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This article details the process of building the stock firmware for the SMCWAPS-G from the sources on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04.1.) The SMC SMCWAPS-G is on one hand an 802.11g access point with two USB2 ports and a 2.5" form factor ATA/IDE connector, and on the other a small and extremely low power consumption x86-compatible linux-based server with the same. While the included GPL compliance CD is relatively worthless to the casual user, the company does make the same content available in a more useful form for free download via their web site. This article explains how I built the sources; Read my review of the SMCWAPS-G for more information on the device in general.

(A no-carbohydrate recipe)

This is my own recipe for soy ginger garlic chicken. Soy, as in soy sauce, and ginger, as in powdered ginger. This is a recipe for fried chicken, so those looking to escape oil and fat should probably look elsewhere. It is not, however, breaded, and none of the ingredients have any significant carbohydrates. This is one of the things I ate the most on my low-carb diet.

Back in 2002 I made a writeup on the Atkins Diet on Everything2. This prompted several requests for what I tended to eat during the course of the day. Sometimes it's a sad tale indeed, because at the time I was a poor student on a tight budget. The following article is a copy of that original article, which I intend to expand as time goes by - I am about to go on the diet for the second time. For the record, I am currently about 80 pounds lighter than I was when I went on it the first time, even though I've been off of it for years now. Read on for the goods.

Ubuntu is a wonderful Linux distribution based (as are so many others) on Debian, perhaps the most stable and certainly one of the (if not the...) "freest" of all Linux distributions. While Debian's focus is stability and freedom, Ubuntu's is completeness and convenience. Both, however, use the same package management system, apt. Without getting into the issue of why apt is better than the alternatives (for the most part, anyway) let me just launch right into the subject of where packages from from: repositories.

Not too long ago, I switched entirely to Ubuntu for my Linux needs. Long-disenchanted with RedHat, I eventually skipped out on gentoo because I am lazy, and meanwhile I never found a compelling reason to run SuSe. I had begun using Debian Linux for servers and was very happy (in general) with the dpkg system, and along came Debian-based Ubuntu with unparalleled hardware support. I like to run Linux from a single vendor if possible since it simplifies things considerably, so now everything is based on some flavor of Ubuntu. In looking for a firewall GUI configurator which would run on and configure my laptop-based firewall system, I settled on fwbuilder.

Debian-based Linux distributions, which use the .deb package format and the apt package management system, are relatively free from dependency hell and thus are generally a joy to use and maintain. However, in order to properly manage a local archive of packages you need to build a repository in which to keep them. This is the simplest recipe I know for putting together a HTTP repository.

I wanted to play Neverwinter Nights on Linux, and didn't have it installed anywhere. Today, the easiest way to install NWN for linux (by far) is to use the current installer from Bioware; you can even download the game content from them, although you will need your own registration code. The code from the Windows version works fine. However, I'm on a modem and downloading that much data is out of the question. It could take me days to download the patch, alone (I get 26.4kbps on average - life in the country is swell.)

While Linux marches ever closer to being user-friendly, there are still a few loose ends to be tied up. Networking continues to be a bit of a sticky spot, and Bluetooth support is definitely in need of some refinement. But another area, and one which you would expect to have been tied up nearly by now, is sound. The PulseAudio server can help you take care of this problem, but simply installing it doesn't clear up the problems with programs taking the sound card and never letting you have it back.

Sun co-founder John Gage, who coined the phrase "The Network is the Computer" which later became a Sun slogan, is today entirely correct. Oh sure, he's not semantically correct, but he's basically correct in that the true power of the computer is not realized until it is connected to something. MP3 players are little computers that are networked to your computer long enough to load music on to them, for example. One useful and basic thing we can do to cause computers to participate with one another is to copy files between them. Sometimes it's most effective to just do this with a disk, but if they are connected to a network, it's usually easiest to copy the files that way, if not fastest.

Let's say, just for the sake of discussion, that you have an Xbox and you want to zip up all the roms in their own little zip files so that they take up less space, since nearly all the emulators will load roms from zip file, and perhaps because emulauncher currently demands that all extensions for a specific type of game be the same. Here's how you would do something like this in a bourne-compatible shell (like bash, ksh, ash, etc:)