RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE

Yes, I haven't updated my blog in over a year.

Yes, I've neglected it. Very wrong of me.

No, I'm not dead!

One thing is for certain... like the legendary Phoenix, this blog is rising from the ashes!

There's a new layout, and new articles related to even more subjects will be coming in!
Over the course of a year, new subjects and old have come into my life, and now I've got THAT MUCH MORE material to blog about! It's going to be VERY exciting to revive the blog, and I hope everyone out there is looking forward to it!

Subway, Lifeblood

Via 2 4 Flinching, check out these photos of the New York City Subway circa the 1980s: filthy, graffiti-ridden, dangerous, dark, cold, primal, raw, real.

This is a New York City that, unless you were born in that era of the 1970s/1980s and grew up in or very near the city, you can only currently see in movies and TV shows, read about in books, or hear the vibe of in the music from that era. Our currently NYC, for better or for worse, is a much cleaner and safer city than it once was back in that era. But at the same time, we also have a Mayor who has driven artists from a public park, calling the simple selling of art a crime, and has turned New York into an overly cookie-cutter shell of its former self, sans soul. It's outrageous!

But back on track... enjoy the photos, and check out more of the artist's work around the city.

Subway, Lifeblood

Don't Mind the Mess!

I want to put a new template on my blog, as I feel that the old template is simply not cutting it visually. So for the time being, things will look a bit off-kilter while I fix that. I'll try not to take too long with that, but now getting ready to move is going to cut into my free time a bit.

If you have some good design know-how and any friendly advice to give in that matter, give me a holler.

Going Hardcore with Arch Linux

Seeing as how I've never used it, I decided to download Arch Linux and see what it's all about. My test subject machine for Arch is an Asus Eee PC 2G Surf, with an 800 MHz Celeron CPU (underclocked to 571 MHz), 512MB RAM, and 2GB SSD.

I downloaded the netinst ISO of the latest release (2010.05 at the time of this writing), burned to CD, and installed with minimal effort. The SSD was divvied up into a 50MB /boot partition, with the rest going to / and no swap setup; as this is an SSD a swap would be rather unnecessary. Gave / the ext2 filesystem and installed a base install with a few extra tools. Total install with just the core install was ~420MB.

I decided to forego installing X and went completely CLI-only. Not to say that X is bad, but I want to see how useful the machine can be without a GUI as part of an experiment. Here's a quick list of some of the tools and apps I have installed:

   * lynx & elinks for web browsers
   * mutt for email
   * irssi for IRC
   * frotz for games
   * mc for file management
   * cURL for file downloads
   * htop for system monitoring
   * python & perl for development

Most of the other tools and apps installed are the standard set of Linux tools, and I also installed the developer tools so I can compile some things from source. With kernel 2.6.34 and bash 4.0, the entire setup takes up a grand total of just over 1.1GB now.

Here's a picture of my Eee PC running irssi and communicating on #rockbox-community on freenode:

Free Delicious Cake!!

And that's no lie! Until May 24th, Portal is free for download from Steam, as a celebration of the Mac OS X version of the popular gaming store and service.

So grab yourself a slice of delicious cake and grab Portal for free! :)

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

iPhone can now run Android!? WHAT!?

Yes, it's absolutely, positively true! I thought the day would never come, but it did! A hacker by the name of planetbeing has posted a video on YouTube of what appears to be either Android 1.5 or 1.6 running on the iPhone. Before anyone says, "This looks shopped!" or "Fake!", read his blog post about this first, then watch the video of it in action (linked below).



According to planetbeing, this is an iPhone 2G that's running Android, but it's likely that it may be relatively simple to port to the iPhone 3G as well. The iPhone 3GS may need some extra work.

But enough yap... this is utterly amazing to see! The iPhone is finally running true alternate OSes, which is something I've been wanting to see since it first arrived on the scene in 2007. If I did have a disposable income, I'd buy an iPhone 2G or 3G just to try this out, or help planetbeing test and develop further. Perhaps at one point or another, Android 2.x may be a reality! :-)

Check out the article on Android Police here, and don't forget to pay a visit to planetbeing's blog (linked above)!