Qimo; a Linux OS for kids

Qimo is based on Ubuntu Linux and is designed especially to appeal to geeks of 3 years old and up.

Christ, when I was that age even the slide rule hadn’t been invented.

Great Bash tutorials from IBM

These are the first two parts of a longer series. Very thorough as you’d expect from IBM. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

Do your eyes ever fool you?

………….if you don’t think so, prepare to think again.

Look at the image (click on it to make it bigger). How many colours do you see in the larger swirling spirals? If you see one green and one light blue………..you’ve been fooled. These two are actually EXACTLY the same colour.

The trick seems to be that what appear to be continuous thin orange and pink spirals, which traverse the larger spirals, are not actually continuous. Going through the green and pink larger spirals they’re actually orange in colour. But, through hat appears to be a large blue spiral, the thin spiral is actually pink. I’m sure there’s a much more convincing scientific explanation, however.

This raises the age-old unanswerable question as to whether the colours that I see, or perceive, are exactly the same as what others see.

iotop shows disk activity

Well, I’ve used top and htop basically to see what using my CPU. Just found out about iotop which lists the processes using your HDD. This could well prove very useful. Surprised I’d never heard of this before. Must try and get out more.

Filter foreign language spam from Gmail

I wrote about this topic just a few weeks ago. But here’s a more thorough solution.

Don’t forget to remove the filters for languages that just may be in your wanted emails. I get a lot, if not most, of emails in Brazilian  Portuguese. However, I notice that no pt-BR is included in the list of recognizable languages although pt-PT is included. But on reflection in a short email, I believe it it would be close to impossible to distinguish between the Brazilian or Portuguese versions of the language. So, in my case I’ll take out lang:pt-PT.

Shutdown a remote Windows box from Linux terminal

I’m not sure how useful this is going to be for me as I only very rarely use Windows. There are others however, feeding from the same router, who are resolute Windows users. Maybe I can surprise them with this.

Set up an anonymous proxy server

This is promoted as a means to help Iranians get their tweets and whatever else out of the country. However, it’s also a very thorough guide to setting up the squid proxy server which might also be useful when democracy is available.

Just when I was getting excited about Opera Unite….

…along comes FilesOverMiles which does a lot of the same thing.

Actually, based on a very limited amount of testing, it may even do it somewhat better (acknowledging that both are in Beta right now) as I can  send mp3 files in FoM whereas all attempts at this in Opera Unite ended in abject failure.

I’m very likely to use this, at least for the moment.

Google Wave.

I’m surprised I haven’t yet watched this video. Putting it here so I can’t forget.

Clean up web pages before printing

Here‘s a very handy web app that lets you do just that very easily.