tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70663469655042269752011-11-29T11:55:36.461-08:00A blog where I review Linux OSes, publish how-tos, or publish/display artwork under the Creative Commons BY license.Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.comBlogger381100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-80587501728448079872011-02-03T10:43:00.001-08:002011-02-03T10:55:30.155-08:00

Well, happy new year to everyone! My year's been off to a hectic start with university, and my upcoming exams, so blogging has fallen a bit to the wayside. However, I'll be starting my semester break in a couple of weeks, and plan to work on a few little projects of mine during my time off. I plan to work on a few c++ programs from my (admittedly long) list of ideas, while getting comfortable

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-10950641368520340322010-10-11T03:07:00.000-07:002010-10-11T03:25:09.139-07:00

As many of you know (or maybe you don't), I write for the Full Circle Magazine. FCM is a free community e-magazine for Ubuntu and its' derivatives. I started writing for them in January, 2009 (21 issues ago!), filling in for Command & Conquer original author, Robert Clipsham. He felt he could no longer continue it for personal reasons and I sent him an email (as he suggested anyone interested

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-10343319223958482522010-09-22T01:10:00.000-07:002010-09-22T01:30:40.045-07:00

A friend of mine asked me to share this video, and so here I am!It's a video for the Samsung Galaxy Tab, titled "For You". Let me know what you guys think.Description (English):2 crew members.2 actors. 2 days. 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab.'For You' can probably be considered one of those spontaneous projects. The new Samsung Galaxy Tab is supposed to transform your life on the go - and that's what

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-12832902090213414862010-07-24T07:14:00.000-07:002010-07-24T07:20:18.091-07:00

Well, now that there's the ability to customize templates, I've made the entire blog a little wider (lets you guys read my code snippets fully). Also, I've gone with a layout and colour/background combo that appeals to me. If you guys have any complaints about any elements of the blog, leave me a comment and I'll take it into consideration (I can't promise every complaint will be acted upon,

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-11919781800122460222010-05-21T08:11:00.000-07:002010-10-15T01:34:02.972-07:00

Well, I've been playing guitar a lot lately, and I just got a new steel-string, so I thought I'd share them with anyone who's interested.Above is my newest steel-string acoustic electric guitar. It's a special edition DynaSun Burst 4 channel equalizer. Sounds great, is extremely light (has a plastic back instead of a wooden back), and is louder than I expected with the off-set sound holes.

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-8176204329784847272010-05-16T05:44:00.000-07:002010-05-16T05:58:11.231-07:00

Lately I've been moving my programming focus from Python to C++, simply because I wanted to experience a compiled language, and compare it with the "slower" scripting languages I often use (perl, bash, python, etc.). Slower insofar as they require libraries to be loaded at runtime. My first step was to create a recursive directory traversal function, since I planned on re-writing a "music

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-19602813690597578542009-12-21T11:26:00.000-08:002010-05-16T05:44:16.108-07:00

Well, the last couple of days have been spent setting up a virtual machine running Windows XP for my syncing needs (I usually use my PC for syncing my iPod, since it runs Windows 7, but when on the road, I will only have my netbook, and require some way to sync it). Therefore I always had the Windows XP partition on my netbook, however, I've not booted it since September, and before that I

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-21368512465097228002009-12-17T07:39:00.000-08:002009-12-17T07:56:45.620-08:00

Recently I purchased an xbox360 for games + videos (HD playback). After setting up my HDMI to DVI cable to my monitor and the standard TV cable to my speakers, I started trying to figure out how to stream my media (matroska backups of most of my DVDs) to my xbox, I stumbled upon TVersity, which is a free (well, there is a free version) Media streaming server. In order to set it up, I had to do

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-59260032902034801272009-12-08T06:47:00.000-08:002010-07-24T07:26:49.697-07:00

*Update* Google Wave was released to the public, thereby making this thread obsolete.I got another bunch of invites to send out. In total I have 17 invites to give out. Same deal as the last time. First come, first serve, leave your email address in a comment with an "invite please" (or something like that), and I'll add you. Invites can take some time to be sent out, but it seems to be going

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-39590505587867868972009-12-04T10:06:00.000-08:002009-12-04T13:41:06.977-08:00

Well, Apple has managed to take senselessness to a new level. I found out today (after deciding I wanted to write a lockscreen application to display a to do list on my iPod touch instead of paying for an application that does something similar) that Apple offers an SDK for Mac OS X only! This raises the question: Why offer iPod/iPhone support for Windows, if you don't plan on letting people

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-74349584942366387422009-11-25T05:02:00.000-08:002009-11-27T01:55:09.846-08:00

Well, end of last week I finally got an invite for Google Wave from one of the guys I asked for one from. Actually, I got 2 invites (got the second one a few hours later from someone else), but passed that invite link on to a friend of mine who was interested. However, I have now gotten 8 invites from Google Wave in order to invite new people. I've already used 3 of them for friends of mine

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-73255734410730398512009-10-27T02:26:00.000-07:002009-11-04T01:53:00.480-08:00

So, it's been roughly a week since I updated my gnome apps to 2.28 off the archlinux repositories. First impression: GDM seems a lot smoother and more "modern" than it used to, however...configuring it these days can be a real pain. You've got to open the gnome-appearance-manager as the gdm user usinggksudo -u gdm dbus-launch gnome-appearance-propertiesWhich is fine, I guess, except that it

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-10259359182099652392009-09-13T12:01:00.000-07:002009-09-13T14:43:13.772-07:00

Well, time for another update. I thought I'd write up my initial impressions on kernel 2.6.31-1 (from the Archlinux testing repository as of the 11/09/09). I have to say, there are a few things that struck me right off the bat.Good Things:- Intel driver performance increased noticeably (smoother, yet cooler), and glxgears (yes, I know it's not a benchmark, but I used it as a comparison check

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-66159706684296775212009-09-01T16:27:00.000-07:002009-09-01T16:33:25.474-07:00

Okay, so I just uploaded all my scripts that I wrote for my N110 netbook (things that I use for audio, wireless toggling, brightness, etc.) to my github. Link: http://github.com/lswest/scripts/tree/5ea76c78e581a978ea0712ccf1c8a9c134c1a40b/Bash/N110%20ScriptsI will add to it if I write any more scripts, but for the time being that does pretty much all I need (save for a basic few tweaks to other

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-18875429702874110892009-08-29T11:33:00.000-07:002009-08-29T11:40:32.387-07:00

Hello,I know I've been doing a terrible job of regular updates, but I was living with dial-up until about a week or a week and a half ago, most of that time was then spent updating all the stuff that needed to be updated. Now I'm spending my days trying to fix up my laptop a little. I've written scripts to manage brightness, volume, wifi (on/off), bluetooth, etc. on my Samsung N110 since it's

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-71186042116240866222009-06-09T02:50:00.000-07:002009-06-09T03:03:50.084-07:00

Well, I know I missed my usual update day (Sunday), but I was a little busy and so the update is a couple of days late. Better late than never, right?The interesting stuff:- My netbook arrived!! The Ubuntu liveUSB image worked perfectly (wireless, etc. was all fine) and I installed it, yet I haven't been using Linux much on this thing, since I haven't had the time to test the battery life in

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-75147836090205139092009-05-24T03:46:00.000-07:002009-05-24T03:59:04.114-07:00

Well, it's my bi-weekly update again, and I haven't really done much that's worth mentioning (besides finishing my exam and then relaxing), so I will quickly outline what I'm looking forward to, and what I plan on doing (blog-wise) in the near future.Basically, I graduate (officially) from high school in a weeks time. After I graduate I will be purchasing a Samsung NC10 netbook to replace my

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-38058661949455100342009-05-10T03:37:00.000-07:002009-05-10T03:39:31.924-07:00

Well, it's my bi-weekly update! Not much to write about, since I'm in the process of doing exams, but they will be over in 2 weeks. I was able to get my article done for FCM, and I decided to cover Bash Functions and History, because I felt it's something useful and has quite a few time-saving uses, so if you're interested, don't miss the next issue of FCM #25 (should come out on May 29th). I

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-86829053971722807022009-04-26T01:33:00.000-07:002009-04-27T01:33:15.780-07:00

Well, I'm now on study leave for a week before my exams start. By the end of May I'll have graduated high school. So if the next update is a little delayed (day or two maybe) you guys know why.These days I've been bothered by my temperamental laptop again. The charger is starting to die (it's the THIRD charger for this HP DV6545eg laptop in the last year), and I'm tired of replacing it, so

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-89202915082986755912009-04-12T01:50:00.001-07:002009-04-17T05:27:33.665-07:00

Well, as I mentioned in the last post I made, I plan on updating this blog every other Sunday (besides when I'm on vacation). This is the first of that series of updates (on time too!). I've been using Python a lot for small scripts lately, because a) it's good practice, and b) it's efficient. Below are a few scripts I wrote and an explanation of what they do:Sorry, but the whitespaces seem to

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-81506025347161062002009-04-04T05:59:00.000-07:002009-04-12T02:05:53.153-07:00

Sorry about the slow updates on my blog here, I've been kinda swamped with school work, writing articles for Full Circle, and such that I haven't been able to think of things to write when I did have time (or I just simply didn't have time). I am now, however, setting aside every other Sunday of the month (second and last sunday of each month) to updating this blog (short of when I have exams,

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-19549949353943134382009-02-04T10:43:00.000-08:002009-02-04T10:58:01.875-08:00

I have finally decided my laptop is configured to my liking.Specs:HP DV6545EG2GB of DDR2 RAM1.8GHz AMD Turion 64x2160GB hdd (10GB - ArchLinux (ext4), 10GB - ext4 /home for Arch, 10GB - Ubuntu, 17GB - /home for Ubuntu, the rest to Vista)Nvidia 7150m chipsetBasically, I installed Arch because I was tired of semi-laggy performance for graphics and lots of extra services running in Ubuntu. I decided

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-82524561561128878062009-02-03T07:56:00.000-08:002009-02-07T11:16:19.509-08:00

Well, on Sunday I was sitting at home and this urge came over me to take something apart (it's been a while since that happened, used to be too busy to do so), and all I really had on-hand that I hadn't yet taken apart and re-assembled was my old, broken iPod Mini (broken in the sense that the battery holds roughly 5 seconds of charge). First I had to heat the glue at the top and bottom with a

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-54729399330649853632009-01-01T07:45:00.000-08:002009-01-02T02:43:32.241-08:00

Section 1 - Preparatory Steps:Check to see if your Macbook is a Santa Rosa 4.1:In Mac OS X go to the Mac Menu (apple logo) and choose "About this Macbook" and it will show the "Model Identifier" in the "More Info..." window.Preparing the Hard Drive:Start the Boot Camp assistant (under Applications-->Boot Camp Assistant).If it says the system is not up to date do the following:Run system update

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-34457306064872710762008-11-26T12:26:00.000-08:002008-11-26T12:39:46.057-08:00

Introduction to *nix Commandsls [folder] - lists the content of current folder unless another folder is passed as an argumentcd [folder] - changes directory to supplied folder. Other arguments can be "~" (home folder of user running command) and ".." (move up one directory), both these must be entered without the quotes.man [command] - will display the manual page for any command supplied that

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-45593792498351569812008-11-25T01:40:00.000-08:002008-11-25T01:44:49.077-08:00

Hey to anyone who's still reading this blog,I haven't been posting much lately because I've been busy with school and personal issues, but I have decided to start a series on terminal commands, useful hints, advanced terminal uses, etc. Anyone is free to comment on this post and offer ideas of terminal uses they think should be covered, or any thing they would like to learn/want to see if it is

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-22166569533852836772008-08-31T10:31:00.001-07:002008-08-31T11:05:37.011-07:00

Well, I was slightly busy over the summer, customizing an openbox and other such things. In the process I designed 3 more wallpapers (yes, I know I only uploaded two, one of them I intend to keep for myself).Lone Warrior:Wise Dragon:P.S. I know the titles suck, I can't help it :P and as always, these are published under the creative commons BY license

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-38301307106465842412008-08-17T06:51:00.000-07:002008-08-17T09:52:57.743-07:00

Bought myself an Asus X223W 22" Monitor the other day, and it's great! Clean, crisp picture, DVI connection, and a 2500:1 contrast rate (not the highest, but it's great for what I use it for).Here are some pics (of the monitor and of the PC setup):I apologize for the bad quality pic in the dark, but it seems turning off the flash on my camera creates a delay between pressing the button and the

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-17690277610925712352008-08-03T10:27:00.000-07:002008-08-03T10:29:04.712-07:00

I realize I haven't posted anything new for a while on here. The reason is that I've been on vacation (and still am) in Canada, where the fastest 'net speed I have regular access to is 28,8K, in other words, too slow for intense usage (especially because it's pretty expensive too). However, I have been working on some videos which I'll probably upload to youtube and link to in a blog post for

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-76205999882786728372008-06-27T10:38:00.000-07:002009-01-02T02:47:45.312-08:00

Okay, well today the case for the PC (finally) arrived. Shortly after I had a lunch it was built (~1 hour spent on building it), and an hour or two after that XP was installed and fully updated on a 391GB partition (the rest is for Linux when I install it tomorrow). Everything works great, the only slight issue I had was that the PSU had a loose cable that slipped down when the PSU (which had

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-54880218929490403742008-06-19T10:25:00.000-07:002008-06-19T10:59:57.253-07:00

Okay, well I just ordered my new powerhouse PC, and I'll be building it together myself, and probably dual-booting Arch and XP (since I do intend to play some games on it :P). Parts:Case: ATX RaidMax Ninja 918 (no PSU) in blackCPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz 1333MHz FSB S775 4MB 65nmRAM: 2x1024MB OCZ DDR2 800MHz CL4 EL Rev 2.0 platinum XTCGraphics Card: 512MB Gigabyte Geforce 8600 PCIe DDR2 128bit

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-32925110380987864202008-06-15T03:52:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:37:20.640-08:00

Well, I had my first few exams on Friday, and so I had a bit more time to relax on the weekend. I spent that time, yup, you guessed it, playing with my ArchLinux install. I decided E17** just wasn't right for me, and went back to good ol' GNOME, and spent the next few hours changing icon themes, GTK themes, small tweaks, etc. etc. This morning I wrote a terminal script (in bash) to print out

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-78154265470196531232008-06-07T07:57:00.000-07:002009-01-02T02:46:00.616-08:00

An intro to Arch Linux:"Arch Linux defines simplicity as a lightweight base structure without unnecessary additions, modifications, or complications, that allows an individual user to shape the system according to their own needs. In short; an elegant, minimalist approach." (taken from their wiki). Essentially it installs a CLI (Command-Line Interface) and offers little pre-installed apart from

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-66520965057796044362008-06-01T10:45:00.000-07:002008-12-13T04:37:22.756-08:00

Well, I'm a GIMP fan, and I made quite a few wallpapers for myself using GIMP, so I'll post them here for anyone who's interested.These are all under the Creative Commons BY license.War of the Depths: More Blue (imaginative, isn't it?):Swirling of Hope:Ebb and Flow of Life:Simplistic Design (tutorial result):Ghosts in the Machine:Turbulence of the Soul:War of the Depths - More Red:Unspoken Mind:

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-37048452762832527962008-06-01T10:07:00.000-07:002008-06-01T10:11:07.519-07:00

I've noticed a lot of people asking about restoring Vista/XP bootloaders, and so I decided to write a how-to for this. Also, I will include a quick how-to on restoring GRUB as well.For Vista:Boot to your recovery cd/partition (if you don't have one, or lost yours, you can get a recovery CD from here note: the CD is ONLY recovery options, so no cheap way of getting Vista "This download is

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-44200523827492606592008-06-01T09:33:00.000-07:002009-03-22T02:14:30.887-07:00

This is a how-to I've come up with on installing a broadcom 4311 card rev 2 using the bcmwl5 drivers, ndiswrapper and a bootscript that enables it (as Hardy attempts to load the firmware from fwcutter first).sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 ndiswrapper-commondownload these drivers, bcmwl5 drivers, extract them to a folder then do this:cd /path/to/driverssudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-67771442850655811262008-06-01T09:29:00.000-07:002008-06-01T09:30:35.958-07:00

I came up with this solution of easily connecting to networks, and dispensed with a need for any network manager (well, for my home and school networks, otherwise I can just use the terminal to connect to new networks)what I did:opened .bashrc with sudo nano ~/.bashrcthen at the end of the page I added the line:alias [name of school]="sudo iwconfig essid [essid] key [key] && sudo dhclient wlan0"

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7066346965504226975.post-50700536074053581672008-06-01T09:26:00.001-07:002008-12-13T04:37:23.064-08:00

Well, I'm a Linux fanatic and this is my blog. I'll be posting useful how-tos, interesting infos, stories, and reviews on Linux systems that I use/test. Hopefully I'll update it regularly, but I've got exams coming up, and I may not be able to.A bit about me:I'm 17 years old, born March 25th, 1991.I live in Germany and am Canadian/German.I'm in a relationship with a great girl, and so, that may

Lswesthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11997705002821132887noreply@blogger.com0