Leo's Tech Blog

Ryan and I are moving to Chicago in August. One of the good things about this is that I won't have a 45 mile commute to work anymore. The University of Chicago is only about 7 miles from our future apartment. I was thinking about getting a bike for this commute, as it would be good my health and also cut out almost all of my gas expenses. Does anyone have any suggestions on what kind of bike I should get?

Radar Magazine has published a list of the most overrated items appearing on high end restaurant menus these days. The list was compiled by Anthony Bourdain and contains some great gems such as suggesting that someone should get a t-shirt saying "I am an asshole, please take my money." if they order a certain item on the list.

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I have found a video that has been posted of a walkthrough of the iPhone unlocking process. The author of the video then puts in a T-Mobile SIM card about 7 minutes into the video and the phone appears to be functioning with it. 

I got an iPhone on June 29th, the day it came out, and one of the unfortunate things about it was that I was now an AT&T customer. Today, iPhone users can now use any GSM provider they wish, due to the availability of the first Open Source iPhone GUI unlocking software. Engadget reports that the software is functional and reset-resistant.

This looks like something I have to try (from Drive Thru):

White Peaches @ Whole Foods Means Bellini Time:

White peaches from California are available at Whole Foods in Lakeview right now, which means true Bellini cocktails are just a blender spin away. The famous Italian aperitif starts with a glass of cold Prosecco (an inexpesive sparkling wine from Italy), topped with a white peach nectar puree, and garnished with a berry or perhaps a little nugget of the stone fruit and a sprig of mint. Epicurious has a recipe from the Hotel Cipriani in Venice that is both simple and classic. Best make them quick. The white peach season is notoriously short.

Lifehacker has a great article on how you can transcode just about any video file (divx, xvid, etc...) onto a DVD that will be playable on just about any standard DVD player. I have had many people ask me questions about how to do this and this article has a fairly detailed breakdown of the process. However, it only talks about Windows software. If you are looking for some OS X software to rip DVDs, I recommend MacTheRipper and for transcoding video files to DVD I recommend ffmpegx. If you're a Linux user, then I highly recommend k9copy for copying DVDs and just plain ffmpeg for transcoding them.

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The CEO of the photo sharing site SmugMug has written a great article about how camera manufacturers rip off consumers by promoting the deception that a camera with more megapixels equals an increase in image quality. There are many people that I know that simply don't understand that it's not how many megapixels that are important, but the quality of the lense, the size of the sensor and many other factors that play into the image quality.

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Artist Aram Bartholl has come up with an interesting set of glasses which give you a different perspective on reality... by letting you view it as if you were playing a game of Counter-Strike. The idea for these glasses is definitely simply, but yet unique. I wonder how many strange looks someone wearing these will get.

[Link] [Source: Boing Boing]

As some of you may have noticed, my server has been down a lot lately. This is because the Dell Dimension XPS T550 that this site (and my IRC server) had been running on died, after 8 years of service. I suspect the processor started going, because gcc would have internal errors.

This week, I finally decided to shell out the money for a new server. I got a Dell PowerEdge 1650 (Dual 1.4 Ghz P3, 2GB RAM, 2x73GB SCSI disks and RAID) off eBay and put Fedora Core 6 on it. Then I restored the data from the old box onto this one (which took some work as the hard drive was a little bit hosed on the old box) and here we are. I will be updating this much more often now and the uptime should be good now.

Stay tuned for pictures of the new server!

If you have a decent number of Linux machines and you want them all to share the same authentication scheme (allow a user to login on each of the machines), what do you do?

One of the best solutions is LDAP.  LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and it is basically a database of user information. You can use LDAP as a global address book of sorts, and you can also use it to store user information, such as usernames and password. Getting LDAP configured on Linux can be challenging, and I have been looking for a good guide on how to do it. The problem is that setting it up is slightly different on every Linux distro, because of differences in how each distro has PAM set up. However, I have found a great guide, that makes setting up LDAP far easier. If you get authentication with LDAP working, you'll never look back.