GemCraft 2 – Chapter 0

*Yay*! Armor Games released Gem Craft 2 – Chapter 0! I absolutely loved Gem Craft 1 and I couldn’t wait for the next round of that fabulous game. I don’t do much games on my computer in general as I have much better things to do, but I couldn’t stop playing Gem Craft.

It’s a fantastic Tower Defence with nice sounds, graphics and an amazingly entertaining gameplay. The major drawback is, that it’s flash based 🙁 (I wonder whether one could make swfdec to save the state of a flash game, like a virtual machine in QEmu…) I haven’t tried the new game extensively yet, but I’m sure that this game will cost me the next weekends 😉

If you like Tower Defence games, you’ve got to try CreepSmash as well. It’s an open and free multiplayer Tower Defence written in Java. It lacks nice graphics and sounds (and security 😉 ) but it’s definitely amusing to plan and play against other (real) player.

Happy playing!

LINUX VIRTULIZATION KERNEL DEVELOPER

Imagine a job as a Linux Kernel Developer; now imagine this job inside of Microsoft. Well, it looks like Hell has frozen over, if that sounds like something impossible and you like doing the impossible and you want to be part of an exciting change, than this job is for you.

see the original post. (The typo in the title was copy&pasted from there…)

I love the “looks like Hell has frozen over” part 😀

Got Linux? Trade MP3s for chocolate :)

If you happen to live in Germany and incidentally like chocolaty things, you might already have seen that you are eligible to download 20 MP3 files, with every bigpack Hanuta you buy. At least that’s what the ads say.

You are supposed to visit http://www.20songsgratis.de/ which doesn’t even run properly in my browser. It demands JavaScript, but even if you allow JavaScript for three domains, it wants to run a flash file… After managing that, I was  supposed to download and execute a strange Win32 binary. I was fed up and I searched for a contact address. I didn’t succeed in first place, but as I know that Hanuta is made by Ferero, I searched their website. The webform didn’t accept my email address because it thinks that “+” is an illegal character for email addresses *sigh*.

So I wrote that I assumed I could download MP3s somewhere but it’s not possible because they only offer a strange smelling binary and how I could get my music now. Of course they have to give it to me because they advertised it and didn’t say what is needed to get them.

After a few days, a nice woman called me and was very sorry that this MP3 thing doesn’t run with Linux and next time they’ll look after it and she was again very sorry. Then she offered me a chocolate package as kind of a refund ^^ Of couse I didn’t say no *yummie*

So, if you got this Linux thing and want some chocolate, go out and buy these Hanuta packs and complain to Ferero 😉 It’ll also help to bring Linux to the peoples mind.

Ferero Box

Ejecting IBMs UltraBay

If you run this linux thing, have an IBM/Lenovo Notebook and own a docking station as I do, you might want to undock your beloved laptop every once in a while. It turns out that the Thinkpad has to run, because you have to “eject” the notebook. So if your Thinkpad is suspended, you can’t just take it.

I have no idea why this is important though. I’d say that linux is smart enough to cover USB, Power, external VGA, etc. losses.

If the driver crashed and you don’t want to turn off your computer, you’re pretty doomed, especially because /proc/acpi/ibm/bay doesn’t exist (anymore?) and you have no obvious interface to eject your notebook. But there is good old sysfs for the rescue:
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/dock.0/undock

Your HAR2009 Tickets

I received my ticket for the HAR2009 which takes place from August 13th till August 16th somewhere in the Netherlands!

If you buy your ticket until 2009-03-31, you’ll get a 25 Euro discount. If you additionally use the code “SURFBIRD”, you’ll get additional 5 Euro off. That translates to 150 Euros for a ticket.

I hope, it’s going to be an awesome CCCamp this year 🙂 I’m really looking forward to this hackers holidays.

HAR Ticket
HAR Ticket

DAAD result

I got my result from the DAAD after I have been there a few weeks ago!

Turns out, I won’t get the stipend, but I am on kind of a list, if anybody drops out. I consider that rather unlikely so I’ll concentrate on other methods to get some money. By the way: If you have some spare money and don’t know what to do with it, consider giving it to me 😉

Anyway, I still need a language test from IELTS before I can apply at the DCU and start looking for a space to live.

Howto Install CarvFS on your Ubuntu 8.10

I found a howto via forensikblog which wasn’t pretty good because it missed some details and installed CarvFS into your systems directories. You maybe want to have the carving files seperate from the rest of the system. So here comes a Howto Install CarvFS on your Ubuntu 8.10 machine:


cd /tmp/
sudo mkdir /opt/$USER/
sudo chown $USER:$USER /opt/$USER
mkdir /opt/$USER/carvfs
wget -O-  'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ocfa/libcarvpath-0.2.0.tar.gz?use_mirror=mesh' | tar xvzf -
cd libcarvpath*
sudo apt-get install -y libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev
./configure --prefix /opt/$USER/carvfs && make && make install
cd /tmp/
wget -O-  'http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ocfa/carvfs-0.4.1.tar.gz?use_mirror=mesh' | tar xvzf -
cd carvfs*
sudo apt-get install -y libfuse-dev
export CFLAGS="-I/opt/$USER/carvfs/include/"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/$USER/carvfs/lib/"
./configure --prefix /opt/$USER/carvfs && make && make install

Happy Hacking

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
This work by Muelli is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.