What is a hack?

1. A clever or elegant technical accomplishment. A clever routine in a computer program, especially one which uses tools for purposes other than those for which they were intended, might be considered a hack.

2. A temporary, jury-rigged solution, especially in the fields of computer programming and engineering: the technical equivalent of chewing gum and duct tape.

Sometimes being lazy is more productive than working hard. After all, that is what your robotic minions are for. I hope to aid you in your quest to find more time to read lifehacker.

Understanding Soccer

June 21, 2010 by sam
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Though I can't take credit for this image, it does help enlighten us mere mortal Americans on how the fine game of soccer works.

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AOL demands that VLC not support it, VLC replies "we support AOL?"

June 21, 2010 by sam
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Ryan Farmer diplomatically reports on AOL and their demand that VLC stop allowing users to access SHOUTcast Radio.

Honestly, I don't care all that much.

They've been in the business of building walled gardens for as long as they've been around. It's their call, it just means that people will find other ways of getting the content, either from them or from somewhere else.

In the case of AOL, this has largely meant somewhere else.

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North Korea Invents Miracle Vegetable

June 21, 2010 by sam
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Apparently North Korea is far ahead of capitalist countries in genetically engineering bizarrely large plants.

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Torrent Trackers are the Public Library of Today.

June 21, 2010 by sam
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The world has a great many problems. War, famine, disease, bone crushing poverty and harsh political systems are just a few of the problems many humans face.

What we do not face, however, is a lack of content. Thousands of books, movies, songs, blog posts and more are created. Some for profit, others for fun, still others for religious or political reasons.

So much content is created that a person with marginal Internet access and an 8 year old computer could conceivably spend the better part of their lives trying to get through all of it.

Using Twitter from the command line with Twyt

May 12, 2009 by sam
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Twitter is a fun micro-blogging service, but I'm not a huge fan of the web interface for it. Fortunately the kind folks at Twitter have made an API available and many third party applications have sprung up to use it.

Twyt is an easy to use and powerful way to work with Twitter from the command line. You can install it from a terminal in Debian and Ubuntu using:

# aptitude update && aptitude install python-twyt

DSA-1792-1 drupal6 -- multiple vulnerabilities

May 6, 2009 by sam
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In case you happen to use Drupal 6 on Debian, you might want to check for updates. A few nasty bugs were fixed in the last update (more details can be found at: http://www.debian.org/security/2009/dsa-1792).

So for aptitude users:

aptitude update && aptitude upgrade

And apt-get users:
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Use locate to quickly find files on Linux

April 14, 2009 by sam
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locate is a great way to quickly find files on your system. It searches using an index created using the updatedb utility so it can find files much more quickly than find can.

Use Aptitude to install all the packages from one Debian or Ubuntu computer to another

April 10, 2009 by sam
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This post shows you how to quickly install all the packages on one Debian or Ubuntu system on another.

Adobe's FTP Server

April 9, 2009 by sam
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Adobe makes some very powerful software, but unfortunately their websites tend to be slow loading and difficult to navigate.

To get around this, there are many files you can download directly from their public FTP server. Downloading Adobe Reader is the most common reason why I visit the FTP server.

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