Okay, what do these logos have in common?
They all use stripes, and they’re ugly. Ugly, I tell you. I don’t know why, but I hate logos that use stripes like these. Please, just use gradients, drop shadows, or just go psycho with the gloss.
Takeaway lights script
23 December 2008I just stumbled across a simple yet fun script I wrote over a year ago to animate your keyboard LEDs:
#!/bin/sh LED="setleds -L" SLEEP="sleep 0.2s" $LED -num -caps -scroll if [ "$1" = "-c" ] ; then exit 0 fi while [ 1 ] ; do $LED +num $SLEEP $LED +caps $SLEEP $LED +scroll $SLEEP $LED -num $SLEEP $LED -caps $SLEEP $LED -scroll $SLEEP done
It will simply pulsate the keyboard LEDs from left to right. Note that this script only works while logged into a tty — it does not work under X11.
VirtualBox 2.1.0 does OpenGL 3D acceleration
18 December 2008VirtualBox 2.1.0, released today (see the changelog), does OpenGL 3D acceleration, which is something I have been hanging out for for a very long time. It doesn’t yet do Direct3D acceleration, but OpenGL is sufficient to run many popular games, namely ones based on the id Tech 3 (Quake III Arena, Jedi Knight II, Jedi Academy, Alice, etc.), Half-Life, or Source engine.
The 3D acceleration works with a Windows guest (with guest additions installed), and works on any host operating system (including Linux).
The above screenshot shows me running Quake III Arena in Windows XP in VirtualBox 2.1.0 in Gentoo, which is running at 52fps.
It is quite ironic that VirtualBox only supports OpenGL acceleration. VMware has had 3D acceleration for a while now, but they have only supported Direct3D, not OpenGL. So I suppose in the meantime, you can use VirtualBox for OpenGL games, and VMware for Direct3D games. Everybody’s happy!
Update: I filed a bug report in the VirtualBox bug tracker saying that WineD3D should be used to achieve Direct3D acceleration.
Internode unmeters ABC iView
11 December 2008This is awesome: ABC iView is now unmetered for Internode customers.
In addition to their other unmetered services (including SourceForge), VoIP, and (relatively) gigantic download quotas, there is now absolutely nothing stopping us from switching to Internode from iiNet.
