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This is so geek beautiful (originally from this Lifehacker article)

Remember SETI@Home? Are you still running that?

Folding@Home studies how proteins fold and more importantly, why they fold improperly and cause cancer. Don’t you think this is a better use of your computer?

It uses your spare CPU so you’ll see your CPU at 100% all the time but it yields to all other applications so you will never notice that its running. Think of it as using your whole computer all the time instead of just sucking power while running the Flying Windows screensaver.

You can find the windows installer on the Folding@Home installer, If you’d like you can join our team using the team number 50606.

Technorati Tags: folding, home, folding@home, cancer, research

I like to give all my computers original, easy to remember names. I think people cop-out if their computer name is XP-PRO or LAPTOP or LINUX. Here’s a few ideas I’ve gathered for naming schemes. Make sure you leave yours in the comments.

• The Seven Deadly Sins (My current naming scheme)
  
• lust
• gluttony
• greed
• sloth
• wrath
• envy
• pride (hubris)

• Mythical Creatures
• gryphon
• dragon
• hydra
• unicorn
• pegasus
• gargoyle
• chimera
• sphinx
• phoenix
• cerberus
• kraken
• leviathan
• wyvern

• Happy Words (thanks Carey)
• abandonment
• isolation
• hate
• despair
• revenge
• Trees
• juniper
• maple
• oak
• cedar
• pine

Update: I thought of one other one:

• alpha
• bravo
• charlie
• delta
• etc…

Firefox has some very weird licensing going on with their artwork so you can’t patch Firefox and release it yourself with the original artwork. Debian’s solution was to create their own GPL’ed artwork and rename Firefox to IceWeasel. I really can’t blame Debian for forking it plus IceWeasel is a cool name. Some of the best software in the Open Source community has been created when one programmer saw a different direction to take a piece of software.

Here are 5 Reasons to Support IceWeasel.

And then 5 Reasons to Kill it.

Technorati Tags: firefox, iceweasel, gpl, debian, artwork

Here’s a quick script that can convert m4a (AAC encoded music files) to mp3. This is a nice example of how powerful the command line can be.

It uses mplayer to write out the raw wave file, then uses lame to encode the mp3’s. After that it cleans up the file endings using sed. This script requires mplayer and lame to be installed.

It should work well on Fedora Core 5 and Ubuntu 6.

Technorati Tags: programming, bash, linux, fedora, ubuntu, lame, mplayer, command line