BSD & Gaming

The new game coming out for linux based OS’s  and Mac OS X called Oil Rush looks like a lot of fun! It is currently in beta testing and if you want to pre-order you can have instant access according to their web page.  The graphics look really good and that’s a huge treat since most games playable on something other than windows look like they escaped from 1982.

While PC-BSD (FreeBSD) is not specifically supported chances are it will run just fine if you have the required hardware and drivers setup. Unfortunately my system is old enough that is doesn’t quite meet the minimum requirements, bummer. Even though it might not work on BSD or my system may be too slow, I’m considering buying it anyway just to help out game developers that support alternative platforms. Hell the current pre-order price is only $19.99 and I’ve wasted more than that on a bad meal dining out.

If you are a BSD gamer and like real-time strategy games you should check it out !  [LINK]

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Interesting day today, got to experience my first earthquake. I live less than a couple hours away from the epicenter and it was definitely a holy crap moment. No damage or injuries, but fairly exciting the 20-30 seconds it lasted. Even though I had never been through a tremor before it took only seconds to realize what was happening.

If you experienced the quake you can help the USGS gather more data on the event here at this [LINK]

#vaquake #earthquake

Privacy and security concerns have always been a part of the tech world. Over time I looked into various methods of encryption and never found any that appealed. Eventually I ran across TrueCrypt which offered several methods of securing data and it seemed like a good candidate to investigate, but I admit at the time I was distracted with other things in life and put the whole idea of securing personal data on the back burner.

Lately all the attacks on computers connected to the net and personal info being stolen off computers or portable drives has brought security/privacy concerns back into focus for me. Once again looking back into the topic, I read a lot of good things about TrueCrypt and all the features offered along with cross platform accessibility made it very appealing. So I decided to try it out.

I haven’t had time to do a lot with it yet but I did a simple test run on a windows box and it performed perfectly! On a usb drive I created an encrypted volume with the client, taking only moments and the options displayed along the process made it a no-brainer. The volume was mounted as a drive using the TrueCrypt software and presto! The virtual drive was easy to read/write – storing whatever I choose. The next step is to dismount the virtual drive, once done the thumb drive shows an unreadable file of an unspecified type. Everything is secure until you decide to access it again with the TrueCrypt software and pass phrase you created, very nice!

Now for the best part, I took that file and was able to access it on my PC-BSD box. It was pretty painless, I created a directory to mount the volume to and opened a terminal. I changed to root, and mounted the file at the command prompt;

# truecrypt /path/to/encrypted/file  /path/to/mounting/directory

I was asked for the password, then a keyfile which in my case was there wasn’t one so I just hit enter, and finally it queried about a hidden volume which I did not create so the default answer of NO was chosen, all done. Simple, now my secure volume was accessible from BSD to do whatever I wanted with. Dismounting and re-encrypting was even easier;

# truecrypt -d

Done! I do wish there was a pretty gui for it in BSD like there is in the windows version but all the 3rd party graphical front ends I found were out of date and did not work properly. No big deal, for my little test case the commands were very easy. There are a lot more options and abilities built into TrueCrypt, but for now I just wanted to keep it simple to see how it all went. I have to say TrueCrypt definitely earned a thumbs up from me.

There is no perfect way to secure anything especially data, however if my secure container ends up misplaced or stolen this should go a long way towards helping honest people stay honest. For those who are less honest or who are just a busybody sticking a nose where it doesn’t belong it should frustrate the crap out of them!

I almost forgot to mention, TrueCrypt is free!

TrueCrypt PBI installer for for PC-BSD here – [LINK]

TrueCrypt home page here – [LINK]

I read a lot, always have. Once PDA devices were introduced and allowed users to carry around tons of reading material in a small thin piece of electronic gadgetry I was hooked.

Here it is years later and I moved on to my 10″ zPad but I couldn’t find a decent reader. I’ve been looking high and low for an ebook reader that allowed for a decent variety of book formats, had screen orientation options, backlighting options, along with background images to make what I’m looking at more visually appealing. I finally got one that does it all…. the way I want it to.

Cool Reader has all the features I mentioned and a ton more, go take a look at their website to get all the details [LINK]. There’s no crappy trial period or sleazy LITE vs PRO garbage – it’s FREE for non-commercial use, period.

August 2011 BSD Magazine is now available! Go to http://www.bsdmag.org and download your free copy.

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Last xmas my family was generous and got me the little 10″ Zt-180 tablet I wanted. It’s been a lot of fun to use especially since this little “hu flung dung” epad has more features than many pricier alternatives, and does everything I want with a price tag that was well under 200 bucks. Gotta love it!!

It originally came with Android 2.1 1030 but the good news is I finally got around to upgrading the firmware to Android 2.2 0603! It’s fast and has flash support. I haven’t messed with it much to check on the actual performance but it seems pretty good so far. When I make the time I’ll put together detailed info on the upgrade and how I made it work for me.