Destructive Incorporated

Ben Brown has finished an amazing piece of work, and is showing it off here!

You can read more about this project at his Vimeo page or listen to more of his work at benbrown.desinc.net

Ben's also been featured over at monome.org

Our friend Jer has been working on a multi-part documentary focusing on positive change in various local communities across the United States. From non-profit, pay what you want restaurants to home building and restoration projects there are many wonderful interviews with great programs all over. It might just inspire you to volunteer in your community!

Check them out @ http://www.youtube.com/user/ExitPictures

Just in case you've been in the dark, one of our friends and Burning Man cohort is building an epic art project to be displayed on the Playa this year.

You can find out much more about it at :

http://kaleidoscopicdreams.com

I'm currently enrolled in a materials fabrication course where our final project is to build an enclosure for a power supply. The schematic and design of the power supply are provided by the instructor. These things use big stupid 0-15v analog gauges. I thought I could design a better interface using a microcontroller and an HD44780 LCD, so here it is. Special thanks to Micah Carrick for the lcd library and Cory Meyer for general advice. The most difficult part of this project was squeezing it all into the 1024 bytes available on the tiny13 microcontroller.

It's been a long time since I gave Sabayon Linux 3.1 such a rave review. A lot has changed in that time. The distribution is still based on the ~arch branch of Gentoo Linux, the biggest addition is the new binary package manager "entropy" and its front-ends: spritz (X) and equo (CLI). One of my favorite things about gentoo is the source-based nature of the distribution; you can always just rebuild everything from source with a couple commands in the console.

Can you believe how hard it is to find a quick cheat sheet for using mencoder (included with mplayer) to encode various video formats?

Cloning a hard drive is almost always the fastest and easiest way to migrate from one disk to another. There are several great programs out there that will do just that, the only problem is they're not free. Norton Ghost, Acronis MigrateEasy, and Partition Magic all have the required functionality to do this, but so does any bootable linux or *BSD distribution. Follow these easy steps and you'll be up and running in no time and still have a little cash left in your pocket.

Step One: Initial Configuration

I was thrilled when I saw Firaxis bringing out a new edition of one of my favorite Sid Meier's classics, 'Railroads!' Of course Railroad Tycoon doesn't quite stack up to the Civilization series, but it still entertained me for hours upon hours. First thing I did was look for some reviews of Railroads!, and found them quite lacking, which surprised me. So, trusting Sid wouldn't do me wrong, I went and bought Railroads! thinking I'd have a game to enjoy for some time to come.

This Gentoo-based distro is going to be one to watch. Rock-solid stability and endless flexibility, all wrapped into a 3.3GB LiveDVD environment packed to the brim with the latest builds of the latest software. So then, what makes Sabayon Linux so special? I'm glad you asked.

The strength of this OS comes not only from the abundance of current software available, but also from its roots in Gentoo Linux, which has long been known for its adaptability and pure speed. Gentoo's portage houses thousands (tens of thousands?) of programs which can be installed, via source, using every setting specified in make.conf, using build options depending on my USE flags. Dependencies are all resolved automatically by emerge (best thing since sliced bread). Boot scripts are easily modified with rc-update (so far my favorite runlevel modification tool). System updates (Sabayon follows the ~arch branch) can be made as easily as 'emerge –sync && emerge -uvDNa world' followed by 'etc-update' which will keep my install up to date with the latest security patches, bug fixes, and killer new features. There are hundreds of Gentoo reviews online and anything more in-depth goes beyond the scope of this article. Sabayon provides a very capable "livecd" environment with tons of the newest software all pre-installed to accomplish work fast. If work isn't your thing you can always kick back and play a little Cold War, or Quake 4 as both

Ever since I saw the first announcement of Flight Simulator X I was really excited to play it. I'm no plane nut or anything... I'm not even sure WHY I was so hyped up over it. Now, after playing Flight Simulator X for approximately 8 minutes, I am happy to say that I am even more excited about uninstalling it.