aprigliano.org

I was just reading 20 Reasons The World despises Norton Anti-Virus and I thought to myself,"Hmmm, wouldn't it just be easier to just not do things that would get viruses on your system."

In my moment of clarity my brain said "It seems anything that A) uses Internet Explorer seems to be a gaping hole and B) email is the other obvious place where naughty things get in."

So here is the not so fool proof method to not getting most of the garbage the world offers Windows...

1. Install Firefox or Opera and delete all Internet Explorer shortcuts. Don't use I.E.if you do not have to. Period. It's rendering engine is not up to current spec, has holes bigger than Aunt Birtha's mu-mu, and it allows the nefarious underbelly of the Internet unfettered control of your machine. There, I said it.
   
2. Make sure your ISP's email server has anti-virus and spam catching. If it does not, get a Gmail account. Then Do Not Use Outlook or Outlook Express – they both use the I.E. rendering engine – and that is a bad thing. If you do not want or like using web mail through your browser (which is NOT I.E. anymore) then use Thunderbird. And don't run executable attachments. Just don't. Event if it came from Grandma.
3. Do not do naughty things or go to naughty sites. You may think you are saving money by downloading Photoshop from “1337War3zHax0rzPr0n” but in the end, you will need to reload your system because “1337War3zHax0rzPr0n” really did not have your best interests at heart when the Photoshop installer came with an adware/spyware/irc bot that disabled your anti-virus and changed and locked your home page to “p0n3d1337War3zHax0rzPr0nMoreMoneyForTheBadGuy.com.”
   

Now, after all that, the AVG antivirus you download and will be more of a suspenders to the belt of better programs and behavior. You are 90% there.

Labels: AVG, firefox, gmail, opera, rant general, tech general, thunderbird, windows

Kurt's (my work roomate) South Park Family (Kurt is the one with the beer.)



Again, go South Park yourself at http://www.sp-studio.de/

Labels: south park

From Atom Smasher

Labels: tech general

sMeet John and Christel

Labels: south park

The following post is useless to most of the world. But, if you are tying to build a MythTv from the Knoppmyth Linux distribution, the following would have been nice to find if you are trying to get XvMC working with an Nvidia graphics card and using the Nvidia binary drivers (Knopmyth takes care of the instalation of those drivers for you.)

Add the following lines to /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 after 'Driver "Nvidia"' (this would also be true, I believe, in /etc/X11/xorg.conf if xorg is your desktop underbelly.) Pico is my text editor of choice, so I would "pico /etc/X11/XF86Config-4" as root at a command prompt.

Option "NvAGP" "1"
Option "RenderAccel" "1"

From my purely layman understanding of the Nvidia binary drivers for Linux, the "NvAGP" piece opens up the the card so you can use the acceleration (What about PCI or PCI Express as aposed to AGP Nvidia cards? Don't know. Don't own one.) and "RenderAccel" turns it on.

You will then need to CRTL-ALT-Backspace to restart gdm.

Then in MythTv manuver through the menus "Utilities/Setup" -> "Setup" -> "TV Settings" -> "Playback." Then select "Standard XVMC" for Preferred MPEG2 Playback. If you need to deinterlace the picture, choose the "Deinterlace" checkbox and select "BOB (2x framerate)" - it too uses XVMC for calculations.

Knoppmyth does a great job and really nails it on so many levels, including pre-compiling Linux with XvMC ready to go, but I needed to add those two lines to the configuration file.

And after 4 weeks of various hairloss, this was the voodoo that did the trick in being able to watch HDTV pulled in by a pcHDTV card and watching it on an old 1.7 Ghz Pentium 4.

If you ran into this because you are making the google rounds trying to get your MythTv box going, or you know a better way, please, leave a comment and let me know.

Labels: hacks, knoppmyth, linux, mythtv, nvidia, xvmc