you follow some of the tips in this blogpost, you should be If you're reading this after trying roulette, I'd love to hear your comments and tips, might give me incentive to give it another try ;)