The video game industry is changing and has been for the past five years or so. What happened five years ago, you ask? The Wii came out. And no this is not one of those "TEH W11 FTW" articles that seemed to be so popular in the traditional press about four years ago. This is one of those "TEH W11 started a snowball effect which is influencing the entire business." What am I talking about? Is it the epic motion controls of the Wii? No, it is not. The Wii brought several news things to the table. One of which was the epic motion controls. Although I think the most influential thing it brought wa... [Full Article]

When I embed a video into my blog, it is played in your browser, which is running a Flash plugin, whose markup was transfered via HTTP, whose streaming over TCP, which is running over ethernet, which is being bounced through switches, which are told what to do by routers, which are connected to the internet, which is being routed through several continents (and probably under the ocean), to reach a computer, which is running the web server, which is running atop the operating system, whose state is held in ram, and whos files are on the harddrive, which is attached via a sata cable to the moth... [Full Article]

How do you define Art, that is the question. According to some douche-bag critic (Whose name I shall not mention) "Art" is Photography, Cinematography, Writing, Drawing, and everything except anything to do with computers. I think he is wrong, so why don't we ask someone who actually knows what she is talking about? To whom am I referring? I am, of course, referring to the loving mistress that is Google, Inc. "The products of human creativity" Interesting. If I look around, all I see is human creativity an... [Full Article]

I recently picked up a Compaq TC1000 convertible slate from SWAP (Well actually, we got four, but that's another story). Here is a proper xorg.conf for Ubuntu 10.04 for this tablet.

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "pen"
        Driver "fpit"
        Option "AlwaysCore" "on"
        Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option "BaudRate" "19200"
        Option "MaximumXPosition" "8600" # "6250"
        Option "MaximumYPosition" "6485" # "4950"
        Option "MinimumXPosition" "154"
        Option "Minim

... [Full Article]

This is an issue which arose when attempting to push an update to my mercurial server. For whatever reason, pushing through SSH did not work.

 
abe@zoey-desktop:~/abess$ hg push ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254/srv/code/private/abess/
remote: abort: There is no Mercurial repository here (.hg not found)!
abort: no suitable response from remote hg!

The fix for this is simple. All you need to do is Add a second slash after the hostname of the machine. Like this.

 
abe@zoey-desktop:~/abess$ hg push ssh://abeisgreat@192.168.1.254//srv/co

... [Full Article]

Alright fine, nobody at Google actually said that, however that does seem to be what they're doing. In regards specifically to their image searches. If you really think about it, it would be nearly impossible to write a chunk of code to sort out the 'filth' of an image search, and for that matter, it would be nearly impossible to write code to properly 'tag' images. I mean for the vast majority of things, it would be nearly impossible to write an algorithm to find or categorize them, except in the most general of sense. Then how does Google do it? They don't you do! Most of Google's bes... [Full Article]

I'll never buy an iPhone, because I can't write applications for it. "Why?", you say, "There are thousands of user created applications, what do you mean you can't write applications for it?" Let me clarify, I didn't say no one could write applications, I said I couldn't. "But why?", I hear you asking again. The answer is simple, because it's a huge investment. Chances are, you've heard that becoming an iPhone/iPod Touch developer is about $100 a year. Not too bad, right? Wrong. That is only to become a developer. If you read a bit more, you will find out that in order to ... [Full Article]

The indicator applet is awesome and it's fairly easy to configure to work with alot of applications. But what if we want to make our own applications which integrate with this new menu? Well if you're a python scripter like me, you're in luck. Lucid is packaged with a new python module called python-indicate. The best part about this new module is that there seems to be absolutely no documentation as to how it works, cool huh? I'm sure within a week or so the internet will be swarming with documentation, but as of this posting, it seems lacking. This whole thing started when I installed a ... [Full Article]

If you have been following the Hak5 podcast, you know that Darren Kitchen, the host, has been working on a super secret Rubber Ducky project for some time. Well about two weeks ago he announced that some developers would get development units, he described it as the ultimate crowd-sourcing. I got mine today in the mail, it included the Tweensy PCB, a rubber Duck, and a piece of paper with pinouts and some website URLs, here are some pictures I took of what I got. I was quite honored to receive this ducky and I will make sure to do my best to benefit the community as best I can. After I got ove... [Full Article]

I don't know about you, but I like wireless Internet. Wifi works great for most occasions, but sometimes you just need a wire. I came into a scenario like this yesterday when I needed to access the FTP on my friend's Xbox. His house is completely wireless, no ethernet line anywhere. His classic Xbox, obviously, doesn't have Wifi. What do we do? My solution was to use his netbook as a bridge. Using the built in Wifi to connect to the network then use the ethernet port to connect to his Xbox. At first I thought this seemed difficult, I would need a DHCP server and a billion other packages to ... [Full Article]

I've been using UbuntuOne for awhile now, I had it back during the initial private beta. To be honest, at first I wasn't totally sold. The client was glitchy, the servers were slow, and I seemed to get more *.u1conflict files than actual files. After about six months of little improvement, I was worried that U1 was going to fall by the wayside and become nothing more than a cheap gimmick that didn't work well and nobody used. I really stopped using U1 for several months while it was still fairly unstable. I only recently started using it again when an update came out that allow synchronizing ... [Full Article]

To paraphrase some podcast which a colleague of mine was listening to today, "You see all these big companies changing to HTML5 for a device that will be a small percent of the market." This is a good example of an Apple Fanboy accrediting something to Apple, something which Apple had little or no impact on. HTML5 has been showing up well before the iPad was announced. Before the iPad, Youtube had already created an HTML5 beta. Before the iPad, DailyMotion has already adopted the HTML5 video tag. Before the iPad, Wikipedia had already switched to HTML5's video tag. The... [Full Article]

If you are new to Linux you may not know what your fstab is. The fstab is a configuration file found at /etc/fstab, which contains information about drives and partitions on your machine. More specifically it contains information on which drives to mount, when, and how. This is achieved by specifying parameters for the drives. I've always tried to avoid my fstab. The few times I have edited it, it hasn't ended well. Generally ending with my machine not booting. Today, when I picked up my new 1.5TB hdd I decided to try to conquer the fstab once more. I had a memory of seeing a GTK based applica... [Full Article]

Anyone who has had a discussion about Youtube.com with me knows that I am not a huge fan of Youtube.com. I enjoy some of the user generated content, but I dislike the amount of pirated content currently on Youtube.com and I dislike their lack of willingness to do anything about it. Technically, Youtube.com seems to be a fine site, as long as you have an interest in uploading videos. Their interface was designed to make it easy for users to upload content. For someone like me, the interface is cluttered with tools which I don't use and more importantly, don't care about. All I would like to do ... [Full Article]

I bet you're wondering what HighQualityInternetCorn.com (or HQIC, for short) is. It is a blog. Which is not about corn in the slightest. This is a blog about Comic Books, Linux, and Video Games. HQIC is not a news site, although I will often be discussing current issues. It is in fact an opinionated blog. Which means, I will be discussing items of interest and letting you know how I feel about them. Now, I know what you,re thinking "Why do I care how you feel about something?" And to that I respond, you probably don,t. I think Blogs are useful because they allow a large n... [Full Article]