Archive for the 'WebLinks' Category

zz85.is-a-geek.com

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on December 4, 2007
in Bloggin and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

In my last post, I mentioned that my email address needs to be updated (for those who emailed >2 years ago). This time zz85.is.dreaming.org couldn’t redirect to this blog and needs updating.

I tried to login dyndns to check my dynamic domains account and weirdly my account has been deleted. Anyway it seems that current dreaming.org network would be terminating its domain.

So I re-sign up and got http://zz85.is-a-geek.com as a url shortcut. Yes, for those who bookmarked this site, http://www.lab4games.net/zz85/blog/ still works. One last exam paper to go, taking another break now!

Lights Off, Laptop!

Published
by
Zz85
on August 20, 2007
in Technology and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

Based on our experiences use gadgets like handphones, digital cameras, DS etc, we probably guessed bulked of the batteries usage went into the LCD screen.

Personally I find little electricity used in turning the colours of the pixels, but much in powering the backlight. A digital watch I had exceeded its estimated battery life without its light used often. The DS Lite new brightness levels consumes the battery much faster than if you use the less bright options. When I use the DS for music listening, closing the lid usually turns off the LCD and allow much longer battery stamina. Digital cameras usually have an option for switching on and off the LCD screens, but what about laptops?

Let me go through the different options.

High-end models would have the LCD poweroff button: Hit “Fn+Battery Key”. If you don’t, you could dim it manually hitting the brightness buttons.

Why not close the laptop lid? Remember the reason why we just want just the lights of is for the computer to go doing what it needs to (play some music, transferring files using wifi, do some virus scan etc). Closing the lid but default usually means suspend, sleep or hibernate, so you need to change the power saving schemes if you like the lid shutting action.

Windows have this Blank screensaver which turns the screen black. Or you could download the freeware Power Dimmer which mimics iBooks screen-fading-energy-saving feature. Take note that these 2 doesn’t turn your screen off, only changing the screen black so the lights in them are still on. Anyway a tip for those who like to turn on their screensavers by demand, create a shortcut (on the desktop) to the screensaver file, double click it or assign a hot shortcut key to run them.

Next, in the windows energy saving section, you could specify screens to turn off after a period of time. Good, and I usually set it @ 2 minutes and power dimmer @ 1 minute. However, your media player may forbid the system entering power saving while you are listening to music.

Here’s more cool tools to the field. NirCmd is a command line based swiss knife for windows. Type nircmd.exe monitor off or create a shortcut for this command to turn off your screen at demand.

Need a easier software? There’s a software called MonOff but I’ve not tired it. However, my favorite software for controlling windows shutdowns called PowerOff also does the job for screens. Its a very small, no-installations-needed file, and after running it you task it to poweroff your screen/windows immediately or a specific time, or decide later at the icon-tray.

Further readings: 1
2

Lights off, sleep tight, keep dreaming, so don’t drain my battery, screen, eyesight and brain cycles too much.

Design My Bedroom with Simple 3D

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on July 16, 2007
in Photos, Technology and WebLinks
. 3 Comments

Ever wanted to re-design your bedroom on your computer?

IKEA Kitchen Planner is a free and easy software to plan your kitchen and furnishing. At Jordan’s Furniture you could use their online flash software to design your room layout with different furnitures.

There are perhaps 1001 commercial 3D products out there (a friend recently recommended SolidWorks), but for free, open source 3d software, a list has always been blender 3d, povray etc.

This time, I tried out Google’s free 3D software, SketchUp. The last time, I used 3DS max, so relatively SketchUp looks simple and lacking, and it took me some time to adjust using its interface, shortcuts, so on. It wouldn’t take long to find out that this software could do alot (like almost all 3d software, limited only by imagination), if only you knew how. Before you could unleash its power, most users would properly want to view its guides or online video tutorials to get started.

I always relate 3d modeling to molding or sculpturing, but SketchUp is unique with its powerful Pencil tool, which makes modeling 3d like drawing. It could switch between and many different views easily, and here are some renders I have done of my room today.

My Room

Plain Top View

Bedroom Plan with X-Ray Drawing View

Coloured Perspective

View At the Door

Computer Generated Sketches Style

Autocad Style

Monochrome

Textured view

In real life…

Messed Room Photo

Not so simple or neat :X

Anyway there’s a Slashdot.org discussion on 3D software for home planning, and as one user has pointed out, the best method perhaps is still pencil and paper.

Online Diary

Published
by
Zz85-nds
on July 12, 2007
in Bloggin and WebLinks
. 0 Comments

Weather: Cloudy

I stumbled across this chinese webpage (when searching some chinese terms) where user can write their diary online.

The webpage may not be well designed (visually), yet I found it very interesting because of the simple way of presenting its data/facts.

As a online diary, user selects the mood they feel for a particular post, a sad feeling? a happy feeling, a loving feeling so on. An icon shows the weather for the date- sunny, rainy, so on. The post made displayed on a background with letter lines, and writers could insert pictures or icons. As I peep around some of the posts, they are surprising short- the chinese language makes it possible to express alot, in detailed, in a few words.

I’m not a one who writes diaries or journals (even when our teachers wanted us too), but the site has gave me the feel and look of a diary. Although I suspect there would be plenty of better, nice and good webpages which provides dairy writing service, I’m not searching for them currently, but bloggers who blog entirely in the diary style might be interested to look for sites as such.

Ubuntu Tweaks (Part 2 - Repository and Packaging)

Published
by
Zz85
on March 8, 2007
in Interesting Stuff, Ubuntu, WebLinks and linux
. 3 Comments

Continued from Part 1 of my series on Ubuntu tweaking.

When I first planned to run Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft”, many reviews on the net showed that not everyone is happy, some whom might think its not edgy enough, some who had their systems broken because they tried to upgrade.

Remember one of my reason I installed Ubuntu? The nature of Ubuntu and its community makes it easy to use, customise and repair the system. In this post, I would show ways to play with your ubuntu system- using apt, guides on the net, and using some other packaging or unified installation software.

Ubuntu

Apts
Apt (Advanced Packaging Tool) was perhaps the reason why many chose Debian. The Ubuntu repositories could then be the very reason that others like me chose ubuntu. Apt-get, Aptitude are very useful and powerful commands to play with. However after trying Ubuntu Synaptic Package Manager for time, I love it for these reasons:

- It has a gui (Graphical User Interface) for those who wouldn’t even touch a shell.
- Its really easy to add, disable, delete sources
- Easy to find, mark and install many packages at one go
- Download packages simultaneously, with ability to resume, making downloads faster
- Notifies you of updates and easy to access via its tray icon.

Even now I use Synaptic a lot and recommend it, apt-get and aptitude are still as important and good to learn and use. Read about aptitude versus apt-get

Finding Ubuntu Repositories
Having nice repository sources is perhaps all you need for a long time. Using these packages, I find that it is even easier to search and install software compared to Windows.

1st, you can uncomment the less official but supported ubuntu sources from /etc/sources.list or preferably do so in Synaptic. Next try out source-o-matic a Ubuntu source.list generator which produces a source list based on selection of criteria you chose. Ubuntu geek has a source list for Edgy Eft which is worth taking a look. Lastly for sources, for the more adventurous, I would recommend Treviño source list which including many packages compiled by him.

Other Debian Packages
Automatix is an Automated GUI installation script which installs the common software people demands. Read here as their official site seems down.

When using lots of “super-cow powers” apts, dun forget they are basically Debian packages. Finding and downloading debian packages is a very simple way to install applications. See GetDeb - Click And Run - Software Portal

Other Packaging
One of Apt/Deb uses is that they are a solution to dependencies. However, it is not the only solution around. Many package management exists for other distros - portage (emerge) for Gentoo, packman for ArkLinux, rpm for Redhat… There are some which are distro independent.

Klik, its another innovative web-based click and install software manager. From its webpage, “Klik strives to be the easiest way to download and run software, without installation”. I love the way you install Klik, with at most 2 lines (in user mode without the dollar signs):


$ sudo apt-get install binutils libstdc++5 rpm gnome-about # for (k)Ubuntu
$ wget klik.atekon.de/client/install -O -|sh

Autopackage - Easy Linux Software Installations for both users and developers. “Autopackage doesn’t need to be downloaded or installed. When you install your first package, Autopackage will install itself automatically.” Check out their package listings

Zero Install system is a caching network filesystem, to make software installation completely automatic. This decentralised installation systems has been made to work with the Rox Desktop

Lastly, if you were to experiment building from sources, you would like to work with the command, esp. tar, cvs, svn, git. CVS (Concurrent Versioning System), SVN (Subversion), GIT(distributed revision control file system project) are also repositories system at a different level.

CheckInstall is a software which helps you keep track of installations done using make install, and creates distro based uninstallations like dpkg on debian.

Welcome to the addictive world of Linux software.