At least a month I find that I’ve been missing out on a wonderful site with which everyone but me got the memo ages ago. Here’s a list to keep you up-to-date for the New Year!

Messenging:
Meebo: You can run your MSN, AIM, GoogleTalk, and Yahoo! Messengers without the program here.
Pidgin: Homepage for the revolutionary all-in-one messenger.

Tech Buying:
SlickDeals: A wonderful place to find some amazing deals and ways to stack rebates you never believed existed.
NewEgg: Good tech stuff at even better prices.

Entertainment:
ICanHasCheezBurger: Home of the outrageously funny LolCats.
XKCD: A great webcomic, full of sarcasm, romance, math and language.

News:
SlashDot: The motto says it all: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters
BBC: A great 3rd party, and relatively unbiased news source. (Come on, they’re British! =P)
Reuters: The original source of most articles anywhere else, get your news firsthand!
DotEarth: Great environmental news, part of the New York Times.
Digg: The most eclectic yet awesome news source you’ll ever find. A bit of everything.

Ubuntu/Linux:
GetDeb: Great precompiled program files for the Ubuntu/Debian user.
GnomeFiles: A useful list of apps and programs meant for the Gnome desktop.

If you’ve always dreamed of being able to hook up your Linux box to your TV, this is the simple, straightforward guide you’ve been looking for.

Prerequisites: An Nvidia Video card with S-Video and VGA (The normal Monitor Connection) Output.

Open up your xorg.conf file:
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Navigate to the video card section of the file, it should start as:
Section “Device”
Identifier “nVidia [Model Name Here]”
Driver “nvidia”
At the bottom of this section, before the “Endsection” line, add the following:
# TwinView Options:
Option “TwinView” “True”
Option “TwinViewOrientation” “Clone”
#”Clone” for two identical screens, “LeftOf” or “RightOf” for one long,
# fused screen.
Option “UseEdidFreqs” “True”
Option “MetaModes” “1280×1024,1280×1024; 1024×768,1024×768”
Option “UseDisplayDevice” “CRT, TV”
# End of TwinView Options

Restart X:
Hit “CTR+ALT+BACKSPACE” or restart your computer and you should be all set!

With such a wonderful Open Source community, wonderful programs for Ubuntu are appearing left and right. Here is my list of the best add-on installations for various categories:

Games:
-Tremulous: A wonderful 3D egoshooter, play as an alien or a human
-Glest: Warcraft on steriods, awesome graphics, great gameplay
-Wormux: a fun Linux Worm-clone

Media:
-Cinelerra: a very promising non-linear video editing tool that looks, feels, and works like FinalCut
-Avidemux: a nice, linear video editing program similar to MS Video Editor
-VLC: a media player that comes with its own codecs and plays practically anything you can throw at it.

Graphics:
-CompizFusion: comes standard with Ubuntu Gutsy, most people don’t unleash it true potential due to lack of configuration. A great GUI can be installed by running: sudo aptitude install compizconfig-settings-manager

Education:
-Stellarium: An awesome 3D planetarium

Internet:
-Google Earth: Lets you fly from New York to Helsinki in less than10 seconds

Others:
-Wine: Runs many Windows programs inside Ubuntu, keep up to date and use their official repository at: http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt
-Ubuntu Tweak: Lets you tweak various aspects of your OS
-InnoTek VirtualBox: Allows you to run Windows and other OSes inside Ubuntu.

One of the awesome beauties of Ubuntu is that it supports a vast array of hardware, unfortunately, the RTL8187 driver (used with the Netgear wg111v2) is just a bit buggy.

After trying out legions of methods, I finally came upon a wonderful simple solution. The only catch is that it disables the Network Manager (thus it is best used when you use the same WiFi network, or in conjunction with a WiFi network finder such as NetStumbler).

Here it is:

Remove the buggy module:
sudo rmmod rtl8187
Blacklist it:
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist
then add “blacklist rtl8187” somewhere at the bottom
Stop the Network Manager:
sudo /etc/dbus-1/event.d/26NetworkManagerDispatcher stop
sudo /etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager stop
Create two files that only contain the word “exit” at the following locations:
/etc/default/NetworkManager
/etc/default/NetworkManagerDispatcher
Disable the Network Manager at Startup:
System=>Preferences=>Sessions
Set up your wiresless network:
sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
Add (Fill in the ……’s):
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wireless-key ……… #This is Optional (Only if you use a WEP key)
wireless-essid ……..
Install ndiswrapper:
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
Pop in your driver cd and navigate to the WIN98 Drivers folder and execute:
sudo ndiswrapper -i Netrtuw.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo gedit /etc/modules
add “ndiswrapper” to the bottom of this file and save
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
iwconfig

Note: This post was made possible by the wealth of information available on the Ubuntu Forums, and especially by a now archived post made there by panurge77, I take no credit for this work, I merely did a lot of reading and compressed all of it into a short and sweet guide.

I decided to learn German a while back, after all, languages are wonderful and useful things. After spending multiple hours/days/weeks, scourging the internet to find the most comprehensive and free way to learn German, I finally developed a system that seems to be working flawlessly. Here it is:

Internet TV: Possibly the best way to take it all in and let your vocabulary flourish. It provides you with both audio and visual stimuli.

My personal favorite is N-TV, a German news channel. Telecasters by definition speak perfect, textbook German, and you get caught up on current events too! Their stream can be found at here.

Interactive Websites:

Deutsche-Welle, another German news channel, provides a great interactive and best of all free German Course. It can be found here. This course was developed in accordance with the Common European Framework and is a wonderful tool for learning German.

Deutsche Welle also offers some other interesting German-learning related materials, they can be found here.

Ubuntu: If you run Ubuntu, a wonderful way to immerse yourself into German is to change your default language to German. This is done by installing German language support through System=>Preferences=>Language Support, and then selecting German on the Language section of the Welcome Screen when logging in.

Note: To keep terminal in English, don’t set German as the Default System Language when you install German language support, only enable German through the Log-in Screen.

Your Library: I have found that my local library has a vast amount of language learning resources, including the expensive (~ $239 per level) Rosetta Stone package. It’s well worth getting a library card for!

Newsletters/Internet Courses:

About.com: This site offers a wonderful self-paced German course, as well as a free newsletter and email courses that help you along the way. Sign up here!

BBC also offers a similar email course/newsletter that can be found here.

Good Luck!
Part 2 is on the way.

12/29/07 and GlobalSyzygy.wordpress.com is officially up.

Phase one complete, start phase two!