[Thu May 31 12:34:27 CDT 2012]

How cool is this? Check it out. It's the US $70 Minority Report device that's more accurate than Kinect:

[Thu May 31 12:21:13 CDT 2012]

ArsTechnica publishes an article signed by Jon Brodkin explaining how he managed to "resurrect" an old Dell Latitude D620 thanks to Ubuntu. I also did something similar with an old (heck, even older than the one portrayed in the article!) Dell Latitude D610, which my older son is still running on a daily basis. I have to agree with Brodkin that these are very sturdy laptops that seem to go on forever and ever, and it's a pity to see that even moderately old versions of Windows won't run on them anymore (well, not much of a disappointment if, like me, you haven't run Windows in over a decade). The thing is that, taking into account what the current economic and ecological situations are like, reusing old hardware is not such a bad idea (actually, pretty much everything I run is old hardware... I'm not the typical guy who needs to have the latest and greatest gadget), and Linux allows you to do just that. If anything, I have a small disagreement with the author: my own experience has been that the latest releases of Ubuntu are quite heavy and suck system resources (perhaps less than Windows, but they still do). I imagine it's all the bells and whistles they have been adding to the distro to make it more "user-friendly". Or perhaps it's the not so mature yet GNOME 3 software (when I tested it, it was slow and prone to crashes). In any case, I did get much better performance with Debian, so I stuck with it. {link to this entry}

[Wed May 2 16:32:15 CDT 2012]

I just had a need to find out a way to configure the mutt email client to view .ics files. Although, for whatever reason, searching around in Google I first found a link to a Perl script named vcalendar-filter, that tool didn't work very well. However, a Ruby program that I found here (the author of the blog entry chose to call it icalview.rb, but you can obviously call it whatever you want) worked much better. All it took, as suggested in the comments on the script itself, was to run the following commands on my Debian system before running it:

# apt-get install rubygems
# gem install icalendar