Actually, Chris Fenton needs your help. After constructing a 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray-1 supercomputer and finding a disk with Cray software on it, he’s ready to start loading the operating system. There’s one small problem, though: no one knows how to boot the thing. Chris posted a disk image for a Cray-1/X-MP with the help of the people at archive.org. Now he’s looking to the community for help – if you think you can reverse engineer the file system, Chris will pay handsomely with a miniature model of a Cray printed on his MakerBot. So if you think you’re the man, woman or child who can reverse engineer a Cray Bootloader, surf over to hackaday.com to lend your talents. Hopefully, they’ve already tried pressing the power button…

I never thought of cutting down a Cray like that – I wonder if you could get it small enough to fit into a Unibody MacBook chassis…

I’d definitely take a CrayBook Pro down to the local coffee shop… If you’re harboring your own plans for world domination that involve sourcing some new-to-you Apple hardware, you’ll want to clear your calendar for the morning of Saturday, January 21st for the Houston Area Apple Users Group, affectionately referred to as HAAUG. The event takes place at 7008 South Rice Boulevard from nine in the morning until one in the afternoon. The event is free to attend for casual swappers, but if you plan on hauling in more gear than you can carry under an arm, you’ll want to register for a dealer table. Info on that and more is available on the HAAUG site at www.haaug.org.

If you’re carrying an Android handset, you’ve actually got a little Linux with you wherever you go. Why not take the plunge and get to know the real deal this Saturday the 14th at the first Linux Users Group bi-monthly presentation of 2012. The group gets together from two to four in the afternoon for an hour and a half presentation on something Linuxy at the HAL-PC Headquarters. All are welcome; you don’t have to be a member of HAL-PC or a Linux Guru to attend. And…some of what you will learn about Linux can be applied to your Android phone.

If you *would* like to consider joining the Houston Area League of PC Users, there are two things you need to know. One: Despite being named a League, they don’t issue uniforms; superhero, bowling or otherwise. Though that doesn’t stop you from wearing your own. And two: While they do have a monthly general meeting, the Special Interest Groups are where it’s at. Surf their SIG calendar to see when you can converse and learn about topics diverse. SIGs include Database and Graphical User Interface Design, Microsoft Server, Genealogy, Computer Investing, Robotics, and even Sybex tech, if that’s your thing. For details, directions and this month’s list of events, hit www.hal-pc.org.

If you’re familiar with the Benoni, the Modern Benoni, the Modern Benoni Classical Variation, the Modern Benoni Four Pawns Attack, and, of course, the Benoni Defense, or even if you just know every word to every They Might Be Giants song ever written, you might want to consider reliving your high school chess club days by swinging by the West Gray Cafe Express at Seven O’Clock Monday night for a game of pick-up chess at the Houston Chess Bi-Weekly Meetup. Finally, a chance to relive the Glory days without worries of wedgies or lost lunch money…
Does anyone in the studio play chess? Do you have a favorite or signature opening?

My own highly explosive opening? Pawn to C4. And boom goes the dynamite.

That’s it for your week in geek, and that’s that for BarretTime.

If you’ve ever known the joy of owning an Apple product, then you’re no doubt familiar with the sting of obsolescence that eventually follows every purchase. One reason Apple owners may have such a bad reputation for being flashy with their gear is that they have such a short window in which to feel superior. What contempt Steve Jobs giveth, he also taketh away in the form of a steady stream of new product announcements.

My own Precious is about to be lapped by the newest line of MacBook Airs sporting Intel’s Sandy Bridge. I feel a little betrayed, and even though I knew it would happen, I didn’t think it would happen so soon. That’s the bad part. The new gear doesn’t even have to be out yet to send you spiraling into the sickly space inhabited by owners of newly old Apple hardware.

If you don’t want to follow in my footsteps of despair, your best bet is to start with something that’s old already. The only place to get your hands on old Apple gear available for sale or trade this side of Cupertino may be at the Houston Area Apple Users Group Semi-Annual Swap Meet, happening Saturday, July 16th, at the Bellaire Civic Center. The Civic Center is located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas. Things go from nine AM until noon, so chances are good you could be poring over an OS 8 manual by lunch, reveling in the fact that only Woz has control
over you now.

And when Lion hits, all you’ll have to do is pull up your Platinum Interface to catch the curiosity of any apple-head in your immediate vicinity.

And who knows… If you come across the correct hipster, you might be able to trade up to something with Sandy Bridge. Your magic word for this impromptu-swap meet will be Vintage. It also doesn’t hurt to say that music just sounds better on old (Correction: vintage) gear. Don’t go overboard and answer ‘yes’ when asked if it contains any vacuum tubes (and they will ask you) but promising to produce a vintage Apple v-neck t-shirt will definitely help you seal the deal.

For details about the group or next Saturday’s Swap Meet, surf to haaug.org. Or call the HAAUG Hotline at 832.305.5999 to find out the latest news on future HAAUG meetings or to report any blinking lights.

If you’ve had an opportunity to venture out to the Houston Hacker Space known as TxRx Labs, you would have surely noticed the spread of mechanical and electrical tools they have at their disposal. The group now intends to delve into the arts of computer science just as deeply with a series of regular discussions centered around any given area of computer science. The group is newly formed within the hackerspace, and certainly fills a bit of a void in Houston in the non-institutional comp-sci community.

So, if you’re at all interested in the amalgamation of black arts and best practices that make up the field of computer science, surf over to www.txrslabs.org and look for the CompSci @ TX/RX link.

A little more in our immediate future, the Houston Linux Users Group will be hosting their first of two monthly meetings covering topics of a Linuxy nature. Things run from two to four this Saturday afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive, Suite 200. Some past presentations can be found at the site, video.houstonlinux.org. You can also surf there to pick up the live video stream of the presentation if you can’t make it in person. The group also inhabits an IRC channel, #hlug, on irc.freenode.net in case you can’t wait until
Saturday to get your Linux fix.

A cool ancillary trivia question: Does anyone know what city the monthly magazine, “Linux Journal” calls home? It’s published by Belltown Media of Houston, Texas. A little more Trivia for you: the first issue was published by Phil Hughes and Red Hat co-founder Bob Young in March of ’94, and included an interview with Linus Torvalds.

That’s it for Apple Obsolescence Avoidance 101 and that’s that for BarretTime.

Occurring between one and three times each year, the day is superstitiously believed to bring bad luck.

Anyone want to take a shot at the clinical word denoting the fear of Friday the 13th?

Friggatriskaidekaphobia. While anyone who took some Highschool Latin can pull out the base words for fear and the number thirteen, Frigga may be unfamiliar to those not sporting Viking heritage. Frigga is the Norse goddess for which Friday is named. Pretty Friggan cool, huh? Oh yeah, I’m going to abuse this every chance I get, starting with June’s Friggan Geek Gathering. Yeah – probably best just to walk away before that gets out of hand…

Although the number 13 has had a negative connotation since Biblical times and the sixth day of the week has been considered a bad day on which to travel or to start new projects since the 14th century, the combination of the two can’t be found until the 19th century. As far as superstitions go, this one is a bit of a noobie.

While I can neither confirm nor deny this particular superstition surrounding Friday the 13th, I can try to dispell one or two more current ones.

The first? Never turn your monitor on before your workstation. I’m not sure if there was ever a time when this was true, though in the early days of Linux, it was certainly possible to damage a monitor by using an incorrect refresh rate. In the day of Energy Star compliance, monitors tend to go to sleep rather than implode, if they receive power without a video signal.

I also know a number of people who are afraid to turn off their computers, especially if they seem to be working OK. While it probably doesn’t hurt anything to leave them up and running, that isn’t exactly green behavior. Unless we’re talking servers or network gear, nightly power cycles are generally a good thing, not an invitation for something bad to happen.

In Linux circles, this is even more of a superstition, as losing uptime is considered a very Bad Thing. For instance, a server with an uptime of 400 days is inherently better than a server with an uptime of 4 days, even though the fresher server probably has a newer kernel and more current hardware. I did some checking into this myth and found out that this one is *completely* *true*.

Some geek superstitions are actually borrowed from professional athletes and gamers…

If you’re into online sports games and are having a good season in competitive play, you may have a pair of lucky socks that go unwashed for far too long. I did some light checking, and while this behaviour may not bolster your team’s standing, it will do *wonders* for your chances of catching athletes foot.

Oddly, the notion of a lucky pair of boxers hasn’t really taken hold in the Geek world. I wonder why that is…?

Blowing on dice happens not only at the craps tables of Las Vegas, but at the gaming tables of tens of thousands of paper based gamers across the US. While the moisture from one’s breath may have made early dice more likely to stick on the side closest the blower, any actual effects are mostly mythical today. There’s no harm in continuing with this one, provided you’re equipped with the appropriate breath care products.

Another one? Crossing the streams is usually considered to be bad. Outside of the realm of Proton Packs, Neutrona Wands and Particle accelerators, this is a myth. From a Geek’s perspective, the Transmission Control Protocol takes care of streams of packets getting crossed
while traversing the Internet. The only real danger is getting KPFT’s audio stream crossed with that of FOX News. Supposedly, life as we know it would stop instantaneously and every molecule in our bodies would explode at the speed of light. Actually, that sounds kinda fun on a slow Saturday night.

Anyone else have any other geek or tech superstitions?

I’d mention the superstitions about partaking in sex, drugs and rock’n'roll while spending your summer as a camp counselor at Crystal Lake, but I don’t think that any of us are in any real danger there. You probably caught that that was a reference to original Friday the 13th movie, which was actually pretty scary the first time I saw it. Of course, I was seven, so your mileage may vary.

If you *were* a kid in the early 80s, it’s entirely possible that you saw a movie starring Richard Benjamin and Jeffrey Tambor named Saturday the 14th. The premise of this 1981 work is that Friday the 13th is for noobs; the true danger doesn’t arrive until the following day, Saturday the 14th, when it’s possible to open an ancient tome that will spill forth an odd assortment of creatures, as evidenced by the the first of two monthly meetings of the Houston Linux Users Group. While power users of the Linux Operating System may seem scary to some, they’re actually completely safe to be around, provided you follow some basic rules.

Dress down. Suits and other trappings of the corporate world tend to spook Linux geeks. It’s best to go with a t-shirt, shorts and some sandals (socks are a bonus) when moving amongst large herds of linux types to avoid causing a stampede.

Linux users are primarily dossile creatures, but, just as bulls are enraged by the color red, Linux users charge and trample anything between them and a blue screen of death in an attempt to both mock it and document it with their camera phone so that the pics may be pored over during those lean periods when Microsoft happens to deploy a solid OS. This is especially true in public spaces where web kiosks, smart vending machines and public terminals may be close by.

And lastly, once you’ve become fairly comfortable moving among the monolithic kernel’d masses, be wary that you don’t become *too* comfortable. Linux users will often turn on their own when it comes to disagreements over text editors, window managers and file system choices, so it’s best to maintain an air of ambiguity if your preferences are ever called into question. “I run them all” usually works for me.

The Houston Linux Users Group gets together at two in the afternoon every second and fourth Saturday of the month at the HAL-PC Headquarters located at 4543 Post Oak Place Drive for a two hour talk that will drop some new knowledge on your superstitious self, but for now, that’s it for your Friday the 13th 411 and that’s that for BarretTime.

We’ll start out the new decade with some geek etiquette: Out of respect for the gift-giver, it’s polite to not void any warranties in the same year the gift was given. Well, we’re 5 days into the New Year and all bets are off. We’ll take a quick look at the most popular presents people received during the holidays and offer suggestions as to how you can best augment them with free software. That’s free as in price and in the ability to hack and mod to your heart’s content.

If you were lucky enough to receive an e-book reader this year, like the Amazon Kindle 3G or the Barnes & Nobles Color Nook, the first thing you should do is read up on what makes your device better than someone else’s. If you can’t defend the merits of the hardware you’re carrying, you should be prepared to have natural brown sugar kicked in your face by all the e-book jocks at your local coffeehouse.

A few survival tips: If you’re defending anything with electronic ink against something that uses a color LCD, take the fight outside into the sunlight: your opponent’s resolve will fade as quickly as their display. Conversely, if you received a reader with a color LCD, it’s imperative that you engage your opponent in low lighting levels while leveraging the power of full color content, like a current issue of a popular tech magazine. Things will fall decidedly in your favor if you’re able to select an article in the magazine that illustrates the superiority of your chosen e-reader. Tablet users: simply launch Angry Birds to derail the confrontation all together.

One thing that *all* e-book readers can agree on: Calibre. It’s a free e-book library management application, developed by users of e-books *for* users of e-books. Calibre offers library management, e-book conversion, syncing to a nearly every e-book reader out there, utilities to convert web content into e-book form, and even a content server for online access to your book collection. Think of it like iTunes for text.

And unlike the iTunes store, you don’t have to break the bank to bolster your e-book collection: there are tens of thousands of books in the public domain that can be had for free. Started in 1971 under the auspices that “anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely”, Project Gutenberg has become the de facto digital library for the classics. For user created and user contributed items, be sure to check out the 20 million+ items at OpenLibrary.org. If you’ve ever wanted to play librarian, this is the site for you.

And if you don’t have an e-book reader, hit LibriVox.org for an acoustical library liberation carried out on the music player of your choice, be it an iPod, a Zune, or a cassette tape deck in the Cutlass. The Calibre application can be downloaded from www.calibre-ebook.com and over 33,000 free books are available from Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org.

If you were lucky enough to receive an XBox Kinect, you really have your hacking cut out for you. The Kinect is a game controller built by Microsoft for the XBox. It contains an RGB camera, a depth sensor and a multi-array microphone, which provides full 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition abilities. To get an idea of what people are doing with their Kinects, simply search for “kinect hack” on YouTube. The real-time light saber and transformation into Ultra Seven, an old-time superhero in Japan, are especially cool, but shy away from the man who is projecting piercings onto his chest.

To play around with some of these hacks at home, you’ll need to install the OpenKinect driver on your laptop or PC. This driver allows the Kinect to communicate with your non-XBox system, letting you direct the stream of data into the application or utility of your choosing. This is definitely bleeding edge stuff, but if you have even moderate technical chops, you can probably get your rig up and running within a few hours. Hit www.openkinect.org for the drivers and installation directions for your particular platform.

Those were definitely two of the coolest presents for 2010. But what do you do if someone gave you something not so cutting edge? What do you do if you received an ancient 486, an underpowered netbook, a Playstation 2, a very merry VAX cluster, a toaster or even a dead badger? Guesses? That’s easy… You install Linux on it. The operating system that really gave the free software movement legs, Linux, in some form or fashion, is available for nearly every piece of computing hardware under the sun. Even badgers. Lucy A. Snyder’s book, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, walks you through the installation process on the badger of your choosing, step by step. (Supposedly, partitioning the badger is the hardest part. Well, that and the smell.) The book isn’t free, but Snyder has published the user guide to the badger installation on the web to be freely read by all. If you’re short on time and more into toast than taxidermy, you can actually buy a ready-made NetBSD Toaster from Technologic Systems on the Web. NetBSD is actually more appropriate than linux for bread-based applications due to its use of disk slices.

Just don’t tell the members of the Houston Linux Users Group that I recommended NetBSD over Linux when you attend their first bi-monthly meeting of 2011. The group gets together at the HAL-PC Headquarters located just inside the 610 West Loop near San Felipe from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon. The meeting takes the form of an hour and a half presentation over something useful you can do with Linux. As always, both noobs and gurus will be better off for having attended. Hit www.hal-pc.org for driving directions and a full calendar of their Special Interest Group meetings.

And lastly, if you have a piece of new or “new to you” tech, we invite you to bring it out to the January installment of the Geek Gathering. KD5 and I will be unveiling XyrgBee, a game that began life as a simple idea and has manifest itself in a distributed computing platform, complete with several Arduinos, some wireless communications and a matrix of 192 discrete light emitting diodes flickering faster than your eyes can perceive. That’s right! We’ll have Arduino’s there that are actually DOing something. All of this happens this Friday at 7:00 PM at The Coffee Groundz, located at 2503 Bagby at McGowan in Midtown Houston. Free wifi and geeky conversation abound, complete with a staff offering coffee, beer and wine and a light menu. Hit the Tech Bytes site at www.geekradio.com for details, directions and your own electrifying invitation.

That’s it for your first 4-eleven of twenty-eleven 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.

When Waco’s K X X V’s regular TV sportscaster became ill, college freshman Brian Collins agreed to step in. All you have to do is read the lines, right? Not too tough… Unless you happen to have been working with an inexperienced teleprompter operator who accidentally fast-forwarded through each of the scripts, leaving Collins with only a few occasional words to use. The video can be found on YouTube, and is fairly painful to watch. When you *do* get to that magical meme, Boom Goes the Dynamite, you will have suffered sufficiently to knowingly command the phrase yourself. Don’t cheat. Feel the pain. It’s the kind of awkward pain that probably made The Office such a hit…

Now that the president has delivered a teleprompter-error-free State of the Union Address and Jobs, who also achieved elocutionary excellence, has dropped the iPad on the nation, it’s time for our own local State of the Mac address to be given by Bob “Dr. Mac” Levitus at the general meeting of the Houston Area Apple Users Group next Saturday, February 20th. That gives you a full week & a half to make peace with whatever feelings you may have about the Apple iPad before Dr. Mac puts his finger in the wound once again.

I’m not letting my own personal feelings show, am I?

A number of Special Interest Group meetings take place between nine and two, with the main presentation kicking off at eleven. 7008 South Rice Avenue at the Bellaire Civic Center is where you want to be to hear what Dr. Mac has to say about everything Apple. Hit www.haaug.org for details and directions to February’s general meeting and to catch up on the group’s activities.

And if you find yourself on the PC side of the fence… Amend that. If you find yourself on the *North Side* of the PC fence, then you may want to check out the 1960 PC Users Group. That’s Farm to Market 1960, not a group of people still stuck on the Intel 4004 processor. They’re a support group of volunteers from the Spring, Tomball and Northwest Houston areas of Texas with an interest in personal computers and their usage.

And as luck would have it, their Investors Special Interest Group is meeting tomorrow night, Thursday February 11th, from seven to nine PM. This month’s special topics include Preferred Dividend Stocks and Exchange Traded Funds. There will be an open discussion during the meeting, at which point you could pose questions about modifying your investment strategy to siphon off a few dollars every month for KPFT.

I’m guessing that they would probably tell you that you’d be hard pressed to find a return similar to the one you would realize by investing in KPFT at any one of our various membership levels. Now, I haven’t looked at a prospectus in ages, but I’m pretty sure none of the Fortune 500s are offering coffee cups and t-shirts along with welcome letters. You’ll also get better voting rights with KPFT. One share out of 906 million won’t sway any elections at Apple, but a single membership in KPFT has the same voting weight as our very own Jay Lee’s membership.

Once you’ve devised your new investment strategy, you may wish to display it graphically. A personal investment pie chart, with a big slice for KPFT may be the way to go, but you’ll want to spruce it up a bit with some text overlays. If that’s the case, then next Thursday’s Graphics SIG may be for you. In addition to following up on some questions as to ‘how best to overlay text onto a photo’, the group will be discussing some non-photographic uses of graphics editors, as well as taking a quick look at the photo organizing program, Picassa.

Both of these meetings take place at the Cypress Creek Christian Community Center, located at 6823 Cypresswood Drive in Spring, Texas. The group’s website is www.1960pcug.org, where you can find a full calendar of the group’s monthly SIG meetings.

And finally, if you’re not on either side of the PC vs Mac fence, but are instead frustrated by the lack of a third option, then the Houston Linux Users Group, aka the HAL-PC Linux SIG, is where you will find like-minded individuals and a quality presentation over something Linuxy. The group meets this Saturday from two to four in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located ever so close to MicroCenter at 610 and San Felipe. Hit www.hal-pc.org then surf to their SIG Calendar for further details and directions.

That’s it for forcasting your financial future and that’s that for BarretTime.