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Items of Note:
We have a new segment featuring open source software! Our fantastic and long-time listener Mark made the suggestion that we begin featuring OSS on The Geekcast and we are more than happy to do so. Preliminary feedback has been really positive and we hope you enjoy this new addition to The Geekcast.
I am trying a new leveling technique for the show. Please let us know if this episode sounds better and more even as far as volume goes!
Show us your Facebook love. Did you know there is a fan page for The Geekcast on Facebook? We have a group set up but it doesn’t integrate well with Facebook’s new design. Updates don’t show up and unless you go to the group explicitly, you’ll never get any updates. So to improve everything, we’re moving to a fan page! Check it out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Geekcast/59648951847. We’re going to close the group in a week or two but the fan page will be great. You’ll be able to get updates about the show, hear new episodes and interact with us directly via the Facebook news feed. We’d love to hear feedback on this!
Listener Feedback:
Hey guys,
Just getting caught up on the shows and found the audio quality outstanding for ep. 149. Congrats on finding the levelator!
Keep up the great shows!
7ate9
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Geek This Week:
Aaron:
Well it looks like we jinxed it on The Geekcast #149 because on Thursday night (really 1:30 AM Friday morning) my Xbox 360 caught the dreaded ‘Red Ring of Death’. In the middle of playing Magic: The Gathering my Xbox locked up and then kept freezing on the boot-up screen. Just five minutes later the RRoD popped up and I knew my Xbox was toast. This is where my fun with Best Buy began.
I bought my Xbox in December of ‘08 and I also shelled out for the Best Buy extended warranty because they said it covered RRoD exchanges in-store. I was fully aware of Microsoft’s extended warranty but I was told I could exchange it in-store for a new one. Imagine my surprise when I was up at the Geek Squad counter and told I had to do a ‘Rapid Exchange’ where they take my Xbox and I get a refurbished one in about a week. After thinking it over, I guess that is a lot faster than Microsoft’s turn-around time. So I handed it in. The guy told me that he needed my harddrive as well but all my saves are on there and there is no reason for them to take it. I insisted on keeping it and the guy finally gave in.
I got my Xbox back today and it’s working, so I guess the $40 was worth it to get a 1-week turn-around time.
Gozer:
When the wife is away the games i will play. Leveled up at least 10 levels on Gears of War 2. Aaron and I Finished Horde on the nowhere map. Thought we’d get the achievement for beating all 50 levels but you also have to be a level 50. Bought a fifty dollar points card. Purchased some old Sega Classics – Gunstar Heroes and Comix Zone. Comix Zone is one of the best Genesis games ever made. So unique in it’s approach to gameplay. The fighting, puzzle solving and level design is awesome. You travel through frame by frame of a comic book. Each frame poses a new objective. Check out the demo. One of my favorite games on XBLA. Also Downloaded Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Friggin’ hard. Haven’t played it since the arcades so i started on easy and still had a hard time. My go to guys are Wolverine, Cable ( yes cheap) and Akuma. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has one of the strangest end bosses. Starts off with this Titan looking dude then a liquid guy who’s really cheap then the end red beast blob guy? Also did some COD WaW Imperial Zombie killing. Played with my wife’s cousin ( he’s the one who got me into zombie mode) and it’s alot of fun. The have these hell hounds that spawn everywhere and they are really tough.
Segway
Inglorious Basterds comes out August 21st
Tarantino + Killing Nazis = Awesome
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as “The Basterds” are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers
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Tech and Gaming News:
Skype Shutting Down?
Skype might have to shut down due to a dispute over the core technology used to make the internet telephone system work.
eBay, which paid $2.6 billion (£1.6 billion) for the system in 2005, is facing a court battle with the original founders of the company who still hold the rights to the system’s technology.
The dispute started after Skype filed a claim against Swedish company Joltid, which is controlled by Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, after Joltid alleged that Skype should not possess, use or modify certain software source coding. By doing so and by disclosing such codes in various US patents, Skype have allegedly broken the license agreement.
According to The Times, eBay admitted in a regulatory filing that it might have to close down the company. It said it was “trying to develop alternative software” but if that did not work, or if eBay lost the right to the original software, Skype would be “severely and adversely affected and the continued operation of Skype’s business as currently conducted would likely not be possible.”
Speaking anonymously to the newspaper, an eBay source admitted that the replacement software they are working on has no guarantee of success.
“Although Skype is confident of its legal position… Skype has begun to develop alternative software to that licensed through Joltid. However, such software development may not be successful, may result in loss of functionality or customers even if successful, and will in any event be expensive,” the source said.
The dispute also threatens eBay’s plan to spin off Skype into a full-blown voice network and service provider, which is scheduled for next year.
http://www.geeks.co.uk/2009/08/03/is-this-the-end-for-skype/
Murdoch to Web users: Oh, yes, you will pay
In a move that makes him seem a bit like Dr. Evil wanting to be paid one hundred billion dollars for Austin Powers’ ransom, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that he will charge for all the online content associated with the newspapers and television stations he owns.
It’s a goal that some in the digital-media space will bill as ludicrous–and some as inevitable. The Financial Times reported the news Thursday, adding that Murdoch had spotted “some good signs of life” in the battered advertising sector.
He’s already got most of The Wall Street Journal, which News Corp. acquired two years ago, behind a pay wall. But he also owns the rest of Dow Jones & Company, the Fox television and film empire, the New York Post, and the U.K.’s The Times. News Corp. is also a partner in Hulu, the joint video venture that offers a big chunk of Fox television content (as well as NBC and ABC) for free on the Web.
Robert Iger, the CEO of new Hulu partner Disney, said at a conference last month that he does not believe Web content needs to be offered for free, and that consumers will be willing to pay for it.
“We intend to charge for all our news Web sites,” Murdoch said, according to the Financial Times. “If we’re successful, we’ll be followed by all media.”
In late 2007, well before the market collapse last fall, Murdoch had said pretty much the exact opposite, claiming that a free and ad-supported model would be more beneficial than a subscription model for The Wall Street Journal.
Presumably the new paid-content strategy wouldn’t apply to News Corp.’s digital-only assets, like social network MySpace.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10304575-93.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0
Twitter crippled by denial-of-service attack
Twitter was inaccessible for several hours on Thursday morning, followed by a period of slowness and sporadic time-outs (and more outright downtime). The company is blaming an “ongoing” denial-of-service attack but has not said anything further. Facebook has also confirmed that it was targeted by a DOS attack that rendered some of its features slow or non-functional.
Judging by the timeline of my TweetDeck client, it looks like the problems started right around 6 a.m. PDT.
“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” Twitter’s staff posted at 6:43 a.m. PDT on the service’s status blog.
Then, around 7:49 a.m. PT, the company posted, “We are defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.”
Around 8:15 a.m., the status blog post was updated with “The site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.”
Perfomance monitoring firm AlertSite says that Twitter’s home page went down at 6:05 a.m. PT and was showing 40 percent availability at 8:04 a.m. PT, but that timeouts were continuing from most of its monitoring locations at 8:30 a.m.
Way back when, Twitter outages were so commonplace that it was worth reporting when it didn’t crash–as when it stayed afloat during the entire South by Southwest Interactive Festival in 2008. Now, a few million dollars of venture capital later, the service is far more stable.
Twitter wants to establish itself as a communications standard rather than just a social-media brand. It’s been acrucial platform for information exchange in the face of global events where more traditional means of broadcasting have been inaccessible or blocked.
Some features of Facebook were also experiencing uptime issues on Thursday–one reader speculated that log-in servers may have been down–which raises the issue of whether a hosting company problem is to blame. Alternately, a denial-of-service attack could have been targeting both high-profile companies.
Facebook responded later in the morning on Thursday with a statement. “Earlier this morning, we encountered issues within our network that resulted in a short period of degraded site experience for some visitors,” the statement read. “No user data was at risk and the matter is now resolved for the majority of users. We’re monitoring the situation to ensure that users continue to have the fast and reliable experience they’ve come to expect from Facebook.”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10304633-36.html?tag=newsLeadStoriesArea.1
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Test a Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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How To: Disable voicemail instructions on Sprint
While we wait for all the carriers to get on board with nixing their endless, unhelpful voicemail pre-beep messages, we’ve already got instructions from Sprint on how to disable it for your own particular voicemail box on that network.
It’s pretty easy:
Call your voicemail.
At the menu, press 3 for personal options.
Press 2 for greeting.
Press 1 to change the greeting.
To enable / disable the instructions, press 3.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/31/take-back-the-beep-how-to-disable-voicemail-instructions-on-spr/
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Ask A Geek: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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Open Source Software:
Welcome to our new segment featuring open source software! Our fantastic and long-time listener Mark made the suggestion that we begin featuring OSS on The Geekcast and we are more than happy to do so. Preliminary feedback has been really positive and we hope you enjoy this new addition to The Geekcast.
Today we feature CloneZilla. Here is Mark’s excellent write-up:
Everyone has at least heard of norton ghost for imaging a hard drive, but not everyone knows there are alternatives, such as clonezilla. Clonezilla is essentially a linux distro that incorporated several open source disk imaging utilities in one easy to use package. With it, you can image all major filesystems including FAT32, NTFS, HFS+, and EXT2/3, and even supports new and experimental filesystems such as EXT4 and XFS. It supports backing up to a local disk, external drives, even over a network to a samba or nfs share. It backs up all partitions, including the boot sector, so if you image an entire disk and restore it later, it will be bootable just as before.
Since it is an all incorporated linux distro, you only need to burn it to a cd or thumb drive and boot off it to use it, no installation is required. You simply boot off it, select if you want to make or restore an image, select what partitions to backup, where to backup to, give it a name, and hit go. it is also possible to use it in an enterprise environment, much like ghost, by putting the seperate server portion of clonezilla on a server and having it push out images over a network. This is very useful if you are running a large network of the same computer much like businesses tend to do. Norton ghost also does the enterprise side of things, but it’s expensive, and clonezilla does the job just as well for free.
Another incredably useful application for clonezilla is upgrading a hard drive. With clonezilla, you can clone a disk to another disk of bigger size very easily. Say you have a laptop with a 60 gig hard drive and just bought a big 500 gig drive for it. Traditionally, you would need to reinstall your OS and all applications, restore your settings, it’s a big headache. With clonezilla, you can simply image the old drive to the new one by installing the new 500 gig hard drive into the laptop, connect the old one to the laptop over a usb adapter, boot clonezilla, copy the old to the new, disconnect the old and reboot and it will boot right up. I have found this invaluable for my netbook. With clonezilla you don’t need to hook up an external optical drive to reinstall an OS, you can just image the drive as soon as you get it, and if you hose the OS, just restore the image.
Clonezilla can be downloaded at http://clonezilla.org/
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Hack: This segment will return on a future episode of The Geekcast
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The Geek’s View:
Watchmen
Directed by Zack Snyder ( did 300)
Didn’t care for it. I guess i was expecting a regular action flick, instead this was more like a bunch of retired super heroes getting back in the game because of the murder of a fellow superhero ” The Comedian” I am not familiar at all with the graphic novel so all i know is that alot of the story got lost in translation. The characters i liked the most were Rorschach and Dr. Manhattan. Everyone else was kind of eh…don’t care. Rorschach is just this grizzled small dude that kicks everyones ass. He kinda reminded me of Kevin Spacey’s character in Se7en. Dr. Manhattan was also very cool. He had this accident in a lab that made him god-like. He now knows how things work in the universe and is therefore able to manipulate things. He can teleport. Dr. Manhattan also has the ability to make people explode. Awesome. The movie is 3 hours, because there is so much content from the graphic novel, it is impossible to cram everything into one movie. Disappointed overall but glad i saw it.
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