---
date: "2001-01-05T22:38:00Z"
title: Does He Ever Update His Page?
---

Here's the big update I've been promising.  First, I realized I never
told anyone about my new system.  Here's what I've got: Duron 700,
GeForce 2 MX TwinView, 128 megs of RAM, a 45 gig UDMA66 Western Digital
hard drive, a Hauppage WinTV Go, a SoundBlaster 128 PCI, and an
Intellimouse Explorer (that's right, the 
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/mouse/">best mouse in the world</a>).
Caveats:  The NVidia Linux driver does not currently support the
TwinView feature, although I did pop my cursed S3 ViRGE in and give
multihead a try.  You can check out the screenshot
<a href="/screenshots/20001207-2030-2048x768-multihead.png">here</a>.
Also, I'm still having a bit of problems with the WinTV card under
the 2.2.x kernel.  2.4.0 was just released yesterday, but I have to wait
for 2 things: the <a href="http://www.kerneli.org/">International
Kernel Patch</a> (so I can access my 500 meg encrypted partition), and 
support for the NVidia kernel module.  I've read that
<a href="http://www.darkrock.co.uk/">[Bb]o[wr]is.*</a> ported the 
driver to 2.3.x, but I haven't actually heard anything from NVidia or
talked to him about it, so I'm going to wait and see.  Until then,
the WinTV is off-limits unless I feel like either rebooting afterwards
or risking the "magical disappearing filesystem game of fun" (I already
lost several great Bjork MP3s).  On the positive side, I was getting
hard locks until I manually upgraded the i2c and bttv kernel modules;
now I just get wierdness that requires a reboot.
<br /><br />

As for the page, I've been making changes here and there.  The most
notable change is probably the sidebar;  I decided it didn't really
fit with the look for the rest of the page, so I added a bumpmapped
effect to it's image as well.  Let me know what you think.  The 
astute readers will note the addition of a CVS link on the sidebar;
yes, I've got a CVS server with some stuff I'm working on, and no,
it's not ready for public consumption just yet.  I'll let y'all know
when it's ready.
<br /><br />

Software, software.  I've been trying out tons of new stuff since I
got this new machine.  First of all, 
<a href="http://divx.euro.ru/">AVI File</a> is one of the best
media players I've seen in a while.  It plays (suprise!) AVI files,
including -- everyone's favorite --
<a href="http://divx.ctw.cc/">DivXs</a>.  I grabbed all my roommate's
DivX's, and I've been watching them while I wait for 2.4.x so I can
use my WinTV again.  The other thing I've been using a lot is
<a href="http://www.gkrellm.net/">GKrellM</a>.  
<a href="http://www.richlowe.net/">Richlowe</a> tried to get 
me to install it a few months back, but I never bothered listenign to
him.  Well, I wish I had.  GKrellM has replaced all my epplets, and 
it uses less CPU time, less desktop space, and actually does a lot 
more (line in volume control, mousewheel support, better theming, 
etc etc).  I don't have it in a screenshot yet, but I'll take one soon
so you can see my new and improved desktop.  Finally, I've been
playing around with 
<a href="http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/">VNC</a> a bit.  It's
sort of like 
<a href="http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/screen/">screen</a>,
but for X.  Basically, you launch VNC, start some X applications,
then you can reconnect from other machines, even MacOS and Windows
machines.  Or a web browser!  The protocol isn't encrypted, but it's
cake to set up SSH port forwarding
(ssh -C -L localport:remotehost:remoteport remotehost, then start the
VNC viewer).  Finally, i started using 
<a href="http://freshmeat.net/news/1999/10/26/940930996.html">LogColorise</a>
for my logs.  You can see it in any of my
<a href="/screenshots/latest.jpeg">latest screenshots</a>.
<br /><br />

Well, that about covers it.  I'll update more later...