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Penguin Pete's Blog

Penguin Pete's Blog
Being an extraordinarily geeky site about Free and Open Source Software and the wonders thereof. Full site features include the hippest FOSS blog on the 'net, a gallery with over 400 wallpapers at this count free for download, source code, distro rev

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Son of the Return of the Rock-n-Roll DOSBox Freak Show
2009-11-06 19:49:00
From here on out, game reviews for abandonware DOSBox titles should be in the fall and winter. Who wants to play video games when it's 76 and sunny out? But after the time change, when the sun drops dead as soon as you get off work and the frost is forming by six, that's the time when you want classic DOS video games. Because there's only so many hours you can spend reading the Internet before you go all Jack Nicholson on the snowbound household. Cartooners You're not going to believe this, but Electronic Arts published this way back in 1989. Yes, the same people who brought you The Sims! This is a doodle toy, plain and simple. Click and drag backgrounds, props, actors, and speech balloons to create little frames, which you can animate and add music to and so on. There must be 100 Flash applications online these days that let you do the same thing in your browser, but in 1989 this made everyone who owned a 386 PC into the next Warner Brothers, as they, too, could now make up ...
More About: Linux Gaming , Return , Freak , The Return

When Do I Get My Own Reboot Girl?
2009-11-06 03:20:00
I loved the two clips from Japanese television demonstrating the new Windows 7 release - or rather, demonstrating that it still crashes! But a new development has me a little jealous. In the second clip, from 'FailPost.com,' we see some news anchor trying to show off the touch-screen interface. So it freezes on him, and they bring out a woman who squats in front of the monitor and seems to have the sole function of rebooting the computer whenever it fails. He has his own Reboot Girl! There she is at 1:06, and again at 1:55. The first time she humbly stays crouched over as she moves back out of frame after earning her keep making the magic box listen to Mr. Vest again. The second time, she stays in the frame for a while all "You gonna be needing me again?" And she sits like that kneeling for a minute before choosing a second when Mr. Vest walks across the frame before scuttling back behind the furniture again. Her face is never allowed to turn to the camera. Where do they keep...
More About: Humor

Des Moines Iowa Searches For Brad Paullin
2009-11-04 19:58:00
http://www.kcci.com/news/21500867/detail. html This post is about local Iowa news. A man named Brad Paullin disappeared Halloween night and hasn't been seen since. He was last seen heading into the woods along the Des Moines river in Des Moines, Iowa, after an argument with his housemate. (Note The Google-Maps satellite data is old, taken last winter.) The woods that people are searching are right by where I am, and since I like exploring in there, I took a hike through there myself - found no clue. I did find plenty of other people searching for him though, along with the occasional helicopter. These woods are not all that hazardous. At one of the Greenbelt's widest points, I can steam right through from street to the Des Moines River in about 40 minutes. It's a vigorous 40 minutes for a 40-year-old armchair computer jockey, mind you, but nothing too daunting to someone of average physical fitness. I'm just saying, even if you were lost, a maximum of 40 minutes in a straig...

Inkscape Tutorial - An Isometric Tileset - part 3
2009-10-27 15:02:00
Continuing our experiment in Inkscape 0.46, we'll find out how to do the more sophisticated isometric tricks. Skew Any object can be skewed, simply by using the 'transform' dialog. For instance, here's an old ray-trace of mine imported into inkscape and skewed vertically by - remember the isometric magic number! - 30 degrees. Quite handy should the citizens of your isometric town be taking in a matinée! You might want to scale the bitmap when you import it, smaller in the horizontal direction only. It will look crunched when flat, but after getting skewed 30 degrees it won't look stretched. This pretty much opens up unlimited possibilities. You can simply draw square tiles in any bitmap editor, import them, skew them, and mash them into the set. Here is a square I filled with Gimp's default 'pine' wood texture, which I then imported, skewed, copied, flipped, and overlapped a couple of sides of our base cube at 50% transparency so the shadows fit, then added a short bas...
More About: Tutorial , Part

Inkscape Tutorial - An Isometric Tileset - part 2
2009-10-26 14:51:00
Continuing our experiment in Inkscape 0.46, we'll take our isometric tileset from the previous part and add some more objects to it. A brick wall Some objects you'll want to set to a permanent color. Here, I've taken the eighth-cube base and opened the 'fill n stroke' dialog to the HSL tab, then, without changing the lightness, set the color on each side to hue: 1, saturation: 255. You can also change these colors if you want your bricks to be darker, of course, just remember to keep the consistent color scheme where the top is lightest, the left face is medium, and the right face is darkest (or however you decided on your lighting scheme). Additionally, because bricks have mortar, I've added a stroke colored just a hair darker than pure white. I've also duplicated that, making one cube and one brick shape: Now just stack-em-up, and group 'em together. Notice that I've gotten the face of the brick wall exactly to scale with the base block. Flat tiles To speed thing...
More About: Tutorial , Part

Inkscape Tutorial - An Isometric Tileset - part 1
2009-10-25 17:40:00
Oh, happy day! Now that I'm upgraded to Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu 9.04, I can start doing vector tutorials again. Today, let's see about making an isometric set of objects which can be quickly dragged around to build structures. The concept here is to have a vector pack, with which we can create images from a set of building blocks, in an environment where we know everything is going to behave. "Behave" is a keyword in isometric art; you have to be an absolute control freak, or the result will look sloppy. Start by creating a new document and changing the properties. I use a 400x400 pixel work area, which seems to be enough for storing a vector set. Now in the 'grid' tab select a new "axonometric" grid. I have mine set for spacing - 3 pixels, X and Z angles left at the default 30 degrees, and major grid line every 6 lines. This ensures that my major-lines area will subdivide nicely into halves and thirds. You will want to enable snapping here, too. Turn on as much as you're ...
More About: Tutorial , Part

Game of the Day - Neverball
2009-10-23 23:08:00
It's about time I paid attention to Linux gaming, isn't it? My fancy new machine with excellent OpenGL support can finally run games like Neverball smoothly and flawlessly. Neverball, for those of you lagging behind, is a game of skill where you attempt to move a series of platforms and structures in such a way as to move a ball around collecting coins and then over a goal. Obstacles and perils lie in your path - you'll have to navigate catwalks, bumpy roads, bumpers, blockades, ramps, and every crazy path element you can possibly draw in GTKRadiant. Without falling off. This is much, much harder that it looks. Anyone watching you will conclude that you're drunk as a sailor. Some tips I've discovered so far: Screenshots go to your "~/neverball/" directory. Go into the "~/.neverball/neverballrc" file and change the mouse_sense number to a lower number for greater sensitivity - I have mine to 100 for a bog-standard Logitech Trackball. Most of the time you want camera on 'm...
More About: Linux Gaming , Game

I'll Bet ?Richard ?Heene Has Seen 12 Monkeys!
2009-10-19 15:03:00
It's so weird, it had to have come from Colorado. The Balloon Boy story seems to be tailor-made to snag the geek community's attention. It has all the elements of a Science Fiction movie: A couple that lives for the media, a "mad scientist" (authorities and most of the rest of us are only sure about the "mad" part), there's the flying-saucer-shaped balloon itself, yards of aluminum foil ("May I borrow your hat? I'm building something."), and then there's all that white-knuckle action with the Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopters chasing it. Being the rabid Terry Gilliam fanboy that I am, as soon as I saw this story I immediately thought of the 1995 film 12 Monkeys. One of the subplots in the film involves the news covering a boy who is supposedly trapped in a well, causing various rescue efforts including lowering a monkey with a roast beef sandwich down the well to try to nourish the boy until he can be rescued. As in real life, the story causes a media frenzy on TV and the radi...

Gnome is Rapidly Becoming My Least Favorite Desktop
2009-10-11 21:59:00
Part of my motivation when I made the big switch from Slackware to Ubuntu was a desire to step out of my comfort zone and give something different a try. And while I've warmed up to Ubuntu - heck, I even like it at times! - I'm still cold on Gnome. For reasons like this: Such a simple thing! I want to hit F11 and have Emacs open. Gnome's set-up already has slots for starting web browser and terminal, so I'm able to have half of the default key scheme I've had for going on a decade now. F12 starts gnome-terminal and F10 starts Firefox, leaving the F11 key dead like a missing tooth. As you might guess at this point in the whine, try it yourself. No emacs! Changing the command to just plain 'emacs' doesn't work. Restarting Gnome doesn't work. Disabling every single other keyboard shortcut doesn't work. For the record, 'F9' doesn't launch ABIWord, either (you can see I tried that in the screenshot, too), but one problem at a time. Googling gets you a recommendation of...
More About: Reviews , Desktop

An Open Letter to Steve Ballmer: Didn't Your Mother Teach You To Say "Thank
2009-10-07 17:58:00
Seriously, Mr. Ballmer, your lack of gratitude to your best friend in the Linux community is appalling. I am talking about Ken "Helios" (named after the Greek god of the sun) Starks, who has recently helped defeat your main competitor a little further this year. I know that Linux sometimes worries you, though you may laugh it off in public. This year, Mr. Starks pulled off a real coup. He collected money as donations from the Linux community, then paid big bucks to a radio station to run a scratchy, echoey, low-fi "radio commercial" for Linux. But hold on! Not just any radio program, but the commercial slot during Kim Komando's show - a long-time Microsoft advocate. So the ad dollars literally went into your pocket - straight from desktop Linux users all over the world! Isn't that sweet for you, Mr. Ballmer? But that's just the beginning. By collecting money, time, and resources out of the limited reserves of the Linux user base, Starks has ensured that funds which could have ...
More About: Humor , Steve , Open , Letter , Steve Ballmer

A POVRAy Modeler - Some Progress
2009-10-05 13:19:00
So I'm disappointed at the sorry state of modelers for POVRay on the Linux desktop. And thinking I can do something about it. I don't want to get any hopes up, so this is not a promise or guarantee that I'll complete a release-worthy program. But at least I am seeing if I have enough skill points on my character sheet to create a GPL-licensed POVRay SDL (Scene Description Language) parser, editor, and modeler in Python. My target language has a very C-like syntax. Not very flavorful, but robust and clear. I state again, that my program will NOT need to "understand" or execute POVRay. Instead of wire-frames, I'll be calling POVRay itself for the preview/editing camera views. So my problem is reduced to one of simple semantics. See a brace? That's a child of the previous item. See a hash? That's a directive. And so on. As long as it's digested into blobs that will show up in the tree doohicky and you could add another blob by clicking a button, I will declare victory. I coul...
More About: General , Progress

It's Actually An African Word Meaning 'Glass Plane You Look Through'
2009-10-03 10:09:00
Just following the news feeds, checking out the stories to find out what this new-fangled PlayOnLinux thing is, when I get to the story on unixmen.com and happen to mouse over the keyword 'Ubuntu.' Oh, and you can't miss with this marketing. Because you've seen one operating system, you've seen 'em all, so of course anybody clicking on 'Ubuntu' wouldn't even notice that they've ended up at a completely different company...
More About: Humor , Word , Meaning , Glass , Plane

She Doesn't Have Your Ears...
2009-10-02 00:15:00
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story. php?storyId=113387960&ft=1&f=1001 Ardi is the new celebrity of the past, in the category of "earliest possible one of us." And I can't help but see that the default monkey head in Blender at least looks related, although with more ears and less hair.

Let Me Get This Straight - There Are Now NO POVRay Modelers For Linux?
2009-09-30 14:38:00
NONE? Zero, zip, swabbo, nothing? Empty, the opposite of full? Because there must be a thousand POVRay front-ends out there that I can find at the end of a Google search, and every last one of them has eliminated itself in some way or another. Being mesh-only modelers - Like Wings 3D. It exports to POVRay. Great! But it does that as all mesh2 objects, even a simple sphere. Look, if I want mesh, I'll use Blender. POVRay is for CSG. Being Windows only - like Bishop3D. How many POVRay modelers does the Windows platform need, anyway? One billion, ten billion, what? As I understand it, Windows users would rather run something like Bryce anyway. Being proprietary and commercial - CYCAS just loves cudly ol' Linux . Unfortunately, these people think they can make money off of a POVRay front-end. Far be it from me to disturb that fantasy. Not born yet - Y.A.P.R.M. - Yet Another PovRay Modeller is porting a Linux version. I tried the alpha. Thanks, it ran, and I got a shiny, beautiful int...
More About: General

Little Annoyances Moving Into Ubuntu
2009-09-26 05:46:00
As much as everybody complains about fast food restaurants, there are reasons why they're so successful. They're consistent. A burger at an East coast location in the restaurant chain is the same burger you could order on the West coast. They're crappy, but it's a kind of processed, homogenized, not-quite-too-bad crappy that makes it something that you'll just barely tolerate when you have to. Actually, Ubuntu has made some improvements in recent years. Now that I have a faster machine, I barely notice that this is still the slowest Linux distro around. Packages now work more often than they don't work. The color scheme still makes me think of a design I could make by throwing up after consuming a root beer float and Cheetos. Going by the cute trick of searching Firefox's page history for 'Ubuntu', which brings up everything I searched Google for the solution for, here's the many misadventures I've had so far in Ubuntuland and the solutions, or lack of, I came up with: ...
More About: Moving

Send Warm Coats to Hell - I've Switched to Ubuntu
2009-09-24 21:53:00
In my last post, I mentioned that I hadn't gotten around to blogging on my birthday. There's a reason for this. Grab some coffee for a long yarn. See, I'd gotten a new box, and I was so determined to wait for the 13.0 release of Slackware, that I was content to twiddle with Windows while I waited. Slackware hit final, and I rejoiced. And I actually got Slackware 13.0 installed and running like a top on the new box. But I was still running my old machine for daily use. The thing with Slackware is, it takes me a month or so to set up before I'm ready to move in. All that geeking around takes time, you know. This release saw vast changes to Slackware - the package format changed. This meant even fewer packages would be available then. If I wanted anything not included in the 3 Slackware disks (the other three are source code), I'd have to compile it myself. After installing the libraries and dependencies, of course, which I would also compile myself. Dropline, which I praised ...
More About: Ubuntu , General , Coats , Hell , Send

It Ain't Easy Being 40 on the Web...
2009-09-23 22:09:00
I should have blogged it yesterday, but it was my 40th birthday. What's wrong with being 40 on the web is the generational shift; this chart from business week breaks down which generations do and don't partake of various aspects of the web. Note that for the most part, teens and early 20s are the ones making full use of it. They're the majority of Blogistan, they're the social news site submitters and commenters, they're the Twitter and Facebook audience. Which leaves me with two generation gaps at the same time. Here I am in the crack between Generation X and the last wave of the Baby Boom. If I try to discuss technology with anybody of my age group in real life, I'll get this dumb-cow-chewing-cud reaction. Computers? Are those the big box things with the reels of tape and the cards with the little square holes? ?And then I go online, and now I'm this cranky old guy rolling his eyes at the massively dumb and juvenile culture. Plus, being a power-user freelance/coder/des...

Four Web Browsers Go To The DriveThru...
2009-09-18 18:38:00
Just one of those ideas that I couldn't get to fit within the constraints of Doomed to Obscurity.
More About: Browsers , Humor , Web Browsers

Four Web Browsers Go To The DriveThru...
2009-09-18 18:38:00
Just one of those ideas that I couldn't get to fit within the constraints of Doomed to Obscurity. UPDATE Wow, the Reddit hits for this one are over 9000!* Thanks for dropping by! *Yes, I know it's a lame meme. That's why I hung a lampshade on it.
More About: Browsers , Web Browsers

New Doomed to Obscurity Feature - New reader Guide
2009-09-17 22:29:00
http://www.penguinpetes.com/Doomed_to_Obs curity/DTO_NRG.html As webcomics progress, they eventually get complex enough that a new reader may stumble onto the latest strip and not know what's going on. So the time is right to add a New Reader Guide - complete with overview about what the strip's about and profiles for the cast. Why is it "the right time"? Because I think it's better to let the strip itself show what the characters are like, instead of decreeing it up front before it gets rolling. Also, the profiles may change as time goes on and the stories develop - so telling too much in a profile would spoil it. Anyway, I can at last know that new readers can come into the strip and get up to speed.
More About: Site News , Feature , Obscurity

New Doomed to Obscurity Feature - New reader Guide
2009-09-17 22:29:00
http://www.penguinpetes.com/Doomed _to_Obs curity/DTO_NRG.html As webcomics progress, they eventually get complex enough that a new reader may stumble onto the latest strip and not know what's going on. So the time is right to add a New Reader Guide - complete with overview about what the strip's about and profiles for the cast. Why is it "the right time"? Because I think it's better to let the strip itself show what the characters are like, instead of decreeing it up front before it gets rolling. Also, the profiles may change as time goes on and the stories develop - so telling too much in a profile would spoil it. Anyway, I can at last know that new readers can come into the strip and get up to speed.
More About: Feature , Obscurity

Awwww, Football Geeks You Too!
2009-09-16 21:20:00
Just got back from the library where I was reminded of how irritated I am at the "Geek the Library" ad campaign. It's not just that we have driven the last stake through the heart of any remaining meaning of the word "geek", rather like the media did to the word "hacker" before. It's that whoever did this campaign didn't "geek" parts-of-speech, since "geek" was never an active verb (with the exception of antiquated drug-culture slang meaning roughly 'to snort cocaine'). Ordinarily I'm not such an English nit-picker, but... it's the bloody library!
More About: Humor , Geeks , Football

Maggie's Farm - A Follow-Up
2009-09-16 17:23:00
It isn't my purpose to go on arguing this point. Like every point I try to make on this blog, eventually you've stated every argument you have and you just have to conclude with, "I guess either you get it, or you don't." But quite a few readers have responded with dismay when I submitted my letter of resignation from the Fight for Technology Freedom in America. "The troops need you.", they say, or "Don't give up, we're winning!" Things along those lines. But I'm looking at the big picture. Let's just forget about what operating system people run for a minute. Let's look at some other fronts in the United States. For instance, Michael Moore is getting discouraged, too. And all he's doing is trying to point out fundamental flaws in US economy, politics, and culture. Flaws that the citizens of every other country tell us and tell us and tell us that we have, and nobody listens. This story at the Huff has Michael Moore saying such things as: "I've done this for 20 years....
More About: General , Farm

Game Review: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection
2009-09-15 17:58:00
While I'm usually happy blasting away demons in a FPS or pushing a necromancer with skeleton escorts to conquer yet another level-grinding dungeon, sometimes I just want to get back to the basics. Casual puzzle games are the unsung champions of the modern game scene. The blockbuster titles get all the attention, and yet it's the simple solitaires and brain-teasers that are in every PC's menu, on every mobile phone, and bookmarked in every web browser. These games have the advantage of being portable, simple to learn, fast to start and shut-down, and providing stimulation for your little gray cells in between more pressing tasks. So this is Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection, which I just discovered as a Zenwalk package on the kids' system, and liked so much that I went to get my own copy. My Slackware compiled the tarball without a single hiccup. After inserting the games into my Fluxbox's menu file, I've been only too happy to become addicted to fiddling with them. ...
More About: Linux Gaming , Review , Game

Guest-Starring in Today's Doomed to Obscurity: Yakov Smirnoff and Kent Broc
2009-09-07 22:51:00
I tried something new with Doomed to Obscurity today. See if I can import a couple of characters and have them turn out recognizable, while still drawing in the strip's own style. The first is the real-life Russian-American comedian Yakov Smirnoff , and the second a supporting cartoon character, Kent Brockman from The Simpsons. The results were uncanny enough to surprise me. Things I've learned today: Importing a real live human into a cartoon is harder to do and have them turn out recognizable. As you can see, I combined two images of Yakov to be sure I had as many wardrobe cues as possible, so he's more recognizable to modern audiences. Importing a Simpson's character, on the other hand, is a snap. I have noticed that there are only a few differences between my style for this strip and The Simpsons, albeit with radically different methods. However, the differences with the Simpson's character are most telling about technique. The Simpsons are drawn in freehand style,...
More About: Guest

A Walk in the Woods
2009-09-02 15:42:00
Nothing enhances your morning coffee like a hike through the dewy wild woods of Iowa! A few shots: I have no idea what these are. I'm guessing some variety of buttercup or wild rose? There aren't many of them around. These, on the other hand, are growing everywhere. Some species of Asteraceae, I gather. I mean they grow everywhere! They weren't around a month ago, now they've exploded. Early morning fog on a clearing. I can't see, but I think we've shaken the Nazgul off our tail for now. I've found the area around the new igloo to be an endless source of entertainment - so I've started a new category, "Iowa", for the occasional photobloging adventure. Squirrels and chipmunks were all we had to work with at our last digs, but wildlife is crazy abundant around here. We've had run-ins with deer, raccoon, hawks, possums, one snake, and frogs. Lots and lots of frogs. For a while there, lots of baby ones were getting in under the garage door and we've all become ex...
More About: Woods , Walk , In the Woods

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