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First I want to say that this dvd player is incredibly cool; I am able to rip a dvd and save the resulting xvid file on a thumb drive, which plugs into the USB port on the player. From there it appears to play just fine. Obviously xvid files can also reside on a burned cd or dvd.

The command to rip the first track of a dvd into a compatible xvid file:

Ok, so it was a little less smooth at home, because I have a slower machine, with an older nvidia card, and two mismatched lcd monitors. However, after setting Preferences->Appearance Prefs->Visual Effects to "None", I am using both as one big weird shaped desktop. The "Normal" Appearance pref was selected initially, which made every operation painfully slow.

Oh and the nvidia tool, run after the envyng stuff, is "sudo nvidia-settings"

Is there any utility (like the linux "lspci" command) that will give you a quick list of what hardware is installed on your machine? Bonus points for a version that works from a web page.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811998021

Sweet, my broadband upgrade is working early :-) It almost makes up for the bastards disconnecting me yesterday without any warning...

It is weird having a connection to my house that is seven times faster than what the entire University had back when I went there the first time.

Couldn't a missile defense shield be built in Israel, if missiles from Iran really are the primary concern?

I noticed that my amazon account page says that my Wall-e pre-order DVD is supposed to arrive on the day it is released (though I picked two day shipping). Having never pre-ordered anything from them before, does anyone know if they ship things early (under the assumption that I won't get it until on or after the release date), or is it listed that way just to tease me?

First I want to say, this has been the easiest install of vmware on to ubuntu yet, which is nice. I followed all the default answers, and it is working great with some pre-existing virtual machines (though see notes below).

apt-get install envyng-gtk

Run envyng --gtk as root to get the config tool for your nvidia or ati card. I was able to configure my work computer using the installed ati config tool (ati catalyst control center, in the "Other" menu after install) to setup the dual monitor stuff, and it works great!

Slashdot appears to have eaten my last journal entry, so here it goes again...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081105/ap_on_el_st_lo/ballot_measures

First I want to say that as shrines go it is reasonably tasteful, for which I am thankful. A nearby neighbor has a large shrine to, uhh, St. Francis of Assisi perhaps? Basically a huge Disney explosion of random animals....

Not that lack of legs to stand on has stopped them in the past. Gore invented the internet and now we find out thatMcCain invented the Blackberry!

Indeed, you are right in every aspect. Malaysia is a lot like Nazi Germany in this respect (compare their racist ideology of "Bumiputera" ie sons of the soil to Nazi Germany's "Blut und Boden" or "blood and soil"; same thing).

I am genuinely concerned about the situation with the Chinese and Indian minorities there. Race riots targeting them seem to be escalating, and Malaysian leaders like Najib Razak openly threatening Chinese Malaysians with genocide and Mahathir Mohamed who said that Indians in Malaysia are "as subversive as Jews" and so forth, Malaysia looks like another Darfur waiting to happen.

It's still science. Weak or strong statistacally, science is body of work based on "Cool! Hey everybody, check this out!" followed either by "Hey, that is cool!" or "Dork, you forgot to carry the one!" Sometimes both.