Along with all the strange changes grub2 introduced (like not having an editable menu.lst file any more), it also provides a grub2-install command which works without having to do 25 other things manually (to be honest, I was never quite able to run grub-install from grub 1 successfully). Here’s how you recover your broken bootloader using a live disk: 1. Boot the live disk It doesn’t matter which one, and […]
Some time ago, I found an interesting recipe on the internet: the world’s first open source cola beverage. Being an open-source fan and generally interested in crazy experiments, I tried this out. Here’s my results. For the first try, I used the recipe from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCola_(drink)) Getting the ingredients First, here’s all the stuff I needed to buy: orange oil lime oil lemon oil cassia oil nutmeg oil coriander oil […]
Simon is a free speech recognition engine for Linux and Windows. Trying to make it work, I found that there is quite a lack of easy-to-understand tutorials for this software. In this article I’ll describe how to record some words and link them to commands. First, install simon. You can download the software for free. You’ll also need to install htk; you need to register at their Website, but it’s […]
Recently, I needed a rot13 encoder / decoder for an IRC channel. It’s a simple, stupid “encryption”, a Caesar algorithm with 13 letters. It’s often used to mask spoilers. Now, Konversation is an awesome IRC client for KDE, but obviously not meant to be extended by such scripts currently. Still (with much help from #konversation! 🙂 I found a working solution which is not *too* hackish. So, we want every […]
NetHack is an old role playing game which you play in a terminal (with ASCII characters). A typical NetHack screen could look like this: The game is very challenging, and really fun to play once you got used to its style. Most players play on public servers; the most widely known one is nethack.alt.org. There’s several reasons for why you want to play on a server: The default distribution of […]
When I started programming a few years ago, I was playing browser games a lot. After completing a few small projects I decided to write my own browsergame; it looked like a ridiculously easy program could be incredibly sucessful. Well, both turned out to be wrong: The programs aren’t simple, and most of them also aren’t sucessful. I was playing Travian when I decided to start this project and I […]
Google App Engine is a service provided by Google, free of charge for small to medium-sized projects. Google App Engine is a framework for Python or Java for writing web applications; the remarkable thing about it is that applications written in Google App Engine (GAE) can be uploaded to and run on Google’s servers, using their (almost) infinitely scalable database engine. Theoretically, you can publish an application there which grows […]