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The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems brings you a test to see if your ISP is throttling BitTorrent traffic from your computer. At the end of the tests, it also gives some nice statistics on your upload and download speeds.
http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php
In the wake of the recent internet traffic monitoring law passed in Sweden, it is highly overdue to get serious about encryption. First off, e-mail encryption, focusing on PGP/GPG. Below are a some useful links:
Enigmail: PGP/GPG extension for Mozilla Thunderbird.
FireGPG: GPG extension for Mozilla Firefox. Brings e-mail encryption to Gmail, and any other website with GPG content.
GpgOL is a plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2003, by the maintainers of GnuPG.
GPGoe is a GPG plug-in for the Microsoft Outlook Express.
For even more links about PGP/GPG and related tools, see Folkert van Heusden’s collection of information.
WINE version 1.0 was announced today, and this got me thinking maybe I could run some of the old games I used to play some 15 years ago. Well, at that time, Windows wasn’t needed at all, so I turned to another great project: DOSBox, an excellent MS-DOS emulator, focusing primarily on games.
So I had to dig out some old games then. Doom seemed like a natural first choice, and after a bit of shifting through various groups, it ran fine. In fact, below you can see a screenshot of Doom, Doom II and Hero’s Quest all running at the same time under Fedora 9.
yum install dosbox
Today, this gave me dosbox.i386 0.72-4.fc9.
* Start up by simply typing: dosbox
* In the DOS-terminal, type: CONFIG -writeconf dosbox.conf
* Exit the terminal by typing “exit”
* You will now find the file dosbox.conf in your current directory.
* Move and rename this file: mv dosbox.conf ~/.dosboxrc
* Next time you start DOSBox, it should say: “CONFIG:Loading primary settings from config file /home/username/.dosboxrc”
On the initial start up, DOSBox gave the following error messages, which many people have reported:
MIXER:Can’t open audio: No available audio device , running in nosound mode.
ALSA:Can’t subscribe to MIDI port (65:0) nor (17:0)
To start with the last issue, the MIDI port. This was easily fixed by updating the midi-section in the .doxboxrc config file created above. Theses settings works for my onboard “VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8233/A/8235/8237 AC97 Audio Controller”
[midi]
mpu401=intelligent
device=alsa
config=128:0
The second issue required the PulseAudio server to be started. Simply typing pulseaudio will take care of that. You can verify that it is working correctly by runnging paplay /usr/share/sounds/generic.wav, and you should hear a small sound.
After this DOSBox reported no more errors, and would play both MIDI and sound effects. For some games, you need to “install.exe”/”setup.exe” to set the sound properties. Make sure the IRQ, DMA and port settings match the settings in your .dosboxrc. (Had you also almost forgotten your favourite IRQ/DMA setting? 
)
Try out this super cool Flash game:
http://www.spudmud.com/games/23-Heli-Invasion-2/
Also, make sure you download Firefox 3, so you can increase the Flash app by pressing CTRL++
http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/
After updating to Fedora 9 today, Autologin was disabled. It seems it has been deliberately taken out. The current fix for Gnome is as follows:
Edit /etc/gdm/custom.conf
[daemon] # http://live.gnome.org/GDM/2.22/Configuration TimedLoginEnable=true TimedLogin=yourusername TimedLoginDelay=0
You might want to set the delay to a few seconds. More information here:
http://dnmouse.webs.com/autologin.html
Stefan Grothkopp has put out a very slick, and fun, command line interface to Google, running in your browser. http://goosh.org
Things to try:
> w street parade ... > 1 > p zurich
Along the same lines, Surfraw and the likes of Links, Lynx, and w3m will do about the same, in your console.
$ sudo apt-get install surfraw w3m ... $ sr google test
(Note: the Debian/Ubuntu packages work fine, however Fedora’s repositories hold an older, broken version of Surfraw.)
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