An open letter to the Sydney Techno Community

I got forwarded this open letter:

It greatly saddens me that there are individual/s in our small Sydney techno scene that are playing us all out.
These individual/s pretend to be concerned about our scene, trying to bring the various crews together to make one big, happy community.
Shit will come back and bite them on the ass.

But in reality, the only concern they have is for themselves and how they can advance their own careers by trading off gigs for gigs, payola maybe?
It’s bad enough that our scene is so small and fragile, so when these player haters put their own ego above the good of all, it lets us all down.
Zealous or Egotistical? Make your own decision.

Eternally yours

Geek Euphemisms for Masturbation

From BBSpot.com

11. Killing the pop-up
10. Hoping the webcam is off
9. Recalibrating the joystick
8. Reallocating the DNA
7. Inserting a card into the HAND bus
6. Banging the space bar
5. Performing diagnostics on the hard drive
4. Commanding the prompt
3. Meeting Mr. Stickykeys
2. Cleaning the lightsaber
1. Lefthanded mousing

Upgrading Linux boxes to 2.6.0

A few articles are popping up around the traps on upgrading to the latest test 2.6.0 linux kernels. Over at kerneltrap.org, they take us through updating a system from a vendor neutral point of view. Over here and here, there are instructions for Redhat boxes. Looks like RPM has some issues with the 2.6.0 test kernels, so you’ll need to update to the latest version.

Also over at Redhat, there are some unofficial kernel rpms as well, which can get installed with APT, if you have it installed on your system.

Some links

Broken beat mixes from Alex Attias, Dego (4Hero), Gilbr, Jazzanova, Rainer Trüby and others
Broke & Beat Radio mixes from Argo, Russ Dewbury, John Arnold, RIMA (Domu and Volcov) and others.
The Vinyl Project from the Freedom Archives

The Vinyl Project is a tool for DJs, musicians, MCs, activists and most of all the people. The soundbites on this record include chilling voices on repression and glimmering assertations of resistance. The Vinyl Project collective hopes these sounds will pollinate your beats, noise, melodies and community.

“Bite My Style: Images and Shapes by Mitch”Buy me this! 😉

Take action! Send a message

On the EFF website there is an email campaign against SCO‘s tactics against Linux.

Linux Users Unite: Stop SCO!

The SCO Group, Inc. recently announced that it plans to sue individual Linux users if they refuse to pay the company a $700 licensing fee. This is an effort designed by SCO to bolster its licensing claims against IBM and Red Hat by beating up on people who can’t afford a multimillion-dollar defense. SCO hasn’t proven that it has a right to collect this money at all, so its attempt to hold end-users liable is a terrible misuse of the legal system. Tell Congress that SCO’s tactics are unacceptable!

Bouldering in Sydney/AU

Found a two sites which have some guides on bouldering in Sydney and Australia in general. First up is Australian Bouldering. Pretty simple site, but more of less has the pertinent information. They have guides, interviews, photos and a magazine. The other one is vi bouldering. Very pretty site that’s based on flash… which has no real reason to be based on flash… except to be pretty. Which really annoys me. And the menu on the main page is a bloody pain. The words are on a right angle and also its bit of a game to try and click on the link that you want. *Phew* But after those interface annoyances that will probably make me never go back to that site (or just bookmark the relavant sections) the info ain’t too bad.

Mozilla Suite 1.5 beta released

OK, so it’s yesterday’s news. But hey. Mozilla 1.5 beta has been released. This release features lots of bugfixes, the inclusion of a spellchecker for Messenger and Composer, and lots of minor feature improvements to Navigator, Messenger, Composer and Chatzilla. Apparently it fixes GDI issues in Windows, so perhaps now it’ll stop hogging all my system memory. That’d be nice.

Also there is a new build out of Thunderbird. Its the first release candidate for version 0.2 and can be found here.

And over here are some nice new icons for Mozilla Firebird.

firebird icons

Moving servers

Apparently the server that this is hosted on is getting retired. It was supposed to be retired on Saturday. But here I am, still blogging away. Blogging away like I ain’t never blogged before… I really should move it over to the main dorja box, along with sorting out my insurance… hmmm… so lazy. But hey, I just love tempting fate. I successfully drove around Sydney for 3 years with no car insurance without an accident (ok, just one tiny scratch). Somedays/months/years I’m just too lucky. Gotta love being a dragon!

Mac OS X Terminal.app replacement

A nice looking Terminal.app replacement is iTerm. Apparently it features “Xterm compatibility” and “better VT100 emulation”. I’ll have to give it a crack when I get home. It bothers me when I try to use terminal apps like vim. Pressing the page up and down and various other keys seems to illicit different results to what I’m used to in other terminals (although it could mean I should learn to use vim properly ;-)). The other nice feature that is have is tabs. Oh baby, can’t get enough of those tabbed applications! 😉

Also, here’s a nice screenshot of iTerm in action:

iTerm screenshot

Other features include, Native Cocoa application that supports OS X, Applescript support, transparent windows, address book, anti-idle function that avoids disconnection because of no activity and supported language encodings with localizations for Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, Japanese and Korean

New music in at SID shop

Over at the SID Shop there is a bunch of new tasty releases. Three newies on UR (Mad Mike, DJ Rolando and the Aquanauts), first release on new label Ignitor (Orlando Voorn), a new Red Planet EP and a new one on Hipnotech from DJ Dez. One of the more interesting things they done is release a bunch of 7″ ep’s which accompany the 12″ ep’s on UR and Red Planet. They’re supposed to be B-Sides that didn’t get pressed onto the 12″ eps. Nice concept for the collectors. Bit of a biatch on the wallet, but when has vinyl collecting not been for stuff like this?

Also while on the subject of Detroit electronic music, my friend Benn is selling a few bits and pieces on Ebay. A couple of Plus 8 Ep’s and some ghettotech as well.

Finally… more photos

After repeated requests, pleas, beggings and accidentally deleting my entire online photo gallery, I’ve finally gotten around to upload a bunch of photos that Rozie and I have take of stuff that’s happened over the last couple of months

We’ve got the illustrious Josephine Wan’s epic 30th birthday, prefuse73 at the Gaelic Club, BMG at Mad Racket, the final Cut & Paste at the Spanish Club, Gabby’s excellent exhibition “Chasing Horizons” at First Draft Gallery in Surry Hills, and some incriminating photos of the Surry Fools apparently playing soccer or something like that in Moore Park.

Bring back those old DOS games back to life!

Having a browse through my local friendly apt repository I found this nice program called DOSBox. It appears to be essentially a 286 and 386 emulator. Its great for all those old games that just won’t run from the command line of more modern operating systems. So far I’ve play Warlords 1 & 2, the Leisure Suit Larry Series, the Elite Series, Civilization, Thexder, Solar Winds 1 & 2 and Rampage. It doesn’t support protected mode games, so games from around the mid nineties don’t (stuff like Doom and that which used the DOS4GW type environments).

It emulates the Sound Blaster card, which is nice and it works under Windows, BeOS, Linux and Mac OS X, so you’ve got NO excuse not to give this a crack 😉 And over here is the list of supported games.