I’m sorry for not having kept the blog up to date for a long time. I’ve been a bit busy with moving around (currently in the Netherlands), settling in and looking for work.

I am in the process of setting up the thraxy.com blog on http://blog.thraxy.com rather than its current location http://thraxy.com

The future of http://thraxy.com is still uncertain, but there are a few ideas floating around as to what the main domain will be used for.

An idea I’ve been toying with is to use thraxy.com as a base for my very own Ubuntu based operating system. It’s a big project and I have to admit my Linux skills are limited, since I’ve only been a 100% Linux user since April 2008. I’m a fast learner though, and to be honest, I do enjoy making things more than I enjoy actually using them. I guess at heart I am a developer more than a user. We’ll see how that goes ;)

If you feel like contributing with your own ideas on what thraxy.com could be used for, feel free to reply to this blog entry.

Due to some compatability issues with the method used for current wordpress install, I am unable to update wordpress to version 2.7.1 and will therefor not move the blog in its current form, but rather set up a new one and repost some of the old content (if needed).

I’m sorry for the inconvenience this will make for my subscribers.

Yeah, we’ve all seen the top this top that “Linux mush have applications” lists that are taking up unnecessary space on the web and more importantly are an unnecessary waste of everyones time. They really get annoying after a while, because it’s very clear that most of these lists just filled with exotic crap that only serves the weird and very limited needs of the poster himself/herself.

So having said that, I’ve decided to make my own list. I do realize I’m wasting time and precious webspace doing this, but my host says “unlimited space” and I intend to put that theory to the test (which could take a while since I’m currently only up to 12mb… why oh why did I go overkill on hosting??). My list doesn’t contain anything new or remotely exciting.

Anyway, here’s my list of crap I find useful when working on my Linux machine

1. Firefox 3
Yeah, now some of you are going “meh dah, but I’ve got Firefox installed by default, so there’s nothing new about that”. I realize that, but some of you might be on a really crappy distro, or have been on the moon the last four years and not heard about it. I’m trying to do you a favor here, so don’t give me crap!

Then just as I’m about to let the subject go, someone mutters in the corner, “yeah, but Firefox is too power hungry”. You know what? NO! It’s not Firefox that’s too power hungry, it’s your computer that’s rubbish. It’s like saying, “security shoes are too heavy, so I’ll wear sandals while operating this heavy machinery”. I don’t care about your early 90s machine with 200MB harddrive and the processing power of a dying caged canary… don’t you think the poor thing has suffered enough? Put it out of its misery.

2. VLC media player
You know… for movies and shit. I like it because it plays many formats and you can boost the sound up to 400%. I hate it when you’re watching a movie and you can hardly hear what’s being said. I also don’t like subtitles, because they divert my attention from the movie itself. And while my attention is diverted, there could be a hot chick on the screen doing naughty stuff, and I would miss it. Damn crappy sound and annoying subtitles! So yeah… sound is important.

3. Deluge BitTorrent Client
Why? Because we all have huge files that we need to share all the time, day and night. What these files are, I’m totally oblivious to, but I hear they run well on VLC.

I wonder what they were thinking when they made the Transmissions BitTorrent client a default install in Ubuntu and Linux Mint. It must have been a moment of temporary insanity when someone went, “yeah, we’ll bundle Compiz with the distro, because almost all computers can run it, but we’ll also bundle on Transmissions in case of fluffy space bunny attack”. That’s my theory anyway.

4. Google Earth
I love Google Earth. I can zoom in on my house. My roof is green. I can also zoom in on my neighbors house and check if their car was in the driveway the day the satellite took the photo. I like this lazy approach to stalking. The Google Earth images of my country were taken a couple of years ago though, so I’m a bit behind.

5. aMSN
Yes! Very good! It looks like crap, but that’s part of the charm. You can go to their website and get another theme, but who can be bothered? It works, and that’s what’s important. You can even be so lazy that you don’t even bother installing aMSN and just go with Pidgin, which is pre-installed (on Ubuntu and such). Which brings me to my next application.

6. Pidgin
When you’re just too damn lazy to install aMSN. Also comes in handy if you use other IM services other than MSN.

7. GIMP
For those times you feel like wearing a leather mask and a… no wait. GIMP image editor. I was confused there for a while. Truly sorry about that

I was a big Photoshop fan, but I have this thing where it doesn’t seem real unless I can run the application natively. Of course, I do run Counterstrike on WINE, but that doesn’t bother me, because my skills with that are surreal (yes, it was a joke, laugh damn you!).

But honestly, the more I use the GIMP, the more I like it. Fantastic application.

8. Bluefish editor
For webcoding and shit. I don’t like WYSIWYG. And it’s blue and a fish! What more could you possibly wish for?

9. Gmount-iso
Great for mounting those pesky ISO files. I hate burning file images to CD/DVD when I can just mount and install them instead. Also, my DVD-burner has been a bit dead lately, so it comes in very handy.

10. Skype
Yay! (I feel a bit of laziness coming on… kinda like what has been going on with the Skype for Linux development team lately)

11. FileZilla
It’s not just another ftp client. Just look at the name. Say it with me, “FileZilla”. I can see Godzilla in the back of my mind. It gives me an enormous feeling of accomplishment to imagine how my file uploading could be terrorizing Japan.

That’s it for my “Wooooo you’ve got to have this for Linux” list. You’re Linux users, you’re smart, you can decide what crap to put on your own computers. I do realize I’d make the worst dictator in the world. I can see Raúl Castro laughing hysterically at me. Oh well…

Happy Linuxing!

This is a new thing I’ll be doing on the blog. Well… anything I put on the blog will be new by default, seen as it has only been up for a few days. Anyways…

Graphs FTW

I’ve always been quite a big fan of numbers, statistics and graphs. I’ve always liked measurable things and enjoy insight graphs in particular give.

To support this interest and enlighten others to the marvelous world of graphs, I’ve decided to make my own graphs by the help of Google Trends, and give my own logical explanation to the images you’re going to be seeing.

Anyway, enough small talk. Let us get down to business.

George W Bush vs Bucket

Popular surveys will have you know that - soon to be former - American President, George W Bush, has lost most of the support from his fellow countrymen. Thraxy.com has decided to do its own investigation into how bad the situation actually is.

I’m sorry to inform that it’s worse than I originally had thought:

As the graph explains, President Bush’s popularity is steadily falling, while the opponent, the bucket, is on the rise. The spike in popularity in August/September 2004 has been explained (by sources that have chosen to remain anonymous) to be due to an incident where the US President, George W Bush, choked on a golf ball at Camp David, as an encore to his 2002 breathtaking publicity stunt. The popularity soon wore off though, as people once again turned their attention to the common household bucket, in search of spiritual guidance and leadership.

Bush has been cast out, even among his own. Here are the visual aids from Texas:

As you can see, the bucket is also taking Texas (home of GWB) by storm, and there’s no stopping it (blue line indicating GWB and red line indication the bucket).

Watch out Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain. There is a 3rd contender. He has been around for years. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? NO, it’s the BUCKET.

Who knows… we might be taken by surprise at the next US election :D

Paris Hilton vs That’s Hot

As some of you might know, media darling and hotel heiress, miss Paris Hilton, acquired the trademark for the phrase “That’s Hot” on Feb. 13, 2007. Thraxy.com has decided to follow up on her tremendous success. The result of the detective work was shocking to say the least:

The graph shows miss Paris Hilton’s popularity steadily falling, while her trademark (That’s Hot) is non-existent.

Thraxy.com therefor has to conclude: Paris Hilton… not so hot.

Coca Cola vs Pepsi

Here’s one that’s very important and interesting to all us geeks trying to slug it out on the interwebz. What’s the beverage of choice?

As we can see, the competition on “Geeks Favorite Beverage” is fairly close, with Coca Cola in an insignificant lead. One has to ask oneself though, “is this really relevant at all?”.

Here’s what separates the pros from the n00bs:

Need I say more?

Education vs Pimp vs Gangsta

Being hip, cool and down with the various groups/units/evil cults has always been important to a lot of individuals (ironically this doesn’t show much individualism), but how important are these acceptance tools in the eyes of civilized society? Thraxy.com has looked into how high pimps and gangstas measure against the gift of education.

Thraxy.com has run into some rather interesting development on this one:

The graph shows education being on a constant downwards curve, which does seem a bit disturbing. Pimps and Gangstas seem to be very stable though (while at a lower level), apart from a brief period in November 2007, when the demand for pimpin’ suddenly shot through the roof, due to a shortage of bitches and ho’s. Two days later, that demand was fulfilled by a pimp named Tom at a rather well known Online Escort Service. Thanks Tom.

If YOU are a pimp, you’ll find the following fact interesting:

It is better to be a pimp in the UK than in Pakistan.

If you are a gangsta: Sorry, your number was not picked at this moment in time. Better luck next time.

This concludes Graphs FTW for now.

Thanks for participating, and Thraxy.com hopes to see you next time, for more fun and games.

And they all lived happily ever after

After posting my first long blog entry, I realized that it was tricky to read, because to high contrast and the with of the paragraphs, so the new design is Yellow Flowers.

I like the idea of using the News section as a blog update log, where everyone can read exactly what I’m doing, so I will continue to do so.

Thraxy

We’re living in a technological golden age, where progress is fast and new discoveries are made on a daily basis. It’s therefor annoying when things simply don’t work.

I’m gonna share a somewhat amusing story, that starts in the early 90s and continues up to date, about my experiences with various operating systems and how that has lead me to where I am today. A proud Linux Mint user.

From the beginning of time, I had been a Windows user. Our first PC (shared with my brother), ran on Windows 95, but at school we had Windows 3.11 which the teacher claimed to be exactly the same as Windows 95 (Needless to say, I didn’t take those classes very seriously).

Anyway, you can say I was a loyal Windows user all the way from 3.11 up to XP. I remember how amazing it felt to use Windows 98 for the first time. I absolutely loved Windows ME, even though it had a nasty habit of freezing me out at all the worst possible moments, and BSOD was a frequent visitor.

I was a bit sad the first time I used my XP machine. I found that the ways I used to set things up were different. It felt limiting because a lot of the setup features were automated. I had to relearn how to set up my network configurations (for LAN parties). I’m not the worlds most intuitive person, so it took me a week or so to get used to all the changes. After that, I was once again a happy camper.

I had heard of MAC, but I had never actually had a closer look, until summer 2004. I’m sorry to disappoint MAC users, but I didn’t feel any attraction. I have to admit, they look good. I wasn’t sure if I should use it or take it out for dinner and a movie. Only thing I knew was, I sure as hell wasn’t going to play counterstrike on it. I had my laptop – a Vega+, Pentium 4 2.8GHz, Mobility Radeon 64mb graphics card, with XP - which was an ok computer for the time, that suited my needs perfectly.

In mid 2007 I found myself needing a new laptop. I decided to go for an Acer Aspire, 9420 series. It came pre-installed with Vista. I carried it under my arm all the way home, positively glowing with excitement and anticipation about my new purchase. It felt so good to unwrap it. I almost didn’t want to take the plastic film of the lid and screen (but I did, because not doing it would be silly).

The time had come. Everything was hooked up. All I now needed was to press the power button. I didn’t wait long. Power on! “What’s this?”, were my first thoughts. The XP load screen came up. A few seconds went by. “Oh, I have to INSTALL it, whew”, I said out loud to myself. Seen as it was pre-installed I thought it would only be a matter of minutes before I was up and running. I was sort of right. It took around 100 minutes. I had done a few XP clean installs prior to this, so an hour and a half seemed rather long for something that’s pre-installed.

Was it just me, or did anyone else find the Vista installer a bit puzzling? I mean, why do I need to choose my location? Can I change it later? What’s the difference? These were the questions going through my head when I saw this:

A bit confusing, isn’t it?

Anyway, I chose one and the network connection worked. As long as I was connected by cable to my router. I couldn’t for the life of me get the wireless to work. I’m running an unsecured network, because it saves hassle when friends are over (I’m not getting into a discussion about that). So basically, I could find the router, but Vista refused to connect. Talk about annoying. My computer, my router, and not a damn thing I could do.

I lost a bit of the Vista hype thingy, right there and then.

A friend of mine recommended I’d update the router software, since that had fixed the problem for some people. Didn’t work.

I spent the next few months leashed to the router with a 2m long LAN cable. I was not feeling the joys of Vista.

You’d think that was enough, but no. Microsoft had decided to fix their security problems by making me do 2 extra clicks, every time I wanted to delete something from my external drive, or wanted to install/uninstall an application. The best word I can find to describe it is “aaaarrrrrrrrrrghhhhh”.

And still, that was not the end of my problems. I was anxiously awaiting the glorious Service Pack 1, that would make my computer shine in all the glory and colors of the rainbow. And so the day came when it was ready to install in my Update Manager. The installation went smoothly, but slow as you can expect from Windows.

I was quite happy. I thought this might actually fix some problems for me. Especially the network problem I’d be having. But it didn’t. It did however fix one thing. I now no longer needed to worry about the pest of having a functioning DVD-burner. Service Pack 1 effectively - beautifully even - managed to shut that down.

I had had enough. It was time for a radical change. I uninstalled SP1 and started researching Linux, which I at that point in time thought was one single operating system. I found myself confused and lost after finding out just exactly how many different flavors there were.

Oh god, how does one choose? I read wikipedia up and down hoping to find something that told me “this is what you are gonna be using”, but no such luck. I had to think for myself. It was a quite new experience. Never before had I been given a choice on what my computer ran on. And architectures? What are those? I went back to wikipedia and got my answer. I swear by wikipedia. I know not all of the information is 100% correct there, but who gives a shit, right? The things I blurt out on a daily basis don’t always match up 100% either.

So anyway, I found a distro chooser. That told me to either go with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora or openSuSE. I chose the last one, for some reason.

The installation went surprisingly smooth. I had a functioning Linux distribution. I felt so proud and geeky. However, I had already been exposed to the mystical and magical CUBE by doing youtube research. I had to get that working. I also had to get my graphics card working. I have no idea what I did, but I just managed to get myself locked out of the OS every time I tried to install the third-party graphics driver (nVidia). I got tired of that real quick. I just couldn’t stop breaking things.

I stuck my tail between my legs and humped on over to XP. That ran absolutely fabulous on my laptop, but I still had a thing turning around in my head, and wobbly figures appeared out of the blue. Yes, I wanted the cube. I was gonna have the cube. I wanted the wobbly windows and the fire and the expo and the switch shifter and all the other various bells and whistles. They were gonna be MINE.

After 2 weeks on XP, I saw that Ubuntu 8.04 was released. I was gonna try it. Nothing could stop me.

The installation took around 30 minutes, which I found lovely. The best part though, was that I could chat and surf the the net while the installation was running. How positively marvelous.

Ubuntu served me well for a couple of months, but I was so absorbed by the possibilities, that I wanted something else. I craved something different. That’s when I found Sabayon. Ooh Sabayon. Had a nice ring to it.

Lets just cut that one short. It didn’t work out for me, and I went out searching again.

I had passed up on Linux Mint several times, because of it’s lack of 64bit architecture support, but I then thought to myself, “Do I really need 64bit? I only have 2GB ram. I should give it a try”. And I did.

This was exactly what I’d been looking for. Easy to install and everything worked out of the box. Even the flash plugin for Firefox. I was happy. I’m still happy.

I’m on Linux Mint. And it’s great… until I get the urge again and switch to something completely different. I’m constantly passively searching.

Now I’m not an OS Nazi. I think everyone should just use what suits their needs. I’m not gonna recommend Linux Mint to you. Hell, if you want to navigate the internet and play games by rubbing two sticks together, then go for it. If it works for you and you like it, then good on you mate. Just don’t let yourself be stuck with something, just because it happens to be what the computer came with.

Through trial and error comes experience, and I’m a happy camper.

Thanks for reading :)

Thraxy

The Thraxy.com blog is finally up and running. I’m working full steam ahead on creating content for the site, so you can expect all manners of randomness any day now.

The current theme is called “Dreamline” and it’s nice and dark, which saves power and looks damn good.

All changes to the look and functionality of Thraxy.com will be posted in “News”.

Welcome to Thraxy.com

Thraxy