I finally broke down and got Minecraft, even though I think Minetest is fairly excellent and getting better. Even though you pay Mojang for the game, making it polished takes at least a couple of mods and making it really slick takes a few more. I wrassled around with minecraft on Linux and found a decent set of bits which make the game pretty fancy. This guide assumes you've got minecraft successfully installed, but not too much else.

Since this site is really just my personal blog, it requires little in the way of resources as compared to any "real" site. Drupal caches most content for anonymous users, and I am generally the only person logged into the site and I'm not on it very often. As a result I've always gone for the cheapest hosting that seemed it would do the job at the time I was looking. This has sometimes had mixed results, but these days it's mostly fairly simple to change hosting, and this is what I've just done.

The Seagate Dockstar is the lowest-end PogoPlug device, a tiny low-power ARM server which runs Linux. Devices like this are ubiquitous now, but when the PogoPlug came out it was extremely unusual. It also cost substantially more than it does today, when a Rev.2 PogoPlug (not the new-new one, the old new one) is only $20. The only cheaper ARM-based server I know of is the Dockstar, which can be had for as little as $14 through Amazon today. Regardless of which PogoPlug you might have, you probably want to run Debian Squeeze with a recent kernel featuring LED support, which is not that difficult — but finding all the information you need is.

I myself probably should have looked for one of these before I made this one; it's a .desktop file for gksudo that gives you access to it from the GUI in non-incidental ways. Below the break you'll find the text, which is not very long.

Hey, nVidia, what has happened to your drivers lately? They seem to have all the quality I expect from ATI drivers. I have new problems I didn't have before my last Linux driver upgrade. What, exactly is wrong over there, and what can I do to help short of buying a $600 graphics card from you? Sincerely, formerly a rabid pro-nVidia, anti-AMD Linux user.

Every time I get comfortable with a retailer something bad happens. In this case, Newegg is doing Microsoft's work by illegally1 refusing warranty support to a customer who installed Linux on a computer. I submitted a letter about it to Newegg through their system; they gave me back the code #120612-001897.

Since I got a Mixman DM2 and like to run Linux I decided to put the two together. Slight hassle, though, the kernel doesn't sit still while you're not watching. A slight tweak is needed to get the driver to work on a modern kernel; in my case, 3.0.0-14-generic on Ubuntu.

If you're a Ubuntu user who would like to try out the Oneiric Ocelot, but would like to not get cut by the bleeding edge, this might be a good time to give it a go. For me, anyway, it's just begun to work correctly including the nvidia driver, proper shutdown, and so on.

As a regular contributor to Katherine Noyes' Linux Blog Safari on Linux Insider, I was recently asked to comment on the NSA recommending Vista for best security. For those who don't already know, Vista is a train wreck, but the situation is at least slightly more insidious than simple stupidity.

Today I reinstalled Debian Lenny on my Dockstar. I thought it was bricked, but it isn't. I never did manage to get the CA-42 serial cable working, though, so now it has a useless tail. If I ever do brick it I guess I'll revisit the issue.