Today at work during my lunch break I quite fancied a quick go on Mario Kart DS, I have been quite addicted to Mario Kart Wii recently, especially the online play and having a DS and copy of MK at work the only thing I was lacking was a WiFi connection.

I take my Mac to work and connect to the Internet via a wired LAN connection, this leaves my Mac's WiFi card free to use for sharing my Internet connection with my DS. There are a few pitfall's that one can encounter when doing this so this news post is just a quick guide written in the hope that someone else may stumble upon it and find it useful.

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I have a 900Mhz Pentium M laptop which should be able to run DVD's and other videos with ease using Totem on Ubuntu. After installing all necessary codecs for the default gStreamer backed I found it does not, not only was it inefficient causing high CPU load (when it worked properly) but most of the time it failed to render the videos with my laptops hardware, using software rendering instead causing even higher load pixelation and near unwatchable fullscreen playback.

The fix however was simple, move to the totem xine backend. Here is the one magic line that will do this, install codecs and allow you to watch DVD's.

Code:
sudo aptitude install totem-xine libxine1-plugins

Now my laptop plays back videos with little more than 30% CPU load, the way it should be

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As an Ubuntu Linux user interested in Japanese I frequently find myself viewing Japanese characters, which look appalling by default. With a creation of a file and the pasting of some text you can fix it!



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Since getting a 2GB RS-MMC card for my 770 I have been thinking how nice it would be to open the video player, image viewer, audio player etc and actually have it pointing at a folder that contains content. You see I don't store any media on the 770. I'd rather leave that space free for future application installations.

Fortunately my problem was very easily solved thanks to the nature of Linux.

If you plan on doing this, I recommend either cutting and pasting the commands from the 770's web browser into the "X Terminal" app or SSH'ing into the 770 and pasting them in from your desktop.

First, check that you don't have any files in the default directories, they will not be deleted but you will no longer be able to access them via the file manager or most applications. Then we must make the directories on our Memory card which we plan to store our media in:

mkdir /media/mmc1/Documents
mkdir /media/mmc1/Images
mkdir /media/mmc1/Sounds
mkdir /media/mmc1/Videos

You can obviously call them as you wish but be sure to change them in the code below. Now we symlink the old directory file names (after renaming the old directories)
so as to have them lead to the directories on the memory card.

mv /home/user/MyDocs/.documents /home/user/MyDocs/.documents.old
ln -s /media/mmc1/Documents /home/user/MyDocs/.documents
mv /home/user/MyDocs/.images /home/user/MyDocs/.images.old
ln -s /media/mmc1/Images /home/user/MyDocs/.images
mv /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds.old
ln -s /media/mmc1/Sounds /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds
mv /home/user/MyDocs/.videos /home/user/MyDocs/.videos.old
ln -s /media/mmc1/Videos /home/user/MyDocs/.videos

Then, we load up an app such as the audio player or video player and enjoy

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I hate adverts with a rage that burns hotter than the fires of hell. I hate them because most people don't understand the importance of them. They see them, ignore them (or so they think) and that's that. They will happily sit through bouts of three minutes of TV ads, attentively listening and watching everyone like puppets being played by the big corporations. Of course, ask one of these people why they watch adverts and they will tell you "They're just adverts, it's not like I listen to them". Foolish are they. Also I hate them because simply, I don't want to see them and should not have to see them if I don't want too.

Anyway, reasons aside, here is how I create a near Ad Free world:

1. Internet Adverts, these evil spawn are thankfully mostly eradicated via Firefox coupled up with the Adblock Extention and theAdblock Updater Extention. This is in my opinion one of the most advantageous reasons to use Firefox.

2. TV Adverts, this one is a little trickier/costlier. Basically you have two paths, one is to mute the TV and look away when the adverts come on which works fine but is somewhat impractical. The other is to by or build some kind of PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and get into the habbit of never watching live TV again, simply set it up to record what you want and watch it when you want. If you do your research right you'll have a box that allows you to skip adverts or if like me you are more technically minded and just happen to have a spare computer lying around, build your own using MythTV.

3. Radio adverts, this ones simple. Don't listen to the radio. Why on earth would you want to in this day and age? Grab a hard drive music player, shove loads of songs on it and have it set to random. Instant radio without the mindless chatter.

4. Junk Mail, this is obvious but learn to look for the signs so you can throw it away before even opening it. Often it will be addressed "to the occupier" or something similar. Otherwise open, to be sure and throw away quickly (after dancing on it).

5. Phone calls. I love getting these. Either just hang up with no reply (very satisfying), hang up after saying "No thanks" or have a little fun such as try to sell them something you have knocking around the house you were thinking of getting rid of, or start talking about the weather or currently politics. Ensure that you don't let them change the conversation, they will try so hard to do this. Eventually they will hang up, fun fun fun. The same tactics apply to those people in the street collecting research or trying to sign you up to something, totally ignore them. Have a bit of fun with them or just politely say "No thanks" and walk on.

6. Billboards, these are by far the most invasive unwelcome adverts that are a plain breech of human rights IMO. I don't want to be forced to look at them yet have no say so in the matter. These things you can't really avoid. They are so big that no trick I have found really works for them. The best thing to do is to recognise the shape of it via your peripheral vision and focus on something else till the scum has passed. Of course, starting a vigilante group that set's alight or defaces these things with paint or ink would be also be a good idea The same tactics of ignore and look at something else are to be used in similar adverts found in shops and around town.

There you have it, this covers most types of advertisements. I hope it serves as some use to you as you fight the advertisements, Go forth and be ignorant!

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