BSD & Gaming

Join Cryptic for their Star Trek Online festivities, the event will run from around 10:00am PST on Thursday, February 2, 2012 through around 10:00am PST on Monday, February 6, 2012.

Celebrations include missions to acquire the new flagships for both the Klingon Empire and the Federation faction, as well as a daily ‘Q’ mission for other prizes!

Download a free to play copy of Star Trek Online today.

Yes you heard right Star Trek Online is now FREE to Play! [LINK]

There are differences between Gold (subscribers) and Silver (Free Accounts), get the details on the F2P Charts. [LINK]

Klingons, Humans, Ferengi, Vulcans, and Bajorans, oh my!

Download the game for Free! [LINK]

Just released, PC-BSD 9.0 [Isotope Edition] go get it now!!

PC-BSD 9.0 changes include the following:

• Based upon FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE
• Support for installing a variety of Window Managers, such as KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and more!
• Improved networking utilities, including wifi quick-connect
• Support for UFS+Journaling out of box
• New graphical boot options page
• Improved PBI system, allows library sharing, binary diff updating, custom repositories, digital signing and more!
• Support for “freebsd-update” via the System Update GUI
• Enhanced “Life-Preserver” utility for doing off-site rsync backups of user data.

Read the release notes here – [LINK]
Download your free copy here – [LINK]
Download via BitTorrent here – [LINK]

(For a full list of changes in this release refer to the changelog.)

NEWS ALERT!  The powers that be in Washington D.C. are doing their best to destroy the last vestiges of Free Speech online under the false pretenses of preventing stolen intellectual property.

Read all the gory details about this farce that is attempting to strip away one more layer of your personal rights – [LINK]

If you already know about SOPA and want to do something to stop this insanity go here [LINK] to contact your Congressmen.

There is also some good stuff covering the topic over at this [LINK] and here [LINK].

Fight for your rights before they are gone FOREVER!!

TIME IS RUNNING OUT !!

Finally! At last a new system. I was recently able to get enough cash to build a new computer, and with frugal shopping I came up with really decent hardware. I also had in mind a goal of future expandability instead of needing to build a whole new computer later on.

ASUS VW246H 24″ 2ms(GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor
IN WIN Dragon Slayer mATX Mini Tower -Great looking case IMO!
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W Modular Power Supply
Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
EVGA SuperClocked GeForce GTX 560 1GB GDDR5 HDCP Ready with SLI
GIGABYTE Intel Z68 Micro ATX Motherboard
SAMSUNG 470 Series 128GB SSD – dual boot Win7/FreeBSD
SAMSUNG 1TB 7200 RPM HDD – storage

It’s been a week now and compared to what I was working with it’s a huge leap in performance and capability. It’s taken every program and game I can throw at it with the highest settings and responded ” Is that the best you got? Bring it on!”. Wow it’s been a long time since I could build a system like this for myself. I know there are bigger and better builds, but for me… for what I was able to spend this leaves me grinning from ear to ear.

Future expansion capabilities include:
- unlocked cpu for overclocking
- motherboard setup for overclocking and includes beefier components such as solid core capacitors instead of liquid electrolytic capacitors.
- 2 more slots to double the ram
- another slot to pair up a matching video card and run in SLI mode
- tons of room for more drives

FLOSS Weekly had a very good episode taking an in depth look at PC-BSD with a Q&A session involving one of the developers and FreeBSD Girl, Randi Harper.

If you want to hear what PC-BSD is all about and what changes are coming in the new version then go take a look – [LINK] Definitely worth watching!!

Just watched the new episode “Heart of Archness” and it was pure awesome! I was in kind of a crappy mood but this was the light moment I needed, go watch and have a laugh.

Let’s face it no matter who you are, you have your preferences about what operating system you like best, we all do. Some are so fanatically driven that they will go into a frothing rage fit when they find their opinions challenged. I try to see things as a learning experience and hopefully take away some useful information from. I even admit Windows has it’s place in the computing world, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it!

Despite the fact that BSD has been around in one form or another since 1977…. Linux based operating systems have always gotten the limelight in the press. From my observations I think this is mainly due to BSD getting tied up with IP fights in the courts [USL v. BSDi] as well as the fact that  for a long time development was focused on servers not on the desktop. In fact Linus is even quoted as saying in an interview that “If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.” In my mind linux and BSD devotees should consider themselves on the same team rather than at odds.

With all that said, many Linux fans have poo-poo’d BSD for the desktop as long as I can remember, while controversy one way or the other will never truly be put to rest because of emotional zeal, Phoronix has a nice article detailing a default install of PC-BSD 8.2 vs a default install of Ubuntu 11.04 with an eye focused on gaming. The end results were a respectable show of performance by PC-BSD that took the win. To me it’s not proof of who is better…. it’s simply one more statement in a long line of examples over the years,  that there are other choices for your desktop besides Linux based distributions if you don’t want Windows.

Read all about FreeBSD’s results here at this link – [LINK]

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.