Ubuntu Linux

For eons I’ve had a little linux desktop machine that’d degenerated into a headless server sitting around. I have these dreams of eventually doing more with it.

I wanted to move it. That was difficult networkingwise. But I got a Best Buy gift certificate for Christmas, and I decided to use it to buy a wireless PCI network card for the beast, so I could move it wherever I wanted (e.g. the living room).

I soon learned that getting the Linux pci wifi drivers for my card working on old-school Debian would be an exercise in pain. Ugly recompilations of this and that. Precise instructions on the web that don’t actually work and result in ugly C error messages during compilation.

I happened across this article at O’Reilly which described Ubuntu Linux “just working” with a wifi card. I decided to give it a try. It had been literally years since I’d installed Debian on that box; why not give a new distribution a try?

It didn’t go 100% smoothly but it did go remarkably smoothly. The wifi card did not work out of the box with native drivers, as I’d hoped, but it did work with the help of ndiswrapper, which turned out to be gloriously easy to use. (Strangely, also, it only works when I have my regular ethernet card in the box too. I tried taking it out and the wireless one stopped working. The regular ethernet card doesn’t have to be plugged into a network, or even configured in /etc/network/interfaces — it just needs to be physically present in the box. Whatever.)

I couldn’t get sound working right, but that might be because the box has two soundcards, both of which are crap (one built into the mobo and one installed), and it couldn’t decide which piece of crap to use. I don’t know. Linux sound hates me.

But everything else just worked, with no hassles. It was a whole new Linux experience. All that and it’s Debian under the hood, and if you want you can use the pleasant, easy to use packaging tool to install Debian software from the main Debian repository as well!

I would highly recommend Ubuntu Linux.

Blockin’ Out The Scenery, Breakin’ My Mind

Found out from Phil O at the party the other night that the Kava House on Kalamazoo south of 60th street has free wifi. This is really near my house, so I needed to check them out. A lot of my friends who live in Eastown love the Kava House in Eastown all to pieces.

My reactions are mixed. Two signs on the door seemed very unfriendly to me. “Restroom for customers only” and “Wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”.

This is a coffee house in a strip mall out in the pucks. Do they really have a problem with an excess of people walking by and trying to use their restroom? Has that really caused a problem in the past, such that they need to put it out there on a sign? Or are they just kind of jerks who resent the idea that they might possibly be duped into providing a service to the public without remuneration?

As for the “wireless for customers only (1 drink minimum)”, I can understand that they don’t want people plunking down and using their connection for hours on end without buying anything. I would never do that. But I’d like to imagine that they feel they could trust me to do that without the sign. (Also, isn’t the “1 drink minimum” redundant? How could you be a customer by buying less than 1 drink? Are they saying it wouldn’t count if I bought breath mints? Have they seriously encountered a problem with customers coming in and using their wireless but buying LESS than one drink?)

Oh, there’s also a handmade sign saying “Kava Cop says STOP: One Drink Minimum.” So not only can’t you use the wifi without a drink, you can’t even be there without a drink.

The signs out front give the impression that these people are obsessed by the fear that someone may get something from them for nothing — that their precious seating space and ambience and wifi may be abused by the unwashed, no-drink-buying masses. This comes across as massively hostile to me. I have not seen anything like it at any other wifi enabled coffee house in the area. It’s bizarre. I have a hard time believing, given the location, that it’s based on actual problems with deadbeats rather than just a general mean-spiritedness.

Apart from the signs it’s been good. Lots of available power-pluggage, pleasant atmosphere, reasonable connection, a guy who I assume was the manager was helpful, wanted to make sure I could find a plug, friendly staff. Everything’s good, but man, the signs really convey hostility to the public.

A copy of this review was posted at grwifi.net. If you’ve been there, drop in and post a comment yourself!

Framing & Gaming

I’m working on a roleplaying game, called Odyssey. Trying to get the rules together, get things clear, and I just realized a big old hole in what I’m doing — I don’t have any rules for “scene framing.”

I realized this cause of this post — the comments thereof — where Emily offhand mentions how important Scene Framing is. I’m like, huh. Haven’t thought about it.

I dink around on the forge a little, google search on “forge” and “scene framing” — and I find this glossary page with links to some wicked fine Forge posts about it — especially this post by Paul “My Life With Master” Czege.

And it’s starting to fall together.

Taking “He-Man” WAYYY Too Seriously

From ConceptArt.org, a series of sketches and paintings for a redesign of the He-Man characters.

I was too old when it came on to ever think of He-Man as anything but completely cheeseball. I still was young enough to watch it, but I wasn’t young enough to even begin to suspend disbelief.

Apparently some people who are now good artists were young enough to suspend disbelief, and grew up wanting to make He-Man grow up with them.

This is really cool stuff (some of it not safe for work) but it just seems so wrong to give the Brom treatment to that cheesy little kids’ cartoon. It reminds me of the “American McGee’s Strawberry Shortcake” comic that got the Penny Arcade guys in such trouble.

Via Uncle Bear

Earthquake

I was at a party, talking to Polytropos when he got the good news about his brother in law’s father.

I hadn’t heard about the earthquake yet. Holy cow. My first reaction when told it was 8.9 on the Richter scale was “isn’t that enough to launch a chunk of the Earth into the sky as a new moon?” Turns out there hasn’t in fact been an 8.9-scale quake for over 40 years. Not a joking matter. 23,000 dead at last count. Some inhabited islands still submerged from the 30 foot tsunamis. Puts one’s troubles, and one’s own nation’s troubles, into perspective a bit.