One of the things I absolutely LOVE about the new Feisty Distro of Ubuntu Linux are the Compiz and Beryl additions to the Gnome and KDE desktop. For those of you who think I'm "Geordi-la-Forging" ( Pulling techterms out of my butt) let me simplify it for you : What Rox about Ubuntu are the wicked wobbly windows ! An amazing little peace of eyecandy that does much more then liven up the way you interact with your computer. Forget play-doh like blue Xp-desktops : Lets Wobble the windows in Linux, Spin the desktop cube, exposé-away and more. Honestly.. When you line up a Beryl-enhanced Ubuntu desktop with an XP or even a Mac .. THe Ubuntu machine looks like Marty Mcfly brought it over from the 22nd century.

What however IS a bitch is getting it all setup and working nicely. Sure there have been some enhancements done in Feisty making it all a lot simpler .. but the simple "enable desktop effects" option you have leaves the geek in my lacking. And if you cant get everything working right away.. you are screwed. Thus enter Kevin Vanzonneveld who has written up a little script that does some serious lovemaking between Compiz, Beryl, Gnome and your Ubuntu machine. So this way you can have both : The time to go out.. get drunk and score a girlfriend .. but still have wobbly windows in your Ubuntu. Check out his manual and enjoy.

Links : Kevins Beryl-Compiz-breadcrumbtrail.

You can do an amazing amount of things in an SSH session. For noobs this means mostly copy-pasting the commands they found on the how to website. But there is more to SSH then just plainly running commands on another system. How about swapping around files from one system to another ? And i'm not just talking "copy here paste there" You can actually remotely MOUNT a folder on your local system and copy stuff back and forth without having to worry about anything  (no authentication, no risk of security etc). 

So i've rounded up some websites that might help you use SSH on Ubuntu or any other distro of linux (and mac ! ) to give more power to the terminal ! 

Downloading Putty.

Secure File copy, Remote mounting of drives, ssh without passwords, forwarding graphical applications through an ssh tunnel.

Secure surfing from work through your machine at home using Putty Firefox and SSH.  

Punching the Samba hole right through the remote machine with Putty , SSH and Windows Filesharing !

eleven cool SSH tricks.  

Leave your SSH Sessions running even if your window closes using "Screen"  

Browse the net anonymously by using Putty and an SSH server.

Mount a folder over SSH using your Mac.  

The Remote Domination podcasts part One and Two.

The Famous Feisty for the Family manuals. 

Picture " In tha Shell " by Teryaki

If there is one thing I truly hate it must be attachments in Email. No seriously ? What the crap is up with that ! !  The Smtp protocol that blissfully shoves email all over the globe was invented a long time ago (in a galaxy not SO far away) by some genious ubergeek to help us all to "get along". Thanks to this brilliant person we can tell our wives we love them, tell our bosses we are to busy and tell our friends we have " A funny movie for them " . And it is definitely with the latter that I have s serious problem. What the crap happened over the last five to ten years with that ! One day Email used to be something damn good, something damn useful. Something that turned Telexes into paper weights, Faxes into oblivious office machinery and was the digital Saviour for the communication age that made the post office want to stick their heads through a noose.  For the life of me I can't even REMEMBER what a stamp tastes like. 

But all of a sudden this digital communication highway has been turned into the party train of the dumb. These days its "fashionable" to send eachother emails with 'Funny pictures', " Silly movies" and " Forward this otherwise Hotmail becomes a payed service '. Somewhere along the road the intellectual bottom fell out from under the Email system and it has now become the domain of the troglodytes who dare to call themselves ' a little tech savvy ' Forget teenagers who blab on the phone for hours on end. Here is the next incarnation of Cyber-turds who spend the best part of their (WORKING) day sifting through and forwarding all this junk email crap filled with 'Funny pictures'. They swamp up the bandwidth of the company, overload the emailservers, fill up the mailboxes and so on and so on. Email : Originally desinged for richt text communication has now become the donkey of this senseless load of crap people entertain themselves with. 

To those out there who dare send me stuff like that my reply is swift but cold : Stop or i'll get really mad. I don't care if its a cyber-savvy citizen who knows better or the first noob-on-the-block who actually thinks his digital sludge will make him rise on my social ladder. They all get the same treatment. Go eat up somebody else's bandwidth, fill up somebody else's mailbox and waste someone else's time. I don't carebear.

But there are some moments in life where you need to shove the proverbial elephant through the sucking straw called email. When you need to get this 23 megabyte file to the other side of the world. Moments in your life where you know that you have an FTP server you can stick it on but either you are to lazy to create a one-time account for this user. Or you know that between the two braincells needed for eating and peeing, and the two braincells needed for surfing porn, the poor guy would not have any brainpower left to figure out an FTP client (and for those of you who think you can access an ftp site with internet explorer : Wake up and smell the music)  So bless you sites like 'senduit" that allow you to upload a file to a server , stick it up there for a certain ammount of time and just send the magic link to whoever you want to send it to. Senduit gets the revenue by using adds on the download page and you are a happy camper. Seriously : I've sent this stuff to computer illiterates and guess what : It worked ! So long Email attachments, Hello Senduit. !

Link : www.senduit.com  

Most of you know by now that I sold my last 'Home built" pc a few weeks ago. And as it is with geeks.. Money from sold off hardware .. just sitting there .. has slim chances of ever getting back to the bank. Lets face it :) It's toy-money. And what do you buy with money from sold off toys ? Right ! New toys ! I had some other "play-money" tucked away on the side and together with the cash from my old computer .. lets say its time for a little "well thought-through" shopping.

There are several kinds of Geeks. Some buy stuff and hang on to it forever, some buy stuff and give it away to buy new stuff. Some buy stuff to sell it right away for a profit and buy more stuff and so on. I'm the kind of geek that buys stuff, holds on to it as long as it is still valuable and then sells it in order to put down a tiny bit of extra cash to buy something new. Never do I make a purchase without selling something else first. I would die in horror if I had to subtract the full price of the new computer/laptop etc from my bank account.  Usually I just put aside little bits of cash and when the time comes for me to make my move I sell something in order to make the last "big leap" towards the amount needed for my new purchase. Some BUY new things and say they will "sell the old stuff later" and put the money back in the bank. I know for a fact that that does not work. Once you have your new toy you are seldom motivated to sell off the old stuff, and even if you do you are tempted to spend THAT money one MORE toys. So I drive a hard bargain with myself : Sell something to buy something (its amazing how much that the crave for that 'new computer smell" helps you to get through those hundreds of bargain sites to get your old stuff posted).

So with some $$$$ in the pocket it was time to look around. What would i really like, what could I really use. What do I really need. Well : I could do with a nice fast workstation (not another laptop) that would have plenty of diskspace, plenty of processor power and plenty of ram. A system I could sit behind all night without having to strain my back, wonder about the small keyboard and what have you. A system that would be ergonomically-correct, fast, versatile and pretty. What does that leave me with : Of course : An Imac !

Now I have thought long and hard about the Imac, I thought it was an overpriced desktop with a small screen (17" widescreen !!!) but with great looks. My argument always was : Why buy an Imac, Its just a mac mini with a different hard drive and a small screen (referring to the 17 inch version) If you want to go for the 20 or 24 inch versions its WAY to expensive. One is better of buying a Mac Mini and hooking up a 24 inch TFT display. Then you would still be way UNDER the price of the 24 inch Imac.

But is that really so ? Mac products are ALL overpriced (I never waver from this statement) But is the Imac an overpriced Mac mini with a 17 inch display ? Or is the Mac Mini an under-equipped overpriced version of the Imac ?  If you look at it that way the 17 inch Imac does have some nice extras to offer. The built in Isight, the 17 inch display (resolution 1440*900 equals that of the 19" tft i have hooked up to my Linux box) the Built in Isight,   the 160 gigabyte SATAdrive (7200 rpm as opposed to the 80 gig 5400 rpm version on the mini) It comes with a keyboard, a mouse ... and of course : Damn good looks. If I where to nag about the fact the screen is too darn small , the Imac has the option to connect a second screen ( An ability the Mac mini lacks!) so "Dual screen joy" is also something one can achieve.  It looks to me that, in spite of the slight price difference the Mac mini is loosing ground.

Conclusions  ? I think I am going to go for the 17 inch Imac. The 20 inch is a tad too expensive for me and the 24 inch is .. well... something one has dreams of that make you need to change the sheets in the morning. I'm pretty pleased with the 1.83 gigahertz core 2 duo version, the extra money you pay for the 2 gigahertz processor is better spent on Ram (there you feel the difference) The 512 megabytes of DDR Ram offered by Apple is an insult to its own operating system so I replace them with one 1 gigabyte stick of ram, leaving me the option to add another stick of 1 gig as a final upgrade.

Grand total brings me around 1100 euro's which is a very nice price for a complete computer. I am already looking into dual and triple booting this little machine that has the power (and the drivespace) to run the three main operating systems (Osx, Ubuntu and Xp) side by side. An it has the RAM to run them simultaneously. Remember : Fast processor, enough ram, enough drivespace and two displays makes for a fantastic virtualisation box where you run 2 operating systems side by side. 

So I will let you know how it goes when all the goods get here and have my "ultimate sliders machine". 

PS : Take the new POLL on the left side of the page and help me decide what machine to buy 

For those of you who want a FREE G3 IMAC : Click HERE .