j’s blog

http://jblog4u.blogspot.com/

Until the server access and speed problems are fixed it seems I’m forced to temporarily (?) switch back to my old blogger blog.

For my needs Kanotix is one of the best Linux distros. It’s as good as Knoppix and Mepis, better than Ubuntu and easier than Debian. At present the two distros I like using best are Knoppix and Kanotix. They’re both free, easy to install, use and update. Kanotix is a little more bleeding edge than Knoppix, but both are excellent distros live or installed on the hard drive.

Kanotix (en)

What is Kanotix?

* Kanotix was assembled by Kano.
* Kanotix is a Linux distribution, which runs completely from CD (see Live-CD).
This means an existing operating system (like Windows XP© or Mac OS X©) on your hard drive won’t be overwritten or changed
* Kanotix is based on the development of Klaus Knopper, the Knoppix-CDext. link.
* Kanotix is a complete Linux operating system with graphical user interface, which uses Debianext. link as base.
* Kanotix is able to access almost every device without installing new drivers.
Perfect for recovering hard disk data, to test hardware, to scan for viruses, …
* Kanotix may be installed on to a hard disk in parallel to an already existing operating system (if there’s enough free disc space),
or as a replacement of an already existing operating system (that’s what we prefer )

Why Kanotix and not Knoppix ?

There were different reasons why Kano decided to develop Kanotix.
Many deficiencies which were discussed on the old Knoppix-Board
are fixed in Kanotix and other things like the hdd-installation are improved
Certainly a special ambition might have driven Kano to do this.
Now we’ve got a Live-CD, which is easily able to compete with Knoppix

Yahoo! News - Google Feature Incorporates Satellite Maps

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Online search engine leader Google has unveiled a new feature that will enable its users to zoom in on homes and businesses using satellite images, an advance that may raise privacy concerns as well as intensify the competitive pressures on its rivals.

The satellite technology, which Google began offering late Monday at http://maps.google.com, is part of the package that the Mountain View-based company acquired when it bought digital map maker Keyhole Corp. for an undisclosed amount nearly six months ago.

This marks the first time since the deal closed that Google has offered free access to Keyhole’s high-tech maps through its search engine. Users previously had to pay $29.95 to download a version of Keyhole’s basic software package.

A more traditional map will continue to be the first choice served up by Google’s search engine. Users will have the option of retrieving a satellite picture by clicking on a button.

The satellite maps could unnerve some people, even as the technology impresses others. That’s because the Keyhole technology is designed to provide close-up perspective of specific addresses.

Keyhole’s previous government ties also have raised anxieties.

Founded in 2001, Keyhole raised some money in 2003 from In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm backed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Leading up to the Google sale, Keyhole’s roughly 10,000 customers included a cross-section of government agencies.

There is little reason for people to be paranoid about the satellite maps because the images generally are six to 12 months old, said John Hanke, Keyhole’s general manager. “And it’s not like you are going to be able to read a license plate on a car or see what an individual was doing when a particular image was taken,” he said.

Google believes most people will like the convenience of generating a satellite image with a few clicks of a computer mouse. The company envisions people using the service as a way to scout a hotel’s proximity to the beach for a possible vacation or size up the neighborhood where an apartment is for rent.

Google’s free satellite maps initially will be limited to North America, with images covering roughly half the United States, Hanke said.

Although Google is offering the satellite maps on a test basis, the feature will probably force its other online rivals to upgrade their technology, predicted search industry analyst Greg Sterling of the Kelsey Group. “To play in this space, you are going to need some robust mapping capabilities.”

Sterling said Google’s satellite maps pose the biggest threat to Mapquest, a service owned by Time Warner Corp. that has long operated the most popular Web site for finding directions.

The satellite maps also up the ante for the many challengers chipping away at Google’s share of the lucrative Internet search engine market by adding more bells and whistles. For instance, Amazon.com Inc.’s A9 search engine earlier this year introduced a feature that includes an index containing 20 million street-level photographs of building exteriors in 10 major U.S. cities.
___

On the Net:

http://maps.google.com

I use this service to make refill requests and it actually works, with my Doctor anyway, don’t know about anyone elses. I fill out the refill request online and its faxed to my Doctor’s office. Pretty handy if you don’t have fax capability. If they have any questions on the request they call me. Very few Doctors have or allow email requests, unfortunately, so if you can’t get through on the phone or don’t want to call, fax is the next best thing.

MDhub.com Revolutionizing the Way Doctors and Patients Communicate. MDhub allows patients to send fax messages to their doctor, using the Little Blue Book Physician database directory, by entering your doc phone number.

Contacting Your Doctor Has Never Been Easier!
Reaching your doctor by phone these days can be an enormous challenge: busy signals, music on hold, press 1 for press 2 for…, telephone tag and even having your personal calls overheard by co-workers. Finally there’s an alternative to using the phone.

MDhub is a FREE service of THE LITTLE BLUE BOOK. There’s no setup, registration or fee. Every medical practice has an MDhub Internet MessageCenter already up and running for NON-URGENT requests. Use your doctor’s MDhub Internet MessageCenter instead of the phone for requesting or canceling appointments, renewing prescriptions, requesting test results and referrals, etc. Since most doctors don’t use the Internet, your message will automatically be sent to his or her FAX machine.

If you’re seeing a doctor for the first time, you can even fill out the paperwork before your visit. That way your new chart will be ready when you arrive.

How Does It Work?
All you have to do is enter your doctor’s name or phone number in one of the text boxes above and you’re on your way. It’s that easy to send your doctor’s office a message that will automatically pop up on the office fax machine.

It seems to me Ubuntu & Kubuntu are not quite up to the level of Knoppix or Mepis, but they are getting more attention on distrowatch at the moment. In my opinion these are some of the best of the Linux distros because they are Debian based and easy to install and use.

Kubuntu - Pure KGX

The Kubuntu project aims to be to KDE what Ubuntu is to Gnome: a great integrated distro with all the great features of Ubuntu, but based on the KDE desktop.

Kubuntu Release Candidate Released

With one week to go until our first final release we are now looking for testers and feedback on the Release Candidate RC Announcement.

The team behind Kubuntu makes the following commitment to its users:

* Kubuntu uses the solid base of Ubuntu plus the latest KDE. We are part of the Ubuntu community and use their infrastructure and support. Our mission is to be the best KDE distribution available.
* Kubuntu will always be free of charge, and there is no extra fee for the “enterprise edition”, we make our very best work available to everyone on the same Free terms.
* Kubuntu includes the very best in translations and accessibility infrastructure that the Free Software community has to offer, to make Kubuntu usable by as many people as possible.
* Kubuntu is entirely committed to the principles of free software and open source development; we encourage people to use free and open source software, improve it and pass it on.

Kubuntu includes more than 1,000 pieces of software, starting with Linux version 2.6 and KDE 3.4, and covering every standard desktop application from word processing and spreadsheet applications to internet access applications, web server software, email software, programming languages & tools and of course several games.

Reasonable: Enabling Better Reasoning

Reasonable helps you: organize thoughts, produce better reasoning, show strengths and weakness in arguments, build general skills, teach the theory of reasoning and argument. 
Reasonable is a software package for PCs running Windows 95 or later. It helps you build simple diagrams of complex reasoning, so that you can see what is going on much more easily.

Reasonable expands the brain’s capacity to cope with complex arguments.

Reasonable is used, In schools and universities, to help improve general critical thinking skills, by individuals, to help organize and present reasoning, By parents, to help their children learn to think, By organizations, to help groups think though complex issues

Trip Gas Price

Calculate The Estimated Fuel Cost Of Your Trip

Using current gasoline prices from AAA’s daily, online Fuel Gauge Report, as well as the latest highway fuel economy ratings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the AAA Fuel Cost Calculator estimates the amount and cost of gasoline needed to complete a vacation trip. Although the total number of miles driven and prices paid for gasoline during your trip may vary from the estimates provided, the AAA Fuel Cost Calculator is intended to help you determine the cost of fuel needed to complete a vacation drive.

Wikipedia Plus Dynamic Search Term Suggestions = WikiWax

Wikipedia Plus Dynamic Search Term Suggestions = WikiWax

Surfwax has just launched its LookAhead search term suggestion technology combined with Wikipedia into a new site calledWikiWax. Over 600,000 Wikipedia index terms are listed with more than 2,000,000 LookAhead rotations available. Remember, you’ll see LookAhead offering suggested entries prior to clicking the search button.

What’s a term rotation?

LookAhead automatically rotates Wikipedia index terms, so you can find Abraham Lincoln under both Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln, Abraham. LookAhead automatically inserts a comma after the first word on topics that are rotated, e.g., Abraham, Lincoln.

Another example. A term rotation could also help find the entry for the Boston Tea Party. Of course, it would be found if the searcher enters Boston Tea Party. However, term rotation will also point out the entry if the searcher begins their search by first typing the words “tea party.”

By the way, after clicking the search button, you’re taken directly to the article on the Wikipedia.org site.

Also, should you find LookAhead oddly familiar to Google Suggest, be aware that Surfwas was actually offering this technology months before Google Suggest, combined with with their news search engine. I blogged about LookAhead and something similar from AOL in this January post.

Posted by Gary Price on Mar. 21, 2005

NewsForge | Karamba, what an attractive desktop!

Monday March 21, 2005
By: Olaf Piesche

In the last couple of years, the development teams of the various desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, have made great strides in the right direction to making the Linux desktop more attractive and visually pleasing. Just with a standard KDE install, I get the occasional “Hey, that looks nice” from friends. When I discovered a program named Karamba for KDE a while back, that suddenly changed to outright “Wow!”

SuperKaramba is an application that lets you place “themes” on your desktop, somewhat similar to the Windows application Samurize or Konfabulator for Mac OS X. But SuperKaramba themes are like mini-applications that live in their own windows on the desktop background, performing different tasks.

Karamba was originally developed by Hans Karlsson in 2003, and eventually Adam Geitgey took over development and changed the name to SuperKaramba. SuperKaramba allows for some really cool stuff.

Installation, however, can be a problem. With a proper RPM, installation should be a snap. However, some of the RPMs available for SuperKaramba don’t seem to contain the proper dependency lists, so that a SuperKaramba needing Python 2.3 can actually be installed and run with a Python 2.4 installation. Afterwards, SuperKaramba simply doesn’t work as expected, so that a reinstall is necessary. Installation from source is fairly easy on a properly configured system. Having a Python 2.4 install, things were a little tricky for me, but after finding a source tarball it took me a total of about 15 minutes to install SuperKaramba.

Looks that kill

Weather info SuperKaramba runs unobtrusively in the system tray with an icon of a small black bomb. Things start to get interesting once you right-click on that icon and choose Open New Theme from the popup menu.

The user interface for SuperKaramba themes is defined by a markup language, in which the various user interface elements are loaded from PNG files, placed, possibly color-tinted, and more. This allows for some interesting effects, as shown in the screenshots. SuperKaramba themes encompass everything from neat, techy-looking system monitors to calendars, e-mail notifiers, and more. Through the use of the alpha (transparency) channel in PNG images, many of the downloadable themes integrate well into most desktop environments, be they minimalistic or gaudy. Having a system monitor, calendar, and analog clock running on the desktop background can look really cool.

Gorgeous eye candy, however, is not all that SuperKaramba and its themes are good for. SuperKaramba provides a number of predefined sensors to themes, such as disk and memory monitors and network throughput. Themes can use these sensors by placing a specific tag in the markup that describes their look, in order to have the desired information displayed, with a choice of images and text.

System monitor The real magic happens, however, in a Python script that you can associate with any theme. The markup language allows you to define clickable areas that can be associated with event handlers in the script, which can then, in turn, change the theme. In other words, themes can be fully interactive, reacting to user input and performing any action a Python script is capable of, including interacting with the system through command line tools and other scripts.

Liquid what?

One of the most popular SuperKaramba themes is LiquidWeather++. After opening the theme, a right-click on the theme window opens a pop-up menu from which you can reach the Configure Theme submenu. You can enter a location code (for example a ZIP code), and, if you have an active Internet connection, LiquidWeather will connect to the weather.com server, download the weather data and five-day forecast for the specified location, and presents a nicely styled display of the data. You can change and customize the display to fit any desktop environment.

Monitoring themes are among the most common for SuperKaramba. Fantastik is one of the first ones, available in many different styles. Fantastik displays current information about the system, such as free disk space and memory, e-mail notification, as well as network activity and CPU load in nice graphs. This might seem like a redundant addition to the monitoring tools that come with pretty much any Linux distribution, but it is actually quite useful to have this kind of information displayed at a single look, without having to click through menus. You can add an email server and login information in the script. The theme uses a Perl script to check for email and display notification. In my eyes, this should be available through the configuration menu; making the user change the theme itself might be intimidating to less technically savvy users.

Still kicking!

For users who don’t like Kicker, the KDE taskbar, there are several taskbar replacement themes, such as Kroller, which exhibits Mac OS X-like smooth zooming icons and a different look and feel. There are a variety of differently styled task bars and program launchers available.

An interesting theme from the launcher category is iLaunch, which, although it displays only a single icon on the desktop, can ‘hold’ and start any number of applications by switching through them with the mouse wheel. This is a great idea to save space on the desktop and make applications accessible quickly in a common location.

Other themes available include control sets for the most common media players (such as Noatun, Amarok, Xine, and XMMS), RSS feed displays (Slashdot headlines on your desktop, anyone?), TV guides, various analog and digital clocks, calendars, auto-hiding program launcher sidebars, and even a theme that downloads and displays lyrics for whichever song is currently playing in XMMS.

Taskbar Any theme can be placed anywhere on the desktop to integrate with the rest of the environment. Themes can be locked in place to prevent accidental moving and closed at any time.

SuperKaramba’s memory and CPU time usage is fairly moderate. According to top, with four themes opened, SuperKaramba occupies approximately 20MB of memory on my system, and uses around 0.3% to 0.5% of my Athlon XP 1700+’s time. Your mileage may vary with different themes.

There also seem to be problems with saving the current configuration. When I restarted SuperKaramba through KDE’s session manager when logging out and back in, the themes that were opened were not automatically reopened. When you manually open them again, they do appear at the positions on the desktop and with the configurations they had when logging out.

Overall, SuperKaramba is a worthy addition for any KDE desktop. It can not only add the wow factor to your environment, but also make many small tasks easier and provide some new ways to go about them. The level of desktop customization it allows via the themes available for download on the Web is a joy for every tinkerer, and the themes’ simple structure make it possible for the technically inclined to write their own.

Olaf Piesche was born in Germany, and moved to the U.S. in 2000. He works as a C++ software engineer, mainly in 3D graphics.

Yahoo buys photo-sharing site Flickr | CNET News.com

Published: March 20, 2005, 7:10 PM PST
By Jim Hu
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

Yahoo has purchased online photo-sharing service Flickr, less than a week after the Internet giant launched a beta test of a new blogging tool.

Vancouver, British Columbia-based Flickr lets users upload digital photos from computers and camera phones, put together photo albums, and post photos to blogs, among other things.

Joanna Stevens, a spokeswoman for Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo, confirmed the deal Sunday but did not disclose the terms.

“We look forward to working with them for their innovation and product development across the Yahoo Network in the coming months,” she said.

Stevens said Flickr will remain a standalone site for now. The company’s employees, however, will relocate to Sunnyvale later this year.

Earlier this week, Yahoo announced Yahoo 360. The service combines a new blogging tool, along with several longtime Yahoo products, including instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio. It also offers tools for sharing recommendations about places to eat, favorite movies, music and so on.

Both the 360 move and the acquisition of Flickr and parent company Ludicorp Research & Development come as social networking and blogging draw increased interest from rivals. Microsoft in December added a blog product for its MSN Web service, called MSN Spaces. Google, meanwhile, owns Web log service Blogger and social networking site Orkut.

CNET News.com’s Evan Hansen contributed to this report.

Podato - won’t you butter me up!

I received this comment on an interesting online dating site that offers podcasting:

Hi, I read your blog from time to time and notice you have an interest in listening to podcast. Maybe with your on-line dating profile you may want to not only write it but record it?

We just launched podato.com last week and are looking for people to start it off.

Basically it’s a dating sinlge for singles. They record a sound clip from their mobile phone and send it to podato@gmail.com via MMS, it’s placed on our site so people can download to their MP3 player.

I think it’s very handy for busy people who are always on the go.

Comment by Liam Burke — March 19, 2005

K Desktop Environment - Announcing KDE 3.4

DATELINE MARCH 16, 2005

The KDE Project ships a new major release of their leading Open Source desktop environment.
Splash

March 16, 2005 (The Internet) - After more than a half year of development the KDE Project is happy to be able to announce a new major release of the award-winning K Desktop Environment. Among the many new features that have been incorporated, the improvements in accessibility are most remarkable.

One of the milestones in this new release will be the advanced KDE Text-to-speech framework. It integrates into KDE’s PDF-viewer, editor, webbrowser and into the new speaker-tool KSayIt. It also allows to read out notifications from all KDE applications. Especially partially-sighted people and speech-impaired users will benefit, but it should also prove a fun desktop experience overall.

For people with low vision, several high contrast themes including a complete monochrome icon set have been added. Other accessibility applications have been improved. KMouseTool which can click the mouse for people with, for example, carpal tunnel syndrome or tendinitis; KMouth to allow the computer to speak for the speech impaired; and KMagnifier to magnify sections of screen for partially-sighted users. Standard accessibility features including “Sticky Keys”, “Slow Keys” and “Bounce Keys” are also available and are now more easily accessed via keyboard gestures. All of these features combine to open the world of computing to a much wider audience and to a section of the population that is often overlooked. The KDE project will continue its close cooperation with the accessibility community to reach even more people in the future.

Another milestone will be the improvements of KDE’s personal information management suite Kontact and of KDE’s instant messenger Kopete. Kontact has improved usability including a new message composer and start screen, and its support for the free software groupware solution Kolab has been updated to Kolab 2.0. This means that KDE has now a complete groupware solution including an open-source server interoperable with proprietary MS Windows Outlook clients. Other supported groupware servers include eGroupware, GroupWise, OpenGroupware.org and SLOX. Kopete features an improved contact list showing contact photos, improved Kontact integration and supports AIM, Gadu-Gadu, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, Jabber, Lotus Sametime, MSN, Yahoo, and the sending of SMS.

With KDE being based on an international community there are more than 49 translations available and even more to be expected for future service packs of KDE 3.4. This is why KDE serves best the needs of today’s world wide Linux community.

KDE 3.4 is available for free under Open Source licenses and boasts eighteen packages of optional applications including accessibility, development, games, PIM, network, utilities, administration, edutainment, multimedia, graphics and more.
Reactions from the accessibility community

“With each new release, KDE continues to enhance its support for people with disabilities”, Janina Sajka, chair of the Accessibility Workgroup of the Free Standards Group, said. “This is making KDE more and more attractive to more persons with disabilities. And, it’s also helping KDE meet various social inclusion objectives worldwide, such as the Sec. 508 requirements of the U.S. Government.”

Lars Stetten from the Accessibility User Group Linaccess said about the release: “The new accessibility features in KDE 3.4 are an important step for the future, to enable disabled people to get to know the KDE desktop and to join its community.”
Highlights at a glance

* Text-to-speech system with support built into Konqueror, Kate, KPDF and the standalone application KSayIt
* Support for text to speech synthesis is integrated with the desktop
* Completely redesigned, more flexible trash system
* Kicker with improved look and feel
* KPDF now enables you to select, copy & paste text and images from PDFs, along with many other improvements
* Kontact supports now various groupware servers, including eGroupware, GroupWise, Kolab, OpenGroupware.org and SLOX
* Kopete supports Novell Groupwise and Lotus Sametime and gets integrated into Kontact
* DBUS/HAL support allows to keep dynamic device icons in media:/ and on the desktop in sync with the state of all devices
* KHTML has improved standard support and now close to full support for CSS 2.1 and the CSS 3 Selectors module
* Better synchronization between 2 PCs
* A new high contrast style and a complete monochrome icon set
* An icon effect to paint all icons in two chosen colors, converting third party application icons into high contrast monochrome icons
* Akregator allows you to read news from your favourite RSS-enabled websites in one application
* Juk has now an album cover management via Google Image Search
* KMail now stores passwords securely with KWallet
* SVG files can now be used as wallpapers
* KHTML plug-ins are now configurable, so the user can selectively disable ones that are not used. This does not include Netscape-style plug-ins. Netscape plug-in in CPU usage can be manually lowered, and plug-ins are more stable.
* more than 6,500 bugs have been fixed
* more than 1,700 wishes have been fullfilled
* more than 80,000 contributions with several million lines of code and documentation added or changed

For a more detailed list of improvements since the KDE 3.3 release, please refer to the KDE 3.4 Feature Plan.

Getting KDE 3.4

Full information on how to download and install KDE 3.4 is available on our official website at http://www.kde.org/info. Being free and open source software, it is available for download at no cost. If you use a major Linux distribution then precompiled packages may be available from your distributions website or from http://download.kde.org. The source code can also be downloaded from there. Both ArkLinux and Kubuntu have targeted a release including KDE 3.4 right after the 3.4 release. If you prefer to build KDE from source you should consider using Konstruct, a tool that automatically downloads, configures and builds KDE 3.4 for you.

Many more KDE applications are freely available from KDE-Apps.org and different look and feel improvents can be downloaded from KDE-Look.org.
Supporting KDE

KDE is an open source project that exists and grows only because of the help of many volunteers that donate their time and effort. KDE is always looking for new volunteers and contributions, whether its help with coding, bug fixing or reporting, writing documentation, translations, promotion, money, etc. All contributions are gratefully appreciated and eagerly accepted. Please read through the Supporting KDE page for further information.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
About KDE

KDE is an independent project of hundreds of developers, translators, artists and other professionals worldwide collaborating over the Internet to create and freely distribute a sophisticated, customizable and stable desktop and office environment employing a flexible, component-based, network-transparent architecture and offering an outstanding development platform. KDE provides a stable, mature desktop, a full, component-based office suite (KOffice), a large set of networking and administration tools and utilities, and an efficient, intuitive development environment featuring the excellent IDE KDevelop. KDE is working proof that the Open Source “Bazaar-style” software development model can yield first-rate technologies on par with and superior to even the most complex commercial software.

Podcasting News: iPodder Version 2.0 Released

The iPodder Lemon team has released iPodder Version 2.0. The application has evolved from its basic beginnings as the world’s first podcasting software to a mature, fully featured application.

iPodder lets users to capture and listen to Internet audio programs anytime, anywhere. It allows users to select and download shows and music and to play whenever they want on their iPods, portable digital media players, or computers automatically, after specifying which music or shows they want to listen to.

iPodder has been downloaded over 125,000 times since it was introduced last August, letting users tap into the growing popularity of podcasts. iPodder continues to be free and cross-platform, available on Windows, Macintosh and Linux platforms.

Changes in Version 2.0:
- Total redefined, fully-featured GUI (user interface)
- New streamlined subscription process with an ability to check and uncheck items for download
- New cleanup section allowing quick cleanup
- History of downloads and click to play abilities
- Proxy support
- Threaded scans/downloads and resumable downloads
- Import and Export functionalities (OPML) to enable easy transport of data between other applications
- Many new smaller features including small add-ons like spotlight search, catch-up functionality, coralizing, and shortcuts enabled.

iPodder Features:
- It’s Free
- Cross-Platform
- Multi-language supported
- GPL’ed — it operates under a public license for the public good
- Fast (even with a lot of subscriptions)

To Download
iPodder 2.0 is available at the iPodder SourceForge site.

Linux.com | Podcasting from Linux

Tuesday March 01, 2005

By: Johnathon Williams

Podcasts are reinventing talk radio on the Web. These homemade audio downloads have become popular since they were introduced last year. Pontificate on your political opinions, praise your favorite bands, interview your hero — the possibilities are limitless.

Podcasts were created by fans of the Apple iPod, but you don’t need an iPod or a Mac to make your own. Properly configured, the average Linux distribution can podcast with the best of them. Here’s how.

Before you start practicing your radio voice, make sure that your system includes the following programs:

* Audacity (sound recorder and editor, included by default with most distributions)
* Lame (MP3 encoder, available through RPM or APT)
* iPodder (subscription tool — see install instructions below)
* Skype (VOIP client, optional for recording interviews through VOIP, available through RPM or APT)

On the hardware side, you’ll need:

* A microphone
* A pair of headphones
* A sound card with a line-in port

If your distribution can handle these modest requirements, it can handle podcasting.

Listening with iPodder

Essentially, a podcast is an MP3 file paired with a syndication feed. iPodder is the most popular subscription tool for these feeds. The program incorporates an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) reader and a simple download agent to grab the feeds that you select.

The Linux version has come a long way, but it is still in beta. An RPM package is available directly from iPodder. Before you install it, make sure your machine is running the latest version of wxpython.

For Debian-based distributions, iPodder installation is a little more complicated. iPodder isn’t available through APT, but an alien conversion worked straightaway on my Mepis Linux machine. Open a terminal, move to the RPM’s directory, and type the commands:

alien –to-deb ipodder-1.1.2-1cl.noarch.rpm
dpkg -i ipodder_1.1.2-2_all.deb

To start listening, run iPodder and select the Preferences tab. Click Browse, and select a folder for your downloads. You can subscribe to podcast feeds by browsing iPodder’s directory or entering URLs on your own. To browse, select the Status tab and click the button labeled "Select feeds from the podcast directory." To add a URL of your own, type or paste the address into the text box at the top of the Status window and click Add.

Download your subscriptions by clicking the button labeled "Check for new podcasts." To listen to your downloaded feeds, go to your download directory and open the files in your favorite media player.

Configuring Audacity

Enough listening. Let’s start recording. The Audacity sound editor offers twice the features of many commercial programs and more power than most podcasters will ever need.

To begin, first make sure that Audacity has MP3 support enabled. Open Audacity and click File > Preferences. Select the File Format tab. Find the section labeled MP3 Export Setup. If this says "MP3 exporting plugin not found," then click Find Library, and select the location of libmp3lame.so. (On my machine, the path is /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.)

Now is also a good time to set the bitrate for MP3 encoding. The default is 128, which is probably a bit high for podcasting. (The smaller the download, the better.) Select your preference, and click OK to save your changes.

Recording with Audacity

Odds are, you’ll want to start your podcast with some music. Audacity makes this easy. Click Project > Import Audio, and select your audio file. Audacity includes native support for MP3, WAV, and OGG formats, among others. Click OK, and the program will import the file as a new track. Stereo tracks are displayed as two waveforms (two blue lines of dips and spikes). The time ruler at the top of the track window lets you know how long the track is.
Obligatory copyright warning
When including music in your podcasts, avoid store-bought CDs and other copyrighted works, or the artist’s lawyers may come knocking. Instead, run a search at Creative Commons to find free music and sound samples. Remember to return the favor by releasing your own productions under a friendly license.

The file that I imported was 4:12 in length — much too long for an intro. I wanted only the first 45 seconds or so. To trim a track, highlight the portion that you want to keep by clicking and dragging across its length. Then, click Edit > Trim. The excess disappears.

But now you have a new problem — the sound cuts off too abruptly. To fix this, highlight the last 15 seconds of the track, and select Effect > Fade Out. This result is a brief musical introduction that ends with a smooth fade, perfect for leading into the talk portion of your podcast.

Recording input from a microphone in Audacity is just as easy. Open your system’s sound mixer (KMix or equivalent), and select your microphone as the input. In Audacity, select Mic from the drop-down menu on the top right. Make sure you plug in your headphones if you haven’t already done so; external speakers will bleed into the microphone.

When you’re ready, click record, and Audacity will create a new voice track below the music track. If your microphone is working, the waveform on the track will spike and fall as you speak. When you’re finished, click stop.

If music and your own voice are all you want to record, skip to the Share Your Work section below. If you want to record an interview with someone else, read on.

Recording an interview over VOIP wth Skype

A good way to record a conversation for your podcast is to use Internet telephony software and save the sound directly to disk. Skype is the most popular voice over IP client out there, and it has become the gold standard for podcasts that include interviews. For Linux users, the good news is that Skype is available as a native binary. Version 1.0, released last month, includes most of the goodies available to Windows users.

Now for the bad news. To record both sides of a call, you need a second machine.

In my testing, I could find no combination of programs or settings that was able to record both sides of a Skype call on a single machine. I tried on both a Mepis and a Mandrake machine with no success. Using two machines together, however, solved the problem easily, with minimal setup time.

This method uses the first machine to conduct the interview, and the second to record it. The second machine doesn’t need to be anything fancy. If you don’t have an extra one, try enlisting a friend to help; the machines don’t even need to be at the same location.

To prepare the first machine, install Skype and set up a user account if you don’t already have one. When you’re done, leave Skype running.

To prepare the second machine, install both Skype and Vsound, a command-line program that writes the output from the sound card to a WAV file. It’s available in both RPM and APT packages. Next, run Skype and create a second user account. This account will act only as a passive recorder, so name it accordingly. (I called mine johnbot_recording.) Finally, quit Skype by clicking File > Close. (Merely closing the window leaves Skype running in the background.)

When you’re ready to conduct the interview, begin with the second machine. Open a terminal, and type:

vsound -f filename.wav -d -r 41000 Skype

Replace filename.wav with a name for your recorded interview. The -d option tells Vsound to both write the output to a file and pass it through the soundcard. The -r option resamples the recording to Audacity’s default quality. Depending on your installation, you may need to include the path to Skype in the command. Press Enter, and Vsound will launch Skype and begin recording its audio output.

Now, go to Skype and click Call > Start Conference Call. Invite your first machine and your interview subject to join.

Once the first machine and your interview subject join the conference call, you’re ready to go. Vsound will record everything received by the second machine. (It cannot, however, record any outgoing sound from its host machine, which is why the second machine is necessary in the first place.)

With this method, not only can you capture the entire interview, but the presence of the recorder in the call list reminds everyone that the call is being saved, so no one can cry foul when you post the interview online.

Obviously, this solution isn’t perfect. Podcasters are screaming for Skype to add a record feature.

Importing the interview into Audacity

When the interview is over, quit Skype by selecting File > Close. (Merely closing the window will leave Skype active in the toolbar and prevent Vsound from writing the finished file.) Vsound will then resample and write the file in short order.

To add your interview to the rest of your podcast, move the WAV file to your primary machine. You can import it into Audacity the same way you imported the previous file. Then, you can use Audacity’s editing tools to place the interview within the rest of your show.

Share your work

When your project is ready to share, click File > Export as MP3. Select a name and save location, and the program will prompt you to edit the file’s ID3 tag. These tags store artist, album, and genre information for MP3 files. You may complete the form or leave it blank. Click OK, and your podcast will be written to disk. Finally, upload the MP3 to your Web space. If you need space, Rizzn’s Podcaster offers free hosting and easy uploading.

The last thing you need is a syndication file. If you use Rizzn’s Podcaster, its upload form will create one automatically. Otherwiwse, this easy Web form will help you generate your own. Enter all of the requested information, taking particular care with the URL to your MP3. Submit the form, and copy the XML code it returns from the next page. This code is everything that you need to syndicate your podcast.

To create your syndication file, paste the code into a new document in your favorite text editor. Save the file in plain text format as podcast.xml. (Feel free to change the file name, but keep the XML extension.) Finally, upload the XML file to your Web space.

Your podcast is now ready to go. To subscribe to your feed, listeners can paste the link to this file into iPodder.

To update your feed with a new podcast, simply upload the new MP3 with a different file name, then return to the Web form and generate new XML code with the new podcast’s URL. This time, however, you only need part of the XML code. Copy everything from to . Open your original XML file and paste that code above the existing section. Finally, upload the modified file, replacing the original.

Of course, people have to know about your podcast before they can download it. Post the link to your XML feed to your blog or Web site. To get listed at popular podcast sites, visit these submission forms:

* iPodder
* Podcast Alley
* audio.weblogs.com

Related Links
· Audacity
· Lame
· iPodder
· Skype
· wxpython
· Creative Commons
· Vsound
· Rizzn’s Podcaster
· Web form
· iPodder
· Podcast Alley
· audio.weblogs.com

This is another one of those ’social’ sites, but you’ve gotta know someone on the inside to get in. If the insider approves of you, then they can let you in. This reminds me of those elitist, ‘exclusive’ clubs that only the acceptable people can join. Google appears to own or operate the site, so this doesn’t surprise me, they used a similar approach with Gmail. If I remember correctly Livejournal requires an invite too. ok, enough time wasted on these people.

orkut - help

orkut is unique, because it’s an organically growing network of trusted friends. That way we won’t grow too large, too quickly and everyone will have at least one person to vouch for them.

If you know someone who is a member of orkut, that person can invite you to join as well. If you don’t know an orkut member, wait a bit and most likely you soon will.

We look forward to having you as part of the orkut community.

Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.

Knoppix 3.8 and UnionFS. Wow. Just Wow.
by Kyle Rankin
Mar. 14, 2005
URL: http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/56987

Klaus has released the latest version of Knoppix, 3.8, to the crowd at CeBIT 2005. This version includes the normal round of updates including the 2.6.11 kernel by default, KDE 3.3.2, and Firefox and Thunderbird instead of Mozilla. The exciting news, however, is the addition of UnionFS. UnionFS stacks your Knoppix ramdisk on top of the read-only filesystem on the CD, the effect being that you can apt-get install, and otherwise modify all of the files on the system as though they were all writeable. Here I’ll go over why I think this is going to change Knoppix in a major way.

One of the struggles with using Knoppix day-to-day as a portable distribution has always been the fact that the majority of the CD was read-only. You had a nice ramdisk sandbox that let you write within the /home directory, and tinker in /etc if you changed some of the symlinks. If you wanted persistence, there was a nice script that created a small filesystem on writeable media like a usb thumbdrive and used it to store your home directory.
The Problem

The problem, of course, is that you couldn’t install new programs with this method. All of /usr is read-only. Over time various methods have been introduced to try to hack around this by redirecting binaries into the /home directory and changing various system paths. The live software installer that came with previous versions of Knoppix is one example, and klik is another. These worked okay, depending on the program, but in some cases relied on hacks such as using scripts to search and replace file paths within binaries.
The Solution

Enter UnionFS. With this system, basically every segment of the filesystem is read-write. UnionFS keeps track of which files you have modified (which are modified and stored within the ramdisk) and which are unmodified, all on the fly. When you access a file in the filesystem that has been modified, UnionFS points you to the copy in ramdisk instead of the copy on the CD-ROM. This means that if you, say, want to install the enlightenment window manager all you would need to do is:

knoppix@2[knoppix]$ sudo apt-get update
knoppix@2[knoppix]$ sudo apt-get install enlightenment

You can install programs just like with Debian. They all get installed to their regular locations, and if you check out the /ramdisk directory on the CD, you will see a mirror of the root directory structure (or at least the directories that have been modified) and can see all of the files that you have changed. You can even use your favorite graphical packaging program (if you have one) to install packages.

This also means that if you set up a persistent home directory, you can potentially back up all of these changes and restore them at boot. In fact, Knoppix 3.8 already has a modified persistent home script that does just this (although it’s still a beta feature so expect to see bugs here and there). Knoppix can even detect when you have done this on a drive when it boots, and will let you choose what features to restore from this image (if any). If you let it time out, Knoppix does the safe thing and doesn’t load any of the settings.

The latest persistence script also automates the process of setting up an AES256-encrypted home directory, so if you are concerned about the security of your persistent image you can enable this option, type in a passcode, and Knoppix does the rest.

I really think UnionFS is going to take Knoppix to a whole new level of ubiquitous computing. You can truly use the CD just like any other installed CD, and with the prices of usb thumbdrives continuing to drop, you can basically install anything you would like. Major changes, such as replacing KDE with Gnome, probably will still work better if you do a full remaster, but I expect all of the Knoppix-based live CDs (if they are smart) will incorporate this technology into future releases.

Can you tell that I’m excited about this? Like I said, currently it seems to be a bit buggy (on a few of my machines I seem to get some instability after I restore from an image), but I imagine that sort of thing will be ironed out once the "download version" of Knoppix 3.8 hits http://www.knoppix.org.

Kyle Rankin is a system administrator for The Green Sheet, Inc., the current president of the North Bay Linux Users Group, and the author of Knoppix Hacks.

ClickPress | Oops Mambo has done it again!

In a reprise to the amazing Industry successes of Open Source technology, Mambo has won another prestigious award. The trophy cabinet is groaning under the weight.

[ClickPress, Sun Mar 13 2005] Hot on the heels of winning industry recognition as the LinuxWorld Best Open Source Solution and Best of Show, Mambo has won yet another award, this time from the UK’s largest circulating Linux publication.

The award, in the most prestigious category of “Best Free Software Project of the Year” was announced this week.

The Linux Format magazine hit the news stands today (March 9, 2005) with a two page spread about results from the competition. Interestingly, the magazine contains a disclaimer about how they had to recalibrate their online vote counter due to a reader voting frenzy, the like of which they’d never seen before.

The magazine describes the “Best Free Software Project of the Year” as “viewed by many readers as the most important”. “You’ve given it to the free software project that more than any other deserves to be held as a shining example of why Open Source is great software,” Nick Veitch, Editor of Linux Format said.

Other projects nominated included: Linux kernel 2.6 , which overtook KDE and Gnome. Gentoo also did well. However, the magazine said Mambo won by a clear margin.

“It has to be said that many Mambo adherents were so caught up in the desire to see it win that they resorted to Florida-style vote-fixing shenanigans, but even after our arduous validation process, it was still the clear winner,” Nick Veitch quipped.

Mambo Core team member Brian Teeman said the award was further recognition “that we’re doing what people want”. Mr Teeman explained that the Linux Format Award dovetailed nicely with the peer-awarded Boston “Best of Show” because this award was a clear thumbs up from the community, not journalists.

“I think we can say we’re on the right track to becoming adopted and emulated as an Open Source success story,” Mr Teeman said. “The level of response the community gave to these awards, illustrates the strength of satisfaction by users of Mambo.”

“With Mambo, adopters are fast finding out how they can take control of their web publishing in an enjoyable system that is well-supported by a brilliant community of enthusiastic users and developers.”

The Mambo trophy cabinet now includes:

* Best Free Software Project of the Year, Linux Format 2005
* Best of Show - Total Industry Solution, LinuxWorld Boston 2005
* Best Open Source Solution, LinuxWorld Boston 2005
* Best Linux or Open Source Software, LinuxUser & Developer 2004

Mambo is Open Source Software. You can read more about Mambo at http://www.mamboserver.com and download the latest version of Mambo at http://www.mamboforge.net. Extensive documentation and information can be found at http://help.mamboserver.com.
Mambo is released under GNU General Public Licence courtesy of Miro International PTY. Mambo requires a *nix, Windows 2000 or XP server, running Apache 1.3 or above, MySQL 3.23.55 or above, PHP 4.2.1 or above. Users should be browsing the net with Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher, Mozilla 1.7 or higher or FireFox 0.9.3 or higher (Firefox is best supported for Macintosh).

Release prepared: by Peter Russell
Authorised by: Brian Teeman

SpywareBlaster Update Available

This is a good spyware blocker program for windows and its free.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.

Nextaris Overview and Learning Center
Purpose of Nextaris [Top]
In simple terms the purpose of Nextaris is to save you time, make your online life easier, and open new vistas for your use of information on the Internet. In other words, to take you beyond search — to function as your personal Internet information toolkit — to help you search the Web, save what you find, share what you find, create journals (blogs), comment on what you find and have saved, and to optionally publish the information you have gathered — a one-stop process; seamless, simple — taking you to the "other side of search".

Studies show that over 80% of Internet users rely on search to find information. Most use major search engines such as Google, while more sophisticated users rely on specialized engines for searching specific content such as blogs, news, and databases. As a result, the major search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves) are moving to incorporate additional features such as personalization and localization into their search capabilities. But these major engines have yet to address what users actually do with search results.

Enter Nextaris — achieving the next level (terrace) in efficient use of information on the Internet.

MEPIS.org | MEPIS Linux Development

SimplyMEPIS 3.3 is Here!
Submitted by warren on Sat, 02/26/2005 - 00:33. Announcements
Morgantown, WV, February 25, 2005: MEPIS has begun shipping the SimplyMEPIS 3.3 bootable CD. SimplyMEPIS offers a Linux that is easy to install and use. It should appeal to the beginner and expert alike.

For the beginner, SimplyMEPIS is a complete desktop Linux that bundles and preconfigures the KDE 3.3.2 desktop, OpenOffice 1.1.3 (with WordPerfect document support), Firefox 1.0, Mplayer plugin, Gaim, Xchat, Konqueror, Kmail, Pan, Skype, GIMP, Digikam, Acrobat Reader, Real Player, Xine, XMMS, Kino, GTKPod (with automatic support for both Mac and PC iPods), Scribus, Checkbook Tracker, KPilot, QTParted, Synaptic, Kpackage, and many other applications to give the desktop user everything needed to quickly become productive in the SimplyMEPIS desktop Linux environment.

For the experienced user, SimplyMEPIS provides the renowned apt package system from the Debian Project, so with Synaptic or Kpackage one can easily add new software and update existing software with just a few clicks. To create a customized system, over 10,000 packages can be downloaded for free from the Debian package pool and the MEPIS package pool…

I just sent this to their webmaster:

Listen to 90.M7 WMFE-FM Online

Could you please add XMMS or another media player for Linux to this page. It’s based on Winamp and is well known in Linux world. Real Audio can work under Linux, but most Linux users think it’s trash. It’s true real Linux users already know what to use, but this might help out beginners. Plus it appears you’re not supporting Open Source, but only large Corporations like Microsoft and Apple. Not very PBS like of you. Thanks, otherwise, for the great site.

http://www.wmfe.org/907/listen_live.asp

I imagine my website will cover roughly the same subjects as my blogs, which are basically whatever interests me at the moment.

One
problem that may cause is a lack of focus. Maybe I should setup a
separate website for each major subject? Maybe not at first, that maybe
too confusing for me and too much work. Perhaps separating subjects
into sub-sections and pages and keeping them all on one site will be
good enough for now. Some software packages edit a whole site at a
time, so, having just one site would avoid the extra work and confusion
of opening and closing many sites as I wanted to edit them. If some
day, when I know better what I’m doing, the site becomes to large and
confusing itself, then I could break it out into several smaller sites.

Subjects:

Computers
Barebones
Linux
Software
Repair
Creativity
CMAPs
Brainstorming
Health
Humanitarian Issues
Internet
Web
Blogging
Website creation
Investing
Marriage
Medical
Philosophy
Religion
Reasoning & Critical Thinking
RVs and Travel

How should I start? Well, what is the purpose of my blog?

1. To learn how to create a more traditional website, rather than a blog

2. To communicate with others

3. To possibly meet and interact with people that share the same interests

4. To write about my interests and hopefully provide some useful information

5. To collect and save information I find on the web and in books, etc.

J’s site

This is a little practice site I just built on Earthlink using Trellix.

I wonder what this could be used for Storage? a menu link home for all my other little sites, blogs and projects?

I just signed up for this free web host:

100WebSpace - Free Web Hosting Service and Web Space Provider

I’m not expecting much, but it may be good for practice setting up a wiki and cms site.

It looks nice anyway.

I’ve been looking for one of these, cause I don’t want to learn more than the bare minimum of HTML and stuff for creating webpages. Refers back to the reason I gave in a previous post, I want to make stuff with tools, not learn all the gritty details of how the tools work and how to fix them. I’m an end user, not a programmer. I want a vehicle that will transport me to my destination without requiring me to build or fix it first. Occasionally I like a good sausage, but I don’t need to know how to raise pigs or watch it being made.

Pricelessware 2005 WEB DESIGN

Editor: WYSIWYG

Nvu
(Betaware) (open source: MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license)
Windows OS: Windows (32 bit)
Other OS: Mac OS X; Linux; Linspire
Languages: English
Description: Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editing. Nvu is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive, professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.
Company: Linspire Inc. Author: Daniel Glazman (lead developer)
Buzzy’s review:
http://www.buzzys.net/nvu.html
Home Page:
http://www.nvu.com/
download page v 0.81 (2005-02-10) (Windows) (nvu-0.81-win32-installer-full.exe) (6669 KB); (nvu-0.81-win32-full.zip) (7841 KB)
http://www.nvu.com/download.html

2005PL CD files: nvu-0.70-win32-installer-full.exe nvu-0.70-win32-full.zip
(desc. rev.: 2005-02-19)

Want to start your own wiki? This site may be worth a look. However, they don’t want personal or low traffic type wikis it seems. I’m not sure I understand their reasoning since a personal, mostly text, wiki would take up little storage space. But, hey, dems da rules. Which you should of course read first.

About Wikicities - Wikicities
Wikicities are wiki communities creating free content with the MediaWiki software. These are hosted for free by Wikia, the company which runs the project. Anyone is free to start a new Wikicity in accordance with the Wikicity creation policy and terms of use.