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2007

  • in Sports, tv
  • 1 min read

Are you ready for some football?

My favorite time of the year is quickly approaching, as we are just over a month away from the start of the college football season, and the NFL is now in full swing with training camps.

I’ve started to watch a few baseball games this year (especially when the Twins are on in HD), but nothing compares to football for me.

I was surprised to see last night that the newly formed Big Ten Network that launches Aug. 30th, will be included on the basic tier of DirecTV. And here I was already to shell out $10 / month for the sports package. I’m glad I don’t, as NFL Ticket just hit my bill. I’ll be interested to see how much HD bandwidth the Big Ten Network gets, as they keep talking about how they’re launching with the most HD content of any new TV channel. DirecTV’s new satellite doesn’t come online until October with more HD capacity, so this will be interesting to see.

In related news, I’ve gotten my hands on a few Packer tickets this year – I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see Favre play knowing this is probably his last year. (But we say that every year, don’t we?)

10 days until the first preseason game! Are you ready for some football?

Foresight Newsletter Issue 5 Released

The July newsletter is officially out the door. (And I need to stop waiting until the last day of the month to publish and give the translators time to translate).

This month we take a look at the new logo (!), the 2.0 release schedule (one of the more commonly asked questions in IRC), installing packages from rPath repositories outside the default Foresight repositories (yes, people, if you have to, you can install Amarok, but why?!) and one of pscott’s and my favorite pieces of eye candy, Avant Window Navigator. And more!

I really enjoyed writing the AWN howto – it is the first package featured in the newsletter that is not installed by default in Foresight. It was also nice to publish the upcoming 2.0 release schedule publically. It makes the 2.0 release feel more tangible, and puts a stake in the ground we can all work to.

I’m also looking for help in writing the newsletter – anything! Feature a package, a howto, you name it. Help in the wiki or email me stuff and I’ll collaborate on it. This isn’t a one man show. Read it here and don’t forget you can also subscribe to the feed in your favorite feedreader, just add http://feeds.feedburner.com/foresightnewsletter

And thanks for reading the newsletter! Enjoy!

A Feather in Conary's Hat

Reading the article “Mepis to switch from Ubuntu to Debian” one thing jumped out at me:

Woodford explained that Ubuntu is rebuilt almost from scratch every six months using source packages from Debian EXPERIMENTAL.

In using Ubuntu for almost 3 years, that was my experience as well. I formatted and installed fresh more than I just did a apt-get dist-upgrade.

And that is one of the major features of Conary – managing your applications and dependencies so you should never have to “install fresh”. Foresight, using Conary, believes in rolling releases – not big releases every 6 months, but incremental updates to keep you up to date with the latest software and security fixes.

Putting Calculus Books to Good Use

A good friend is letting me permanently borrow his 22″ monitor that he doesn’t use anymore. The timing was perfect, as I was just talking to a buddy about a week ago about his impending monitor purchase, and I mentioned I wanted to try a dual monitor setup, and now I am:

img_0053

(Click through to Flickr for larger versions, and note the Calculus books making a monitor stand on the 22″ monitor on the right).

A Dell 2405 is on the left with a default resolution of 1920×1200, a Samsung 213T is on the right running 1600×1200, both powered by a single BFG Nvidia 7950GT with the Nvidia propietary drivers on Foresight Linux. This gives me a default resolution of 3560×1200. Here’s a screenshot, click through to see a larger version on Flickr:

3560

It was easier than I expected – looking at a couple seach results in Google showed me how to add to my xorg.conf to set this up.

I added a second monitor section in my xorg.conf with the Samsung information. I then added the following lines in the Section “Screen”:

    `Option         "TwinView" "Yes"<br />
    Option      "SecondMonitorVertRefresh" "39-85"<br />
Option      "SecondMonitorHorizSync" "29-81"<br />
    Option      "MetaModes" "1920x1200,1600x1200"`

I restarted X, and voila.

You can download or view my xorg.conf here.