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Have you ever heard of free music?

Chances are you probably haven’t, I’m not talking pirated or hand me down music either, I’m talking about absolutely free music released under a creative commons license.

Now I can bet when you hear that this music is truly free and comes at no cost, legally, your probably thinking that it’s not really worth listening to, you’ll probably want to rip your headphones off when you hear it right?

Your wrong, while a bit of the music released under the creative commons license may not be up to par with what your used to listening to, there is still thousands of other songs that probably are!

If your even reading my blog I’m sure your a fan of open-source software or at least acknowledge there is power in freedom, the same way of thinking towards free open source software can be applied to free music of this kind.

With Jamendo you can download from a huge inventory of about 7163 albums that the artists themselves uploaded, you can sort music by it’s Popularity, Listens, Downloads and a few other ways, you can also search by using tags, all music can be streamed right to your media player via a .m3u playlist.

Since I found this website about 3 days ago I have already downloaded nearly 60 songs that I enjoy as much or more than my mainstream collection which actually did cost me money, so at least go check it out, if you throughly enjoy an artists music you can even donate to them, they actually get the money delivered into there hands! Read the rest of this entry »

Hello fellow earthlings, I’m sure everyone already knows about the Lunar Eclipse and that is will be occurring Today the 20th-very early AM 21st!

You can get some handy Lunar Eclipse Diagrams from NASA that will show you when the Lunar Eclipse will start and end.

Also here is some more info on Lunar Eclipses

Okay for those of you who may have missed it, the eclipse is gone, gone till December of 2010!

However you should be able to see pictures nearly everywhere in no time, in fact here is a link to a nice an big one!

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/images/2008/02/20/lunareclipse_2.jpg

I’ve been using this nifty script for some time now and it really has saved me a lot of time, whether I just need to run a file through the terminal to see the runtime messages, or compiling something Terminal here is a life saver.

Using Terminal commands to CD into your folder can take a lot of time depend on where your destination folder is located.

With Terminal Here all you need to do is right click inside of your file manager and click “open in terminal” and it will open a new terminal right inside of that folder, no need to CD!

Thats right folks, the new Inspiron 1525 to there growing list of Ubuntu Linux pre-installed computers.
As of right now they have only released it to customers in the UK, France, Spain, and Germany, but it should be available in the states later this month!
Apparently there computer sales with Linux installed has been growing enough that they are willing to add more systems to there list, hopefully this will continue!

Link

An Update: The Inspiron 1525 is now for sale in the US, the base model is starting off at $549 with these specs

• Intel^®  Pentium^®  Dual Core^TM  T2330 (1.60GHz/500Mhz FSB/1MB cache)
• Ubuntu Linux version 7.10 with DVD Playback
• 1GB¹ Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz
• Size: 120GB² SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)

Link here: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

Well if your tired of waiting to play around with a physics sandbox look no further!

Hot off the press is Phun beta 2.51, Phun is a 2D physics sandbox that is actually leaps and bounds ahead of crayon physics in the physics department, even though the current physics engine appears to be a fairly simple temp.
In Phun you have a GUI with tools to create all kinds of scenes that are really only limited to your imagination!

If you want to see more here is a video showing only a few possibility’s!

You can visit there website and download Phun for Linux or windows, a Mac port is said to be on it’s way (They hope the have one), but in case your a Mac user and can’t wait, you might try running the windows version under wine.

Download Phun

Well it’s been nearly two years since I first started dipping my toes into Linux, when I first started using Linux it was mainly just to see what else was out there, I had been hearing lots of great things about Linux but had never taken the time to try it out.

At the time I was more of an avid gamer than anything else so I was busy wasting most of my free time playing halo or some other video game. My first Linux install was Mandriva, probably not the best distribution to dive into for a beginner but unfortunately my hardware at the time refused to boot a live cd (Ubuntu), and I didn’t know there was a text based installer.

After about a year of dual booting between windows and Mandriva Linux, using Linux for work which was mainly word processing and graphics manipulation, I built a new computer!

Fortunately this one booted the ubuntu 6.06 live CD without a hitch, within 30 minutes I was rebooting my computer into the new Ubuntu installation!

I felt like I had won the lottery, there was sooo much free software in the package manager! with Mandriva I was used to having to download individual dependencies and looking all over the web for an RPM, Ubuntu cut out all that work, I could install a piece of software in as little as a couple of clicks.

over the next couple months I tried out the KDE Kubuntu desktop but ultimately got hooked on the simplicity and practicality of Gnome and have been using it since than.

Another thing I was overjoyed about was the fact I didn’t need to edit runtime configs and all that stuff just to install the video drivers, after installing the drivers in nearly the same manor as a piece of software I decided to try and install Beryl, something which wasn’t possible on my old computer with Mandriva, after reading a Guide another Ubuntu user had written I was wobbling my windows and spinning my desktop cube to my hearts content, this was the turning point of my dual boot situation, I was becoming more and more fond of my new Ubuntu desktop, I actually wanted to boot Linux over windows.

Shortly after installing Ubuntu 6.06, Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty) was released and I completed my first distro upgrade, I couldn’t believe how easy it was to upgrade an entire OS with just a click!

After fiesty was released I upgraded Beryl to Compiz Fusion which made my desktop even more polished than it was before, at this point it was getting to be where I would only boot windows on the weekends to get on and play a video game with my clan.

After the release of ET:QW for Linux I haven’t needed to boot windows nearly at all to get a little gaming in. lately I’ve been thinking about ditching my windows installation all together, because I run Linux and windows on individual hard drives I have a hard drive that doesn’t get used hardly at all anymore, I’ve been thinking about formatting that and using it for storage/backups, I’ll have to run a poll and see what my readers think I should do

Anyhow to sum it all up, after years of using windows since 3.1, Linux has become my OS of choice.

I no longer have any dependency on windows and like it that way, software is nearly always free and everyone in the Linux community is so friendly and willing to help out with any problems I may run into (Nearly all are self inflicted) I feel right at home!

I encourage you, if you don’t use Linux go give it a try, I’m sure you will come to love it as I have.

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As many know Amazon has a new music downloads service, the downloads are all DRM free (Woohoo!) you can download individual songs without the downloader, but that would take more time and cost more money.

They have not yet released the downloader as of yet, but it is in the closed beta stage, if your lucky (Like me) you might be able to get you hands on the beta by emailing them @ amd-linux AT amazon.com .

They have asked me not to distribute my copy of the downloader so please don’t ask me for it.

Now for the actual review, hold on to your hat!

The interface consists of only a few controls, so it’s not even close to being difficult to use.

To enable it in your browser you will need to click “help/enable in browser”

To download an album or individual song simply log into your amazon account and click Buy Mp3 or album.

After you complete the payment process it will you will be able to download the .amz file, this is just a file that tells the downloader to download the song(’s)/album you purchased.

When your download widow pops up be sure to select open with Amazon music downloader.

My overall opinion of the software is that it must be near completion, I haven’t found any bugs of any kind so prepare for the release any time now!

And here is a screenshot of the downloader

The song you see that is downloaded is a free song they give you upon installation, it doesn’t reflect upon my music tastes or interest’s.

I was actually trying the other day to find out about installing Firefox beta 2 along side my current Firefox installation which is version 2.0.0.11, well just this morning I had my little update manager pop up and tell me there was updates.

Inside the list of updates I was shocked to see an update for Firefox 3, in the description it was an update from alpha 8 to beta 3, as far as I knew beta 3 had not been released.

However when I opened Firefox “beta 3″ it really was a third beta… err pre beta?

Apon opening FF3 I found that even the release notes at this link aren’t even there, in fact all I get when trying to load it is a 404, it’s been a bit of a hassle trying to find out some information on this update, it appears to be in the Gutsy backports.

After a quick look at the package name Via synaptic I found that it is a cvs version.

I haven’t begun to test it out yet, so hopefully this version will be better than the old alpha version. Read the rest of this entry »

Jamie Hyneman wrote a nice article for the magazine Popular Mechanics, the article is about “Tech Headaches and how to fix them” (”MythBusters: 7 Tech Headaches—and How to Fix Them”)

Within the article I was pleasantly surprised to see that he actually recommends a switch to a Linux based OS!

He even goes in to a bit of detail on why to switch!

It really gives me a new appreciation of the Mythbusters show after reading it, you can read the article Here.

Labels in Gmail are very handy when it comes to organization, but what happens when you have lots of labels, many of which are basically a sub category (i.e.. My-Website/Web-hosting/etc…)?Don’t you think it would come in handy to be able to organize them accordingly?

With the help of GreaseMonkey you can, It’s called Folders4Gmail.

To use Folders4Gmail all you’ll need to do is rename your labels like this: Say you want a folder named “Family” simply make sub-folders for it named “Family/folder” there will be a folder inside of the Family folder named “folder”.