Just saw this lovely machine on TV. It is a Wireless enabled rabbit with rather good speech.

You can send messages to the rabbit or ask it questions. It will connect to different services. It also has the ability to interact through a couple of lamps and by moving its ears.

Wonderful!

Link.

Tags: Fun, geek toy, rabbit, toy, Wireless

David Pogue of NY Times visited a tech support center. They gave him a CD with funny customer calls.

On one call, the caller seemed to be taking an inordinately long time to complete each instruction she was given.

Agent: Ma’am, I can’t help noticing that every time I give you an instruction, it takes a really long time before you get back to me. Is your computer that slow?

Caller: Oh, no, it’s just the stupid, stupid design of this computer. Every time I want to click something, I have to unplug the keyboard to plug in the mouse. And then every time I want to use the keyboard again, I have to unplug the mouse. Because there’s only one jack.

Agent: Ma’am, you do realize that there’s a jack on the keyboard itself? You’re supposed to plug the mouse into the keyboard, and the keyboard into the computer.

Caller: Are YOU KIDDING ME!? Oh, wait a minute—yes, I see it now! Oh, holy cow. That’s going to be so much easier!

Agent: Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using your computer that way?

Caller: Six weeks!

Link (via Boing Boing)

Tags: call, center, computer, David Pogue, Fun, support, tech support center

Boing Boing presents a couple of nice optical color illusions that you just should see:

Note that square A and square B have the same color.

Here’s a similar illusion with colored squares. The “blue” tiles on the top face of the left cube are the same color as the “yellow” tiles in the top of the right cube.

Don’t take my word for it. Use an image editing program with a eyedropper to see for yourself. I used Photoshop’s eyedropper tool to take 5×5 samples and found that both the “yellow” and the “blue” tiles are C:50 M:40 Y:40 K:5.

The color tile illusion is one of many excellent illusions created by R. Beau Lotto.

Link.

Tags: Fun, illusions, optical

Great video. Someone singing a song reverse. Try to get the name of the song before the middle of the video.

Tags: Fun, movie, music

Here is a fine bloke who did what I have been dreaming of ever since I got my new Dell D830: he upgraded his Windows Vista installation to Windows XP.

Although my own Vista installation runs a lot better than his, I do see a lot of familiar problems he seems to have fixed with his upgrade.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec’s pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.
Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you’re surfing, a nice touch.

Link.

Tags: Fun, upgrade, vista, windows, xp

Today on Something Awful’s Photoshop Phriday contest: improbably pop-up books. Here is a nice example from the site. Nice movie as well…

Link (via boingboing)

Tags: contest, Fun, movie, photoshop

What can I say? She will explain herself what is wrong with her. Whatever it is, she does it very professionally. it’s like she’s telling everybody ‘I know how to puke!’

Tags: Fun, movie

OKFuture has a link to a very, very funny English translation of a Belgian kids show:

This is a hilariously naughty English translation of a song on a Dutch kids show. Whoever did this is brilliant, even though some of the lines in this song stand out even without the translation. What do you want me to do with the duck?

The title of the song probably is ‘Er zit een gat in het dak’ which translates to ‘There is a hole in the roof’. The translation, however, manages to give it a whole different twist.
You can find the artice here.

Edit 19/05/2008:

The original link is down, but thank god there is youtube:

Tags: broken, Fun, movie

This toy gun has a whistle on it. Just put it in your mouth and pull the trigger:

Tags: Fun, movie

Since information on Google seems to be a bit hard to get and I wanted a central point for all the information, here it is.

Please note:
This information modifies files on your computer. After modification your computer may not work anymore which may result in loss of data. If this, or worse, happens don’t complain, you have been warned.

(K)ubuntu version
The question is what to use for this installation. My personal choice is to use Kubuntu. So everything here has only been tested with that particular distribution. Since nothing I have done has anything to do with either KDE or GNOME, everything should apply to all variations of ubuntu.

The second question was, what version should I use. Gutsy has the advantage that it supports OpenGL 3D effect (screensavers, beryl and Google Dekstop) out of the box. Feisty will freeze if you run those applications. But Gutsy still is very unstable and has a lot of issues. So I went with Feisty and decided to do some backports of the important packages.

Last but not least I asked myself the question whether it should be a 64 bit or a 32 bit installation. Since I have a 64 bit machine it didn’t make sense to me to go with a 32 bit installation. If you have a 32 bit installation, please refer to Ross Burton’s blog for ready compiled packages. This howto will describe how to build the 64 bit packages. It should work for 32 bit as well, but since you can just download them I don’t think you would like to do that.

Now without further delay, here comes the howto install Feisty 64 bit on a Dell Latitude D830 with Intel GPU and all the 3D graphics you could ever dream of.

Installing (K)ubuntu
To install (K)ubuntu on the DELL Latitude D830 forget about all fancy graphical interfaces. You will have to use the text installation provided by the alternate CD, so download that one. I went for the AMD64 distribution, but you might as well go for the 32 bit one, since that will save you some compatibility problems. Then again, why buy a 64 bit machine if you are not going to use it…

Getting X to work
After the installation is done and you reboot the machine you will be prompted by a nice command prompt. Since the cdrom will not function correctly there are a few steps you will have to execute:
Open the file /etc/apt/sources.list and remark the first line, listing your Feisty CD as an installation source. Then install all updates for feisty:
$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude dist-upgrade

and install the xserver-xorg-video-intel package by typing
$ sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-intel

Then open your xorg.conf and change the device from vesa to intel. After this change save the file and restart kdm. Things should be better. If restarting kdm doesn’t work, try rebooting the pc.

X is a little bit blurry
No it is not you, you do not need any glasses. After starting X everything will look a bit blurred. We will fix that issue later when we update the intel driver. So for now, you just have to live with it.

Getting the latest intel drivers
The default intel GPU drivers in feisty will freeze your pc as soon as OpenGL is running (Beryl, Google Earth) so these need to be updated. This is probably the hardest part of the installation since it involves updating parts of your x-server installation. I did warn you about blowing up your laptop, didn’t I?

You can achieve this in two ways. The first way would be to install gutsy packages on feisty. This can be achieved by using a debian process called pinning, which involves making changes to your apt.conf. More information can be found here. This is a very easy and very quick process, but it will also upgrade your libc6.

Since I think one should only upgrade the packages really needed, I decided to compile the packages needed for my libc6. This also makes sure that other packages depending on that library will not run into conflicts.

For the update I followed the following procedure:

Open your /etc/apt/sources.list and append the following line (make sure you use your own mirror location):
deb-src http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main restricted

Save the file and execute:
$ sudo aptitude update

Make a root directory for your sources:
$ mkdir ~/xorg

Install the dependencies needed to build everything:
$ sudo aptitude install fakeroot dpkg-dev
$ sudo apt-get build-dep mesa
$ sudo apt-get build-dep libdrm2

Install the libxdamage packages
$ mkdir ~/xorg/libxdamage
$ cd ~/xorg/libxdamage
$ apt-get source libxdamage
$ cd libxdamage-1.1.1
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i libxdamage1_1.1.1-3_amd64.deb libxdamage-dev_1.1.1-3_amd64.deb

Install the mesa packages
$ mkdir ~/xorg/mesa
$ cd ~/xorg/mesa
$ apt-get source mesa
$ cd mesa-7.0.0/
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i mesa-swx11-source_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb mesa-common-dev_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb libgl1-mesa-dev_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_all.deb libgl1-mesa-dri_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libgl1-mesa-glx_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb libglu1-mesa_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb mesa-utils_7.0.0-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb

Install the libdrm2 packages
$ mkdir ~/xorg/libdrm2
$ cd ~/xorg/libdrm2
$ apt-get source libdrm2
$ cd libdrm-2.3.0/
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i libdrm-dev_2.3.0-4_amd64.deb libdrm2_2.3.0-4_amd64.deb

Install the x11proto-print-dev packages
$ mkdir ~/xorg/x11proto-print-dev
$ cd ~/xorg/x11proto-print-dev
$ apt-get source x11proto-print-dev
$ cd x11proto-print-1.0.3.xsf1/
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i x11proto-print-dev_1.0.3.xsf1-1_all.deb

install the xorg-server packages
$ sudo apt-get build-dep xorg-server
$ mkdir ~/xorg/xorg-server
$ cd ~/xorg/xorg-server
$ apt-get source xorg-server
$ cd xorg-server-1.3.0.0.dfsg/
$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i xnest_1.3.0.0.dfsg-6ubuntu3_amd64.deb xprint_1.3.0.0.dfsg-6ubuntu3_amd64.deb xprint-common_1.3.0.0.dfsg-6ubuntu3_all.deb xserver-xorg-core_1.3.0.0.dfsg-6ubuntu3_amd64.deb xserver-xorg-dev_1.3.0.0.dfsg-6ubuntu3_amd64.deb

Install the xorg-server-video-intel packages
$ sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-video-intel
$ mkdir ~/xorg/xserver-xorg-video-intel
$ cd ~/xorg/xserver-xorg-video-intel
$ apt-get source xserver-xorg-video-intel
$ cd xserver-xorg-video-intel-2.1.0/

The following is no longer needed with the 2.1.0 driver
This is where we patch the driver to be less blurry. If you like the blurry effect, please skip this part.
$ vim src/i830_lvds.c

Find the following line (line number 230):
pfit_control = (PFIT_ENABLE |
VERT_AUTO_SCALE | HORIZ_AUTO_SCALE |
VERT_INTERP_BILINEAR | HORIZ_INTERP_BILINEAR);

And replace it with the following:
pfit_control = 0;

Save the file (:x). And continue the installation.

$ dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -b
$ cd ..
$ sudo dpkg -i xserver-xorg-video-intel_2.1.0-1ubuntu2_amd64.deb

Edit your /etc/apt/source.list again and remove (remark) the gutsy line we added above.

Now reboot and see if X is still running… if not you are in deep trouble.

Installing Beryl
Installing beryl is easy. Just type:

$ sudo aptidute install beryl beryl-manager

Then start it by typing beryl-manager in a konsole

Using my repository
I just setup a repository with the above packages as debs. Please note that I am on a limited download rate, so if you want to install them on a 1000 machines, please setup your own mirror. Please note all packages are amd64!

To use the repository, you should add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ubuntu.jordswart.org feisty backports

You will also need to add my key to your list of trusted keys:

wget http://ubuntu.jordswart.org/falcon.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

Tags: art, DRM, feisty, Fun, google, info, ubuntu, upgrade, xp