You can find more information about the Coffee Groundz, as well as a couple of pictures from our past Geek Gatherings on their main page at www.coffeegroundz.net. And of course, you can get always all the details at www.geekradio.com, along with some pictures of phliKtid the Coffee Groundz has yet to grok.

Now, even though the Geek Gathering is on for the weekend, pretty much everything else of a techy nature is off.

VB Programming at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
The Basic 101 Seminars at HAL-PC? Cancelled.
Samba and Network Administration? Cancelled.
And Monday’s Chief Architect Special Interest Group Meeting? Cancelled.

So what to do with all the extra time and no user group meeting to go to?

Well, you could always use the long weekend to improve your hacking skills. Gone are the days when a hacker was forged from equal parts curiosity, technical prowess and thousands of hours at the keyboard. With the advent of YouTube, you, too, could become an uber hacker in only a matter of minutes; just four minutes and twenty six seconds, if all you want to do is view other people’s IP addresses. That’s right, in just under five minutes, NextGenHacker101 will walk you through using the l33t hacker tool Tracer-T to see who’s connecting to a particular website, their IP addresses and their connection speeds.

If you haven’t seen this video yet, you’re really missing out on some excellent mis-information. The joke is that Tracer-T doesn’t really do any of the things that NextGenHacker101 believes – it simply shows each piece of network routing equipment that sits between you and a particular host on the Internet. If you want to check out the tools that *really* get the job done, carve out some time this weekend to get familiar with the following current gen hacker toolkits:

Pin-G: Pin-G is installed by default on most modern operating systems as well as a few ancient ones. To use it, simply type in Pin-G, spelled p i n g, onto the command line followed by the IP address of the computer you’d like to hack. You’ll immediately see if that computer is reachable from your own, as well as a report on how much lag may exist between you and the target. You can even use Pin-G to build other more nefarious attacks like Smur-F or Floo-D.

OK, now that you’ve determined that your target exists, you’ll want to see what kinds of Internet Aware programs it may be running. To do that, we’ll need to reach for the next tool in our arsenal, Inma-P.

Inma-P is a free network security scanner that can do things like list the open ports of a particular computer on the Net or even detect the operating system of a remote host. All in all, it’s a very robust and powerful tool. Inma-P comes installed by default on many Unix based operating systems, and is available for download for Windows, Mac and other Operating Systems at n m a p . org. To use Inma-P, type n m a p onto the command line followed by the IP address we used in our previous example. Using it like this, in its most simple form, will yeild a list of open ports on the target computer.

So, Now that you know what kind of services are running on your target, you may want to capture some of that traffic to see what’s really going on.

We’re getting away from the command line now and going graphical. After all, the Internet is a series of tubes and you’re going to need to crawl up a couple of them if you’re truly going to make the metamorphosis into a l33t haxor. And as all hackers know, the command line is not for crawlers: we’re going GUI on this one.

The last tool of the evening is called Wireshar-K. It’s a packet capture tool that will allow you to save and inspect the individual packets traveling over your local network segment. If nothing else, use of this tool will scare you into using end-to-end encryption whenever possible. That means using https instead of http in your URLs and using products such as PGP or GPG to encrypt email and attachments.

Of course, all of these next gen hacker tools have real world counterparts. Ping, nmap and Wireshark all all great network diagnostic tools with legitimate uses: they can give an experienced network admin quite a bit of detail about what’s actually happening on their network at the packet level. If you do spend some time with them this weekend, be sure not to direct your next gen attacks at anyone other than yourself, as many servers run Network Intrusion Detection Systems and don’t appreciate being scanned.

That’s it for this NextGenHacker Fourty One One and that’s that for BarretTime.

As far as birthdays go, Tech Bytes is in good company. The online bookstore Amazon.com was launched fifteen years ago. And, in parallel with this show’s history, Amazon’s current moniker was not it’s first.

Any guesses as to what Amazon began life as? Cadabra.com

And TechBytes was originally conceived under the name Radiodrome (later Radio X).

Just one month later, in August of 1995, the Dotcom Boom starts in ernest.

This is also the month that Internet Explorer was released as part of Windows 95.

In September, the online auction site eBay was founded, but not as eBay. Anyone know the original name? Auctionweb. The first item sold? A broken laser pointer for $13.83.

In December, the first *multilingual* search engine is launched. Guesses? This is December of 1995… Alta Vista.

Fourteen years ago, on Independence Day, Hotmail launches in the US. This is also the day that Jeff Goldblum uses a mac to upload a virus into an alien mothership en route to Area 51, thus saving all humanity from certain destruction. Well, all of Humanity except the Houstonians that got nuked midway through the movie. Some of these saved humans became the first cyber squatters, fueled by the sale of the domain name business.com for $150,000.00 in March of ‘97.

Others go on to follow in the footsteps of web commentator Jorn Barger, who coined the term ‘weblog’ in December of that same year. Weblog, of course, was later shortened to ‘blog’, giving birth to what are now known as bloggers.

‘97 was also the year that the Dotcom Boom became a Bubble, as people threw money at anything with a commercial TLD registration attached to it.

In March of ‘98, Kozmo.com launches, promising delivery of anything in under one hour, and in that September, two Stanford post-grad students open Google’s first office in a garage in California.

By October of ‘98, the first blogger community launches in the form of Open Diary, EverQuest and Napster come online in 1999, and the original MySpace website launches… anyone know as what? As a file sharing service. Seriously. They were shut down in 2001 and then re-opened their doors in 2003 as a social networking site.

In 1999, NTT DoCoMo launches the first mobile Internet service called i-Mode. Its only available in Japan, doing nothing for the healing city of Houston.

In January of 2000, after countless patched CoBOL systems lumbered on with very few hitches, the Dotcom Bubble reaches its peak when the Dow Jones Industrial Average tops out at record levels seen neither before nor since, and in February of that year, several notable websites, including Amazon, CNN and Yahoo are defaced or crippled by hackers who had no doubt watched the Movie Independence Day just four years earlier.

So, actually, the first five years of the show heralded in alien viruses, bloggers, cyber squatters, financial irresponsibility, black hat hacking and MySpace. Yeah. I blame Goldblum…

Hang in there… Things do turn around. On One Eleven Oh-One, Podcasting is born via a Greatful Dead track and four days later, Jimmy Wales founds Wikipedia.

In April 2003, right about the time that MySpace was reinventing itself, the Apple iTunes store goes online. One month later, the first Flash Mob assembles. Any guesses as to where? Sorry, Steve, it didn’t happen at the Apple Store, but rather in the rug department of a Manhattan department store. A little over 100 people assembled.

The date on this next one is a bit of a tip-off if you do the math. On February 5th, 2004, *this* becomes the most searched for image in web history.

Careful on the phrasing as we don’t want any microphone malfunctions in the studio tonight… That’s right – Janet Jackson’s Wardrobe Malfunction during the 2004 Superbowl half-time show.

In November of that same year, the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser is launched, heralding in a new age of browser wars. A 1.0 party was thrown here in Houston at the original location of the St. Arnold’s Brewery.

And video sharing site YouTube comes online in February ‘05 and the web experiences more growth this year than it did during the entire Dotcom Boom.

So, the good news is that we’ll leave the last five years for you to chat about this Friday night at the Technology Bytes Fifteen Year Anniversary Party, happening at the Houston House of Blues in the Foundation Room from seven until close.

Now, the bad news is that Will Smith has signed on to make another TWO Independence Day movies, which means that we could be in for another technological downturn should Goldblum take another Mac along for an extra-atmospheric jaunt. All of the havoc he wreaked before was done on OS9, so there’s no telling what 10.8,
Star Leopard, will be capable of.

That’s it for the early days of your inter-life flashing before you eyes and that’s that for BarretTime. See you Friday!

Not everything is purely sci-fi this year. On Friday night, a panel titled, “Con Season is in the Air: When a Young Fan’s Mind Turns to Flirtation” will be discussing fun, flirtation and the possibility of making a lasting connection at the con. The Panelists state that “anyone who says geeks don’t get any love has certainly never been to a convention!”

And for any con-goers who found a little romance six to ten years ago, there is now an ApolloKids track with everything from Oragami to Krav Maga for Kids. For those not in the know, Krav Maga is an eclectic hand-to-hand combat system developed in Israel which involves wrestling, grappling and striking techniques. It’s mostly known for its extremely efficient and brutal counter-attacks and is taught to elite special forces around the world. I’m assuming that they’re teaching it to the kids, and not to parents for use on the kids, though after having been in more than a few airports recently, I’d probably be up for attending a class on the latter.

For the politically aware KPFT listener, there is a talk entitled, “Deepwater Horizon: Beyond the Spill” in which panelists will discuss the spill, the realities of offshore oil production and how future environmental catastrohphes can be prevented. “Greening the Future by Recovering the Past” will discuss the concept that recycling isn’t just for aluminum cans and plastic bottles. The greenest solution may be to renovate, reuse, and recycle. And for those in posession of a hand-crank radio, you can continue your emergency preparedness education by attending “Hurricane Preparedness 201: The Post-Ike Lessons Learned Story”.

Also talking about the tangible future will be our own David Brummel, known on IRC and at Geek Gatherings as KD5, with a talk and Q&A session on the Future of the Space Industry. This is just one of several panels and workshops that KD5 will be on during the three day con, several of which add some extremely techy fare to the already dense sci-fi and fantasy content.

If you can only attend for a day and have a yearning for Mobile Computing or Open Source Hardware in your heart, then Saturday is your day. At noon, KD5 and I will be sitting in on a panel called “There’s an App for That” – I’ll be the Android advocate and KD5 will be representing his vast stable of Apple gear. On the heels of that, we’ll be giving an Introduction to Open Source Hardware talk that gives attendees a survey of currently available hobbyist micro-controllers, with some extra time spent on the Arduino platform, both hardware and software.

All of that talk is theory. If you want to get your hands on some actual hardware, we’ll be putting on a two hour workshop in which participants will build their own functioning Arduino clone from the ground up. We’ll be using cool looking translucent solderless breadboards. The key word there being “solderless”, meaning that no harm will come to your hands during the construction of these mini micro-controllers, only your pocketbook, as we’re passing on the cost of the kits to the participants. You’ll also need a laptop running Linux, OS Ten or Windows along with a functioning USB port.

While you’re able to attend all the panels with just a basic Con Badge, you may need to sign up in advance for any of the workshops requiring materials. You can get details on Apollocon Panels, workshops and ApolloKids activities by surfing to www.apollocon.org. Both three day and single day passes are available.

That’s it for this Sci-Fi and Fantasy Four One One and that’s that for BarretTime.

So, not due to any shortcomings in listener support, but rather in order to take a bit of a breather before the big plunge, we will *not* be holding the monthly Geek Gathering this Friday in anticipation of the 15th Anniversary Party at the Foundation Room at the Houston House of Blues in July. This is going to be big. Given the potential light levels, I’m sure we’ll be doing something with a lot of LEDs and Arduinos. And if you’d like to get in on some of the action rather than being a casual bystander mesmerized by all the blinky lights, then you may want to make plans to attend the 2010 edition of Apollocon, Houston’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference. Aside from the usual goings-on, friend of KD5 and I will be putting on a presentation on Arduino and Open Source Hardware along with a workshop in which participants can build their own arduino and get some lights blinking in anticipation of the big 15. The weekend of June 26th is the one you’ll want to keep free. Details on the con can be found at www.apollocon.org, with details about the Arduino panel and workshop once they’re nailed down. But for now, back to being excited about our party.

I think we have the venue until 2:00 AM, so you may not be getting up very early the next morning. Which could be a problem, because it’s often been said that you have to wake up pretty early in the morning to get a jump on the crew of Technology Bytes in terms of pure troubleshooting prowess. Given, we were probably the ones saying it, but until now we have never mentioned an exact time. And the time is… Drum Roll… Huh. 9:30 AM. I really thought it would be earlier. Well, you may have to get up closer to 8:30, depending on traffic between you and the PC Upgrade and Troubleshooting SIG at the HAL-PC Headquarters, which is located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive. That’s just off the West Loop and San Felipe, conveniently close to corporate coffee in case 9:30 AM really does come early for you. The SIG happens every Friday morning from 9:30 to 11:30, so, actually it’s: You have to get to work pretty late to get a jump on the crew of technology bytes. How’s that for a catch-phrase?

The PC Upgrade & Troubleshooting Workshop specializes in helping HAL-PC members get their misbehaving computers back in good working order. You’re free to come watch the HAL-PC members help others in distress, but you’ll have to be a member to get your computer looked at. Even then, you need to make an appointment with the HAL-PC Front Desk and most of the six available slots fill up by Tuesday. Suddenly our on-hold times don’t seem so bad. That would be the equivalent of Richard on LINE 2 having had to have called in last Sunday night. That’s not a dig at HAL-PC, just something for the squirmers to think about until next time.

Other opportunities to up your technical game exist at HAL-PC. This Saturday, June 5th, the Samba & Network Administration SIG meets at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters. Samba is the free software program that allows Linux and Unix based computers to join MS Workgroups and Domains and even host Windows file shares. Rick Archibald will be leading the group through Samba 3 by Example while also tackling hybrid and open source networking. And just like the Wednesday Linux Workshop, its always free to attend.

The Linux Workshop meets from six to eight every Wednesday night at the HAL-PC HQ, and, unlike the PC Upgrade and Troubleshooting Workshop, you don’t have to book anything in advance or even be a member, though membership is generally encouraged. Wether you’re looking to hone your existing Linux skills or if you’re a complete noob and you would like to have every detail of Linux’s history played out for your ears, the Linux workshop is for you. If you get this explanation unsolicited, you can always ask them a Windows question under the guise of running Win4Lin, WINE, or some other Linux emulation package. The cons are low on this one and the Pros include not having to get up early, probably not having to miss any work, and definitely not missing any Technology Bytes.

You can find more information on these and several other Special Interest Groups by surfing to www.hal-pc.org and checking out the SIG calendar.

That’s it for me for the next two weeks and that’s that for BarretTime.

I think that most of you will recognize that passage from the late author Douglas Adams, creator of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series of works. Douglas Adams passed on May 11, 2001, and on Tuesday, May 25th, people around the world will honor the author by taking their towel with them wherever the day may take them. If you want to find some fellow hitchhikers to revel with or get some more history on the event, you can surf to www.towelday.org.

And if you’re plugged into the Internet right now, chances are extremely good that your data is traveling through an Ethernet cable along some point of its journey. Ethernet, the thought child of Robert Metcalfe, will have been around 37 years as of this Saturday, May 22nd.

Ethernet has enjoyed nearly two decades of supremacy as the de facto way to connect computers together in a home or office. It wasn’t until the recent widespread adoption of wireless technologies that the Ethernet cable started becoming an afterthought in people’s laptop bags and backpacks.

I’m curious as to how many of us in the studio could actually produce an Ethernet cable from their laptop bags right now… Anyone?

Most people are wireless these days, and since Kaveh Kanes closed, I know of no coffee shop in Houston where I can show up with a 20 foot Ethernet cable and expect to get connectivity. Of the two, Wireless is actually the more venerable technology, though, with Ethernet borrowing some of its tricks from one of the very first wireless networks that was created to connect several University of Hawaii computers together in 1970.

This network, the aptly named Alohanet, used amateur radio to link nodes together. Using one frequency to transmit and another to receive, a machine receiving data would immediately re-transmit that data back the origin machine, thus introducing the ability to detect and correct errors during transmission. Aloha also tackled the issue of collision detection, a condition when two computers try to talk at the same time, by just dropping both transmissions and simply trying again. Transfer speeds on Alohanet maxed out the Data Terminal Equipments built-in baud rate of 80 words per minute. That’s Teletype speed for you old timers…

Another networking technology was coming on very strong in the 70s that may have displaced Ethernet if not for one single flaw. IBM’s token ring technology overcame the problem of collisions by using a 3-byte token that was virtually passed between computers connected in a ring pattern. Only the computer in possession of the token was allowed to talk, or transmit data, while all other remained quiet. This ruled out the possibility of data collision. Token Ring speeds kept up with Ethernet speeds, with IBMs 16 MB/s Token Ring technology being introduced in 1989, eventually becoming the IEEE standard for token ring networks. Both Apollo Computer and Proteon offered other proprietary token schemes in the 80s. And though IBM did beat out those companies, it was Token Ring’s large plastic connectors and thick IBM Type 1 cabling that kept it from overtaking Ethernet. Token Ring speeds eventually hit 100MB/s, but would never see the multi-Gigabit Ethernet speeds realized today.

Early Ethernet cabling looked a lot like the coaxial cable that used to bring cable television into homes before satellite hit the scene. Now, Ethernet cabling takes the form of 4 twisted pairs of wire sheathed in a plastic coating. The end connectors are known as RJ-45 connectors, a larger version of what you still find on the ends of phone cabling, which is known as RJ-11.

So happy 37, Ethernet!

That’s exactly the half-way-point of this season’s sizzle and that’s that for BarretTime.

And you certainly wouldn’t want to have to figure out what a KPFT Basic Membership would cost you in terms of terabytes transferred to Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution if you had to do it by hand, would you? Especially if they’re computing megabytes as a powers of two rather than the mega-means-one-thousand bytes methodology that is extremely popular with hard drive manufacturers.

No, you would want, maybe even *need*, a calculator.

Blaise Pascal is generally credited with inventing the digital calculator. And by digital, I mean a technology that uses discrete values rather electronic. I have seen some misinformed folk on the ‘net under the impression that Blaise was typing out 55378008 to elicit giggles from friends. That is simply not the case. Blaise’s calculator, known as the Pascaline, was a collection of eight movable dials, each one representing a power of ten. So as the first dial representing the numbers zero through nine would make one full revolution, it would move the second wheel, representing the tens, one click.

This was actually an improvement on the Slide Rule, which was invented in 1622 by William Oughtred. Early-day slide rules came in both rectangular *and* circular models. An engineer with a slide rule is his pocket is probably a pretty old engineer; an engineer with a circular slide rule is ancient.

In 1820, the Arithmometer came on the scene. It was the first commercially successful mechanical calculator.

In 1886, the Comptometer became the first successful key-driven adding machine.

In 1878, W.T. Odhner introduced the Odhner Arithmometer that improved on the earlier device with the addition of a pinwheel engine.

And in 1893, The “Millionare” calculator was introduced. It was the first in its class to perform direct multiplication. Snopes neither confirmed nor denied that these early calculators were, in fact, covered with gold.

Other cool calculated names? The Arithmaurel in 1842 and the curtly name Curta. The Curta was the first miniature calculator that could be held in one hand. And while it was introduced to the world in 1948, it was developed under peculiar circumstances in 1938.

These circumstances included Nazi’s bunkered away in underground salt mines, forcing a Mr. Curt Herzstark (Spoiler Alert: the Curta) to work on a small, black metal cylinder, no bigger than the palm of his hand.

If you want to know more, you can Go Googling or you can check out the story re-enacted by real live people on the Neuhaus stage of the Alley Theater.

They’ll be putting on Kenneth Lin’s play, Intelligence-Slave, which centers around Curt, his work on the world’s first miniature four function calculator and his dealings with the nasty Nazi’s that designated him an intelligence slave during the second World War.

The play runs from May 23 through June 20th here in Houston at the Alley Theater. It’s actually the play’s world premier, otherwise I would rattle off some reviews for you. You hear that, bloggers? This is brand new territory…

Another spoiler alert? You can spell Sieg Heil using the same upside-down technique on any pocket calculator with an LCD disply. Actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s in the play; I’ve only read the first act. I do know that the cast has spent some time with an actual Curta device so they would be able to more accurately operate the prop-Curta on stage.

For details on the play and performance times, hit www.alleytheatre.org. (Either spelling of theater works with that…)

A warning: The play is recommended for mature audiences due to “language and subject matter”. I’m assuming this mature subject matter is the math behind 9’s Compliment, not the Nazis. Nine’s Compliment is the notion that you can perform subtraction operations by adding the radix compliment, or in our own decimal system, the Nine’s compliment of a number.

If you want some Allied Action, you’ll have to search out Hugh Whitemore’s play, Breaking the Code, which centers around Alan Turing and his efforts to break the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. The play was adapted for television in 1996 by the BBC and was re-broadcast in the US by PBS, so there’s a good chance you can find it.

While that’s not certainly not it for this calculated cry for currency, that that’s for BarretTime.

AMD, Asus, Cooler Master, Evercool, Gigabyte, Intel, Microsoft, MSI and SuperMicro to name a few. Not that I would want to incite any friction at this kind of event, but it would definitely be fun to bus in some Linux evangelists to hand out leaflets outside the festivities. Are you listening, LUGs?

All of this goes down on Thursday, May 6th, from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM at Directron on Harwin Drive.

If you subscribe to the old addage of ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, then things are heating up over at Apple, too. Let’s ignore the fact that police have executed a possibly illegal search warrant at the home of the journalist who accepted the infamous ‘found iPhone’ from a California college student and go straight to a smokin’ hot new app hitting iPhones around the nation.

So…Apple has approved a game for inclusion into the App Store called “Puff Puff Pass”, a game where up to five players choose a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe, a location (either indoors or out) and a time frame, then puff and pass as many times as they can before the clock runs out. I’d be curious to know exactly when this hit the App Store… It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if Apple hadn’t previously banned Wi-Fi searching apps, political parody apps, apps that constitute duplicate functionality, third party code translation frameworks, (*cough* Flash *cough*), an LCD buyers guide and a port of Leisure Suit Larry. I’ve still never gotten to play that game and it looks like I never will, at least on the iPhone.

While the water may be a little warm on the Apple side of the pool, the Android half is doing fine. If you’re running Android 2.0 or better, you will soon have yet another web browser to choose from. A pre-alpha build of FireFox is now available for the platform, and though it’s far from optimized, it does bode well for both Android phones and especially the oncoming onslaught of Android powered tablets.

And if we continue to peer through the tablet Looking Glass, we can see things heating up between users of the HP tablet and those of the iPad. Apparently, there’s some contention in the world of tablet users as to which is best, with lines often being drawn along business Use Cases. Apple could potentially wipe the Slate clean with updates allowing the iPad to be more business-y, much like they tried to do with the iPhone in 2008.

I don’t know: trying to blend the world of business with the world of entertainment may not go so well. Of course I would like a single device akin to Captain Picard’s Ready Room briefing tablet to use at both work and home, but “Business Up Front, Party in the Back” may only produce the digital equivalent of a mullet. I think that Apple should stick to the home experience while HP carves out a place in the business world. Whatever may transpire in the tablet arena, there’s certainly no end to the flames spewing from both camps.

And here at home, we have five Fridays in the month of April, meaning that we are experiencing a bit of a drought as far as user group get-togethers go. In fact, attendees of our Geek Gathering will have gone a full five weeks since having a chance to level their D&D characters, knit a summer scarf, or lay down dark digital tracks from the DJ booth. DJ table. That’s coming up Friday, May 7th, but for now, that’s it for this puff-puff-passing of my Apple angst and that’s that for BarretTime.

(I guess that would rank dust bunnies somewhere between actual bunnies and those of the Monty Python persuasion, which await you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth. The thing to remember is this: Keep clear of any cave entrances guarding sacred treasures, and the killer bunnies will keep clear of you.)

So, leaving the cave for the computer: electronic circuitry works most reliably at low temperatures. Higher temperatures can degrade and wear out any heat sensitive materials used in the electronic components, and fluctuations in temperature will stress many more components, causing them to expand and contract, wreaking havoc on the myriad of interconnects found on every circuit board in your PC.

Even more nefarious is something known as ‘metal migration’. This is especially prevalent in areas where high temperatures are combined with high humidity. I personally don’t know any place like that, do you, Houston?

Metal migration occurs when metal whiskers or dendrites grow from the conducting lines of a circuit board. With lines being spaced closer together in today’s devices, shorts between lines can occur, causing component failure and the untimely demise of your PC.

While there’s no immediate cure for metal migration, you can combat dust bunnies with some carefully aimed bursts from a can of compressed air. Don’t make the mistake of blowing any visible dust on external fans inside the case; you’ll need to muster up the courage to open your computer’s case for this job.

Before you crack your desktop’s case, you’ll first want to unplug everything, paying close attention to what went where. Opening your computer case can require anything from the simple press a tab to performing a certain series of knocks and bumps that would just as soon grant you passage to Diagon Alley as it would open your case. When in doubt, get online and search for the instructions on opening the case to your particular model of PC. Trust me: three minutes of Googling is roughly equivalent to ten minutes spent super-gluing broken bezels and tabs back into place…

Be careful not to unseat anything or tug on any wires that would loosen something. Actually, this is a good time to take a look inside your computer and try to identify all the major parts. Again, a quick search for ’schematic’ and the model of your PC should turn up what you’re looking for. Of course, you don’t want to do this from the computer you’ve got opened up. If you don’t have a second computer around, print them out for handy reference before open the PC.

If you have pets or smokers in close proximity to the PC, you may even want to take the PC outside for this, as smoke and pet hair act like dust bunny steroids. Who knows, you may have a bunny who can bat .400 in there…

Aside from removing any obvious animal life from the PC, you’ll want to make sure that both the fan over your PC’s processor and it’s power supply are clean. If the situation is really bad, you can brush debris off the fan blades, away from the processor or power supply. After that, you’ll want to blow them out with your can of compressed air. Since it’s possible to damage your fan by spinning the blades too quickly as you apply the compressed air, keep them in place with the end of a plastic disposable pen, cotton swab, or something similarly non-conductive.

Blow off any exposed circuit boards, taking care not to get too close to the boards with the air, as pressurized air has been known to dislodge shoddily affixed chips and components. If there are any coffee or soda stains in the base of your PC, first, count yourself very lucky that you still have a running PC, and second, get a slightly damp cloth to scrub them away.

You can also inspect components to make sure that everything is properly seated, or plugged in securely where its supposed to be plugged in. The schematic for your PC will help out with this. If you do need to physically touch any components inside the PC, make sure to touch something metal on the case first, to discharge any static electricity that may have built up on your person. Once everything has been dusted and it looks like a new PC on the inside again, its time to put everything back together and power it up.

If something came loose during your dusting, an error message will generally display on the BIOS screen or you may hear a series of beeps before its even able to get that far. Opening your case again and checking to make sure that everything is properly seated will generally fix the issue.

And if that doesn’t do it, you can just call it quits and head to Austin this weekend for Texas Linux Fest 2010. Happening this Saturday, April 10th, at the Marchesa Hall and Theater, the Texas Linux Fest is a one day event bringing Linux visionaries and gurus together with Linux enthusiasts from across the state of Texas and beyond. Jon “maddog” Hall will be on hand throughout the con, as will a number of notable guests, speaking on things like monitoring large scale Linux systems with OpenNMS, the Drizzle Database, Security Enhanced Linux for Mere Mortals, Ubuntu on the Arm processor and even a talk on Unicode. If you’re on Mac or Linux and you’ve ever noticed the
diamond-question-marks in place of oddly accented characters, this talk is for you.

I’ll be in attendance, so be sure to say ‘Hi’ if you head that way. Hit
www.texaslinuxfest.org for a schedule of panels, directions to the venue and details on registration (which they have made extremely reasonable for those who may be on an open source software style budget).

That’s it for this dust-bunny death-match and that’s that for BarretTime.

Admission is inexpensive and both enthusiast and supporter level tickets may be purchased, depending on your particular economic situation.

Hit www.texaslinuxfest.org for a list of talks and a link to the registration page.

This coming Tuesday, the 1960 PC Users Group will be holding their monthly general meeting in conjunction with the monthly meeting of their Digital Photography SIG.

The general meetings are generally short and are generally used to recognize visitors, make announcements, and give attendees a little social time, complete with refreshments, before the start of the meeting. Six thirty to get your blood sugar up and seven o’clock to level up your intelligence. The Digital Photography presentation immediately follows. April’s speaker will be Don Townzen, who, over a period of three years, travelled the state of Texas to photograph all 254 of the state’s court houses. He’ll be sharing these pictures along with bits of Texas history and folklore, with his photographic traveling partner, Pat. Your digital photography questions will be answered, too. All of this happens Tuesday, April 6th. Hit www.1960pcug.org for details and directions. The Digital Photography SIG has been posting past presentations in PDF format to their SIG page, so be sure to take advantage of that resource if you’re just starting to get up to speed with digital photography.

And tomorrow morning, you’ll want to surf sites like Slashdot.org and ThinkGeek.com with an air of suspicion, as it will be April 1st, aka April Fool’s Day. Since the dawn of the Internet, there have been those who would deceive on this day, in mostly clever and harmless ways. Rather than try to pull the digital wool over your eyes tonight, I’d rather revisit some of the better pranks from April first’s past.

Last year, YouTube allowed users to turn videos upside down by including flip=1 in the GET string of the video’s URL, turning several unaware users’ worlds upside down. That may have looked just about right to users of Google in Austrailia, who may have been temporarily enticed be the gBall, a football containing a GPS and motion sensing system used to monitor the location, force, and torque of each kick. 2009 was also the year that the UK’s Guardian stated that they would be killing their print version and going to a Twitter-only format.

In 2008, the Aussies are back at it with a claim that the new Google search tool could search into the future. YouTube also made a notable showing by RickRolling all of their featured videos that day. The Weather Underground stated that psychic research had proven the connection between hurricanes and global warming, which could have extended some credibility to a BBC video produced by Terry Jones, in which the film maker discovers a breed of flying penguin that migrates to the rain forest when things become a little less than pleasant in their wintery summer homes.

In 2007, Think Geek dropped a few new products on the market, such as the Wii Helmet and the 8-bit tie. In Their defense, Think Geek did eventually bring a real, live, 8-bit tie to market which is now available the other 355 days of the year. Google.com offered up free in-home wireless broadband, and hideapod.com offered up the ultimate iPod anti-theft device… by hiding it in a Zune. (Zing!) And having apparently missed the fallout from the bonsai kittens, or perhaps paying very close attention, the site tattooyourtoddler.com caught some flack from a few child protection organizations who had failed to check their calendars. This was also the year of the virtual tin foil hat, as it was introduced as an in-game item by Blizzard in the World of Warcraft.

In Aught-Six, the Fair Use Day.com team announced that they had joined the ranks of the RIAA, Fidofinder.com offered up a one million dollar reward for a lost dog, and iwantoneofthose.com featured a tiny device that would allow you to download your brain’s memory onto a 2GB USB flash drive. Surfers who bought that probably could have gotten away with the 500MB model.

In 2005, Google released Google Gulp, allowing you to quench your thirst for knowledge. The Auto-Drink feature and the fact that it was low in carbs were two strong selling points. Our own Chron.com was among the first to pick up prank that Maxim magazine would feature the Bush twins on the front cover, clad in lingerie, in what would appear to be the aftermath of a pillow fight. And in a one-two-punch combo on the Bush clan, SpaceDaily.com announced that Bush had canceled the Space Shuttle program.

And all the way back in 1998, an issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159… to the ‘Biblical’ value of 3.0. The newsletter soon made its way onto the web, resulting in hundreds of letters to the Alabama legislature demanding they repeal the bogus bill.

The site aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com has a pretty good compendium of April First web shennanigans dating back to 2004. They’ll also be tracking tomorrow’s 2010 fare in near real time, so rather than circularly surfing sites, just use them as your single prank portal.

And if you’re not already in the habit of doing so, tomorrow is an excellent day to start locking your desktop when you leave for a coffee break, lest you fall prey to a local prank at the hands of co-workers.

And finally, Friday, April 2nd, is the date of the April Installment of the monthly Geek Gathering. That’s no joke, though tales of the previous day’s antics won’t be turned away. We’ll be carting out an epic amount of Arduino gear in the hopes that we’ll have enough room next door to let people get the hands dirty with physical computing. If you have any of your own projects you’d like to show off or if you’d just like to work on something in the presence of kindred souls, then we invite you come on over and set up shop. The Coffee Groundz is located between Brazos and Bagby on McGowan in Midtown Houston. WiFi and geeky camradery are free, but coffee, beer, spirits, gelato and food will set you back a few bucks. Things get started around seven and are buzzing until the last geek isn’t. Which is always after ten. So join Jay Lee and the rest of the crew of Technology Bytes to get in on the action, be it digital or something made with some 100 gram heavy worsted Merino wool. Knitting reference for the win!

That’s it for your 4/1 411 and that’s that for BarretTime.

This weekend, Houston’s George R. Brown will be home to Comicpalooza. In its third year, the con has been re-invented as a multi-format convention celebrating not just comics, but also sci-fi and fantasy, horror, steam punk, New Media, movies, film, and gaming of all types. www.comicpalooza.com for details and registration information.

Also, the Texas Linux Fest is coming up in just a few weeks. Happening Saturday, April 10th, at the Marchesa Event Center in Austin, Texas, the Fest aims to be the first state-wide, community-run conference for Linux and Open Source Software enthusiasts. I don’t know how LinuCon from a few years back would factor into that, but this is definitely the first state-wide Linux conference to open with a musical morning keynote.

Delivered by Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, ‘A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux: Reprise’ will take a look at where the Linux community is, where its going, and maybe where it should be going next. Along the way, Zonker plans to show you that Open Source has more in common with popular music than you might think.

Talks and Panels cover topics such as Apache Cassandra, building your own Mail Cloud, Drizzle (the database, no relation to Snoop Dogg, yet), OpenNMS, Security Enhanced Linux, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

For all of the developers out there, you should probably pencil in the talk being presented by Janet Swisher and David Cramer entitled, ‘Benefiting from the Skills of Non-programmers’. If you just muttered ‘what skills’ under your breath, then you should probably go ahead and ink that in.

And it wouldn’t be a Linux festival without talks of installing the OS on things other than your garden variety IBM clone. ‘Linux on the PowerPC’ and ‘Ubuntu on ARM’ are two talks that fill that niche. If you want to develop for mobile platforms but don’t want to deal with the lock-down of the iPhone App Store or the awesomeness, I mean, well, you’re going to have to Google for a con of the Android platform because I’m still in love with my Nexus One, so long as Google is legally allowed to call it that. The point is that if you want to run Linux on your older Apple or Ubuntu on your ARM-powered mobile device, these talks have you covered. By the way, I mean ARM powered as in products powered with the ARM chip, not your own arms, as would be the case with our hand-crank radio of fundraisers past.

ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer, which is commonly known by the acronym RISC. The chip started out life as the Acorn RISC Machine, but underwent a name change to the Advanced RISC Machine.

In 2007, 98% of the more than one billion mobile phones sold used at least one ARM processor. Today, products like the Acer n300, the Amazon Kindle2, several of the Dell Latitude e-Series laptops and the Microsoft Zune HD all use ARM technology. So Ubuntu getting into ARM is certainly big as far as freeing the next generations of mobile devices.

So getting back to all things Linuxy, Linux Legendary Jon “maddog” Hall will be on hand at the Texas Linux Fest to talk about Project Caua, a project aimed at making it possible for people to make a living as a Systems Administrator or Entrepreneur using Free and Open Source Software and Hardware.

Randal Schwartz will be wrapping things up with a talk titled, ‘Free Software: A Look Back, a Look Ahead’ in wich he’ll be recounting some of his experiences with the history of free software, including why it works, how to contribute, and how to make money with it.

It will cost you some money to attend, but both enthusiast and supporter tickets may be purchased, depending on your particular economic situation and dedication to the scene. The supporter ticket also comes with a bag for schwag and a t-shirt. Other than that, they badges are identical.

Hit www.texaslinuxfest.org for a list of talks and links to the registration page. Again, that’s Saturday April 10th.

A little closer to home is the second of two presentations by the Houston Linux Users Group aka the Linux SIG at HAL-PC. Things get going at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters and are generally wrapped by four. Hit www.hal-pc.org for directions, then follow the link for viewing the complete SIG and Class Calendar. While you’re there, you can check out other Special Interest Group goings-on, such as the Robotics Lab that meets at 1:00 that same Saturday, or the Linux Workshop, which meets every Wednesday night at six PM at that same location. Aside from the Geek Gathering, I know of no other groups that invite you to bring your Linux problems in hardware form, along with you to a meet-up. But these guys encourage it. Just make sure to bring all the appropriate power cords, keyboards and mice. Really, everything but the monitor. And they’ll have you in the car in time to catch us, hopefully with less Linux questions than you started with.

I mentioned Project Caua earlier. The group has some fairly lofty goals that include creating millions of high tech jobs in the private sector, saving huge amounts of electricity from desktop computers, creating environmentally sound computing, making computers easier to use, and bridging the Digital Divide by creating a free wireless mesh bubble over areas of high population.

They also believe that annoyances of today like viruses, SPAM, making backups and even installing software should all be things of the past. A little less ethereal is the project’s idea to transfer oversea support jobs to unemployed people here in the US. The project believes that there are perfectly capable people who are currently on welfare that just need to be trained to do a job well and given backup support when needed. The underlying technological theme is that all of this can be done with Free and Open Source Software and Hardware. Its out there, its free, we just need to get it in the hands of the people who can benefit from it. That’s a tall order, but you don’t earn the nickname “maddog” by chasing things that are easily caught.

Hit www.projectcaua.org for more information about this group’s lofty goals.

And lastly, we have a Geek Gathering coming up in a little over a week. And while we’ve definitely hiked in a large amount of Arduino gear in meetings past, we’ll be doing doubly so a week from Friday. The Arduino platform revolves around the idea of taking a low power micro-controller, something akin to what would have set on your desktop twenty years ago in terms of power, but no bigger than a stick of chewing gum in terms of size, making it easy to tie in any assortment of electronic inputs and outputs. In the end, Arduino can mean anything from wearable computing to audience-aware art installations. And at April’s Geek Gathering, we can show you the gear that
will allow you to take your first steps into becoming a maker rather than a user. That’s it for getting a Lasso on Linux in the Lone Star State and that’s that for BarretTime.