Place of Stuff

I discovered this via an LXer newsfeed on Linuxquestions.org. Most Linux users should know about the Wine project and about the Cedega project and even about CrossOver Office - the aim of these programs is to run Windows programs, games and office type programs easily on Linux. There are problems with each program - Wine can be difficult to get working well (often needing tweaks even to just install it), Cedega took Wine and turned it into a “pay for” program and gave nothing back to Wine and Crossover Office is another program you have to pay for, though they do give their programming back to the Wine project. If you just want to play games, until now, Cedega is the one you had to go for. And if you wanted to pretty much guarantee that you could play games and run office programs, you had to buy both Cedega and CrossOver office. And finally, if you have a lot of time on your hands and don’t want to pay money for a product, you could spend time with the original Wine.

That is, until now. PlayOnLinux is a Wine frontend created with Bash and Python. This means that it is runnable on any recent (or up to date) Linux distro. It provides pre-scripted installs for many Windows programs and Windows games. In fact, I installed LucasArts‘ Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast with it and it plays flawlessly and installs in the quickest time ever. I chose this game for two reasons: the first is that I know it installs with both vanilla Wine and with Cedega. The second reason is that it’s a lot of fun to play :)

From the Presentation page:
Continue reading ‘PlayOnLinux - Play Games On Linux’ »

Yet another small change to the site. When will the madness end? RT Cunningham and Corey Thompson have both mentioned recently that they have enabled subscriptions by email. This is because people’s RSS feed readers tend to get very clogged over time and because not everyone has one. So I installed the Subscribe2 plugin tonight.

If you look to the top of the page, you’ll see a new entry on the menu bar: Subscribe. Click the link and fill in your email address and you too can receive posts by mail.

The PC is becoming ever more ubiquitous - as well as games, you can receive radio channels, listen to various types of music, watch DVDs or other movie files, upload, download, share and do all sorts of other things. Television, though, has always seemed a little trickier - at the very least you need a TV card of some description.

We have a main TV in the house, but with 4 people and differing requirements, scheduling time to watch can be difficult. Especially when one half of the household only want to watch at particular times. Watching on the PC or laptop is, of course, possible. But because I don’t watch more than one or two hours per week, even the relatively low cost of TV tuners for the PC is more than I want to pay. The BBC iPlayer goes some way to resolving the problem, but maybe I want to watch the programme when it’s on rather than after it’s finished.

Zattoo solves that problem - for me. It’s a free to download program which uses peer to peer sharing to stream channels over the internet. Sign up, give far fewer details than most other services, download the program and install it and you’re good to go. It uses Adobe Flash to handle the viewing, but otherwise is pretty self contained. There are a number of channels available for it - in the UK this means the 5 terrestrial channels and a number of satellite/cable only channels, effectively all the Freeview ones.
Continue reading ‘Zattoo - Real TV On Your PC’ »

I have long been curious about how people find my site and what they do when they get here. There are a number of plugins you can install for WordPress, but there isn’t (as far as I know) one tool which shows everything. And now there is.

Woopra is an application which analyses your site traffic and can bring up a number of facts about who they are and what they do. Signing up is free - you sign up, submit your site(s) and await notification. At this time of writing, it can take around 7 days but I believe they are working on ways to speed this up. Once you have signed up, download the WordPress plugin, install the app (with a few extra steps for Ubuntu users!) and watch the graphs fill up.

Woopra is in beta at the moment, but I must say that it’s one of the most polished beta apps I have used. For example, on starting up you are presented with the dashboard (click for bigger):
Continue reading ‘Woopra - Website Analytics’ »

For all of my love of control and the other great stuff that comes with my usual distro, I also like to try out new things and see what’s going on elsewhere. To that end I decided to give Kubuntu a go. And I have been pleasantly surprised.

Firstly, the install itself. When you first boot up the build disk you are given several options, the one to use the disk as a live disk is still there, but you can choose to install directly from boot (as with other distros), I chose that and it went very quickly, as you would expect. I won’t go through the steps here as there were only a small number. Kubuntu installs a limited number of apps on first install, leaving you to use them or add to them as you wish.

Continue reading ‘Test Driving Kubuntu 8.04’ »

For all those of us running WordPress.org, just a heads up to say that a point released is available. 

Previous big number release was 2.5 and this is 2.5.1.

The Developer’s Blog has full details of the reasons for this upgrade, but in short:
Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.5.1’ »