Tofaffy

You know how everyone is always talking about their latest and greatest compiz configs? Well, compiz is great. It looks great, runs great and everything. But if you’re looking for real productivity, perhaps you should try something different.

Hello XMonad!

Xmonad is a tiling window manager. That means you don’t have to worry about where to put all those windows, it’ll arrange them for you automatically, in such a way that all screen space is occupied. It’s lightning fast, and the source code is really small. Too bad you have to download ghc, which is quite large. (XMonad is written in Haskell, and ghc is the haskell compiler.) You need ghc to be able to edit the config file, which is haskell source. That may be confusing at first, but you’ll get used to it. And for the people who believe it’s fun to edit it until it fits your needs perfectly, the possibilities are nearly endless.

If you like to tinker with programs and stuff, i’d suggest you try Arch. It’s perfect for this, you get to setup ALL programs.

One of my favourite torrent clients is Deluge. It’s like uTorrent for windows, but cooler (because opensource).

So go ahead and try it, it’s great for downloading your ‘linux isos’. It runs really light (1% cpu on my box).

Deluge is a full-featured BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface.

Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.

Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. It is our belief that downloading shouldn’t be the primary task on your computer and therefore shouldn’t monopolize system resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Though some of you may know it already, i’d like to shamelessly plug MPD, the Music Player Daemon. As the name probably gave away, it’s a daemon, playing music.

The thing is, it does that rather well. I personally don’t care about lyrics, last.fm integration (though scrobbling would be nice, but that can be done through mpdscribble (or some other programs)). I just want my music.

You can also look at it as if you have your own radiostation. That way you can listen music without actually controlling it constantly. And without some heavy music player eating your precious cpu cycles.

Read the rest of this entry »

So two days ago I took on the task of installing Arch Linux. The first two times, I thought you know “Kind of follow the tutorial, it’ll all be fine…”. FOLLOW THE GUIDE WORD FOR WORD. Period. That’s what I learned. So when I finally started following the guide more carefully - it was very easy to install. There were no major things that couldn’t be fixed or anything that I found seriously outdated. Pacman is a GREAT package manager! It’s just as easy as apt-get/aptitude, and MUCH faster. Though I am still learning I would recommend Arch to anyone. I really enjoy using it and I hope to continue using it.

I will post more later about Arch!

The guys at Techcrunchit.com came up with a great idea some time ago: a completely open source web tablet with a touchscreen.

I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

I personally think this is a great idea, especionally if it has a reasonable battery life and ofcourse you should be able to run your own apps as well (OpenTTD anyone?)

Check out the huge amount of comments on the blog post, I think there’s a fair chance this project will actually succeed.

Read the rest of this entry »

To those who have yet to learn the magic of pastebin.

If you want someone to see a conversation you have copied and don’t want to flood them with tons of messages, or have error output you want to show someone helping you out, or just anything…USE PASTEBIN. Pastebin is a very useful tool that you put text into, post it, and you can give a link to whoever you want to see it.

Support Tofaffy and use OUR pastebin! tofaffy.pastebin.com

It even has code highlighting! (some do)

Attention all Linux users! If you own a computer with a Foxconn motherboard and your ACPI doesn’t work correctly, blame it on Foxconn! In a recent article posted on Ubuntu Forums, a user was looking at his BIOS and saw a poorly written DSDT table for linux. This can cause things such as hibernation not to work.

Foxconn Logo

”
Who is Foxconn and why must we get the message to them?

I’ve heard a lot of people ask, “Who the h*ll is Foxconn”, if you use a PC, there’s a good chance you have one of their boards, even if it’s branded as MSI or some other brand, if you use a Nintendo Wii, XBOX 360, or Playstation 3, Foxconn made that motherboard, this isn’t some little dodgy hardware maker with no name that we can afford to be quiet about.
————
I have disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won’t post all the results here, I’ll tell you what I did find.

They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX.

The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board’s ACPI implementation, causing weird kernel errors, strange system freezing, no suspend or hibernate, and other problems, using my modifications below, I’ve gotten it down to just crashing on the next reboot after having suspended, the horrible thing about disassembling any program is that you have no commenting, so it’s hard to tell which does what, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy a copy of Vista just to get the crashing caused by Foxconn’s BIOS to stop, I am not going to be terrorized.
”

For more information go to here and read.

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The new site is finally in progress. I am truly sorry to all those who have been waiting. I would like to thank everyone in #tofaffy (chat room on IRC) for the help and suggestions. Please visit us in the chat room!

Read the about page for information about the aim of the site.