Kubuntu 10.10 Slow Wifi Connection

I was recently experiencing very slow wifi connections in Kubuntu 10.10 on my HP Pavilion dm4 with an intel wireless card. I was getting intermittent speeds from 0.3 to 1 Mps. Needless to say this was driving me nuts. After hitting the forums and verifying that this is a documented problem and reading the various solutions I installed
linux-backports-modules-compat-wireless-2.6.38-2.6.35-28-generic
and linux-firmware version 1.38.6
Note: if linux-backports-modules-compat-wireless-2.6.38-generic is available install that instead.

Sprint is Evo-Ill (Evil)

First let me just say that I love my Evo. The Evo is a great device!

As much as I want to love Sprint and believe that they actually do offer the fairest deals in wireless, the truth is that they are just as evil as AT&T and Verizon.

The problem, Sprint charges $10 extra for the Evo. Supposedly this is for 4g, but depending on who you talk to at Sprint you will get a different story.
This part I am actually ok with. Charge me $10 extra a month because I have a super fast phone and am likely to use more data. Even with the extra $10 fee

help John Graham-Cumming build Charles Babbage 's analytical engine

I just pledged $10 to help John Graham-Cumming build Charles Babbage 's analytical engine.
Babbage designed the analytical engine, a Turing complete computer in 1833, a 100 years before Alan Turing published his paper on the Turing machine. If you want to see this steam powered brass mechanical computer get built, pleas...e pledge and be a part of history!

pledge page http://www.pledgebank.com/babbage

More about Charles Babbage http://blog.jgc.org/2010/10/babbages-heart-warming-message-for.html

Motorola and Verizon DroidX = Major Fail

According to several sources, the latest Android phone from Motorola "The DroidX" available on Verizon has hardware built  in (the eFuse chip) that will brick the phone if you mess with the bootloader.
This is akin to a car manufacturer designing a car the freezes the engine if you open the hood.

How to Create Debian .deb packages from Tar .tgz files in Linux

Please watch the video for the full tutorial. Basically all you have to do is this.

KDE3 to KDE4 the 3 things I'm still missing

KDE 4 is shaping up nicely and I must admit that the look and feel is great. After using it for a while however there are still several things missing that are keeping me on the fence regarding running KDE 4 vs the KDE 3.5 backports in Kubuntu 10.04.

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 2 ATI Radeon HD 4200 Fix

The ati fglrx driver is still not working for my Radeon HD 4200.
I am sure I can get it working as I did before using alternative drivers, but preffer to test and report bugs to try to help get the official driver working.

Without any driver the card works great in kubuntu 10.04 with the exception of 3d rendering being slow. All of the composite effect work great.
Unfortunately after I install the driver the desktop will not load even after I un-install the driver.

Kubuntu 10.04 - aka Lucid Beta 1

The first beta of the next Kubuntu Long Term service release is out.
I have been running the development release candidates on one of my entertainment computers for a while now and unfortunately for me the upgrade was not so smooth. Ok, it was a disaster, but only because I was running a bunch of backports and had other non-supported ppa repositories for various hardware reasons.

After a backup and full re-install averything went smooth as silk.

The Best USB Thumb Drive

This USB thumb-drive is sweet. Basically this is just a standard thumbdrive built into metal carabiner which just makes sense.

How-To Create Multi-res .ico files in Gimp

Gimp makes it really easy to create multi-res .ico files. In fact, this is one of the few areas where Gimp beats Photoshop hands down.
The trick is to use multiple layers with different sizes.

Here are the basic steps.