GNHLUG Quarterly Meeting @ SNHU

I got to attend the Greater New
Hampshire Linux Users Group last night up at href="http://www.snhu.edu">SNHU. href="http://www.freephile.com/">Greg Rundlett gave a nice talk about
how he uses Linux to manage his photo and music collections as well as
a little discussion about using the gimp<
/a>.
While I prefer bins for my photos, ne
tjuke
looks very nice for music collections. There is even a
netjuke debian package available.

Links:

• Netjuke: Web-based Streaming Media
  Jukebox


• Registry of Gimp Script-Fu plugi
  ns

Christian Rapture on October 28, 1992 -- Photo taken April 14, 2003

Why did they use such long lasting poster material?

alt="Click for a larger image"/>

I've been driving by this poster for over a decade and finally got around to taking a photo of it. It is at the corner of Daniel Webster Highway and Industrial Drive (Exit 10) in Merrimack, NH.

Map to October 28, 1992 rapture poster in
Merrimack, NH

War Driving in New Hampshire may become legal

By way of href="http://techdirt.com/articles/20030429/0259220.shtml">tech
dirt this morning information I saw this href="http://www.wired.com/news/">Wired News href="http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,58651,00.html">article
about my adopted "Live Free or Die" state considering making war
driving legal. Read the href="http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/2003/HB0495.html">NH
House Bill 495.

GPS management software

It is getting time to go geocaching with the kids and that
means time to install GPS managment software on the debian laptop

Don't tell anyone but I've been using the free Windows program
that geocaching.com provides
do download waypoints into the GPS.


apt-get gpsdrive dgpsip gpsman gpstrans


freshmeat mentioned GPS Manager which may be
interesting. Unfortunately no screen shots and requires gpspoint2 which also has a
pretty description-free website. Hard to know if it is worth the
effort to download and compile...

Okay, okay -- I give up. Here is why MSIE really does rule.

But I'm still going to be staying with Galeon and Mozilla running on Linux.

Anyway, check it out -- href="http://craiger.uh.nu/ierules.html">http://craiger.uh.nu/ierules.html

Adding cups print support

At work swapped out the large scale Xerox printer for a shiny
large scale HP
LaserJet 9000 printer and now seemed like a good time to get cups
working on the laptop...


apt-get install cupsys cupsomatic-ppd


Gideon Taylor/Sarah Burr 1857 family bible images

As mentioned a few days ago, I liberally licensed some scans of the Gideon Taylor and Sarah Burr's 1857 family bible I bought on ebay.com last year.

It is now available here:
http://www.nozell.com/genealogy/gideon-taylor-sarah-burr-family-bible/

And available here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/sets/72157603912480432 on Flickr.com

A New Hampshire based company, contourdesign.com is spamming -- Remember don't buy from spammers

href="http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/20030415-contourdesign-message-1.spa
m">Here
is some Unsolicted Commerical Email (UCE) that I received from href="mailto:pr@contourdesign.com">pr@contourdesign.com where they
are "seeking stories from statisfied users" of their stuff. They sent
the spam to GEN-NYS-admin@rootsweb.com which is the admin account for
a genealogy mailing list that I manage. I've never used that email
address for any purpose except to receive admin messages and certainly
would never use that to sign up at any website.

Kim Adams (href="mailto:pr@contourdesign.com">pr@contourdesign.com),
apparently the press contact for Contour.Design.com, sent the message
out. Since she was so nice to include her office number (603-893-4556
x 226) in the UCE, I gave her a call on the way home today. I
explained that I never requested email from them and that the email
address was never used for registering with a web site. She said that
some other people have complained today and that they purchase email
lists from 'a few places' and my 'address must have been on one of
them' and offered to remove it. I told her to remove it, but I was
very interested in knowing just who they are purchasing email lists
from since they appear not to be reputable. She didn't know if she
could get that information. I provided her with my personal email
address and cell number and asked for her to get back to me with the
info. I also told her that the spam would show up on my web log.

Here are some more information about the company from
http://www.contourdesig
n.com/contact_info.htm

Contour Design, Inc.
10 Industrial Drive
Windham, NH 03087 USA
Phone: 800-462-6678
International: +1-603-893-4556
Fax: 603-893-4558

Contour Design (Europe) Ltd.
Unit 3
Honeypot Business Centre, Parr Road
Stanmore, Middlesex, UK HA7 INL
Phone: +44-20-8731-1410
Fax: +44-20-8731-1419
email: europe@contourdesign.com

And email address contacts:

Customer Service
US
email: info@contourdesign.com
Europe
email: info@contourdesign.eu.com

Ordering Information
US
email: order@contourdesign.com
Europe
email: order@contourdesign.eu.coma>

Sales and Marketing
US
email: sales@contourdesign.com
Europe
email: sales@contourdesign.eu.coma>

Technical Support
US
email: support@contourdesign.com
Europe
email: support@contourdesign.eu.c
om

I eagerly await a reply from contourdesign.com about where they buy
those lists of address that are used to spam people.

I'll be emailing the addresses above with a pointer to this blog entry.

Gideon Taylor/Sarah Burr family bible CD under the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0 license

I just released my first project under a Creative Commons license, specifically the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike1.0 license.


It is a CD I sent to Wendy's siblings that contained a number of
scans of the Gideon Taylor/Sarah Burr 1857 bible CD I bought on
ebay.com along with a number of genealogy reports showing the lineage
from those folks to today's generations.

Tomorrow I'll be putting a copy of the CD in the mail for a second
cousin of Wendy who is also a Taylor/Burr descendant.

Feels good to add to genealogy knowledge base of other people...

See here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn/sets/72157603912480432 for scans of the genealogy related pages.

Unintentionally funny

Hanging out on the corporate IRC on Fridays is great fodder for
blogging...

craiger pointed to an internal newsgroup posting:

Subject:
Subject: Linux on a laptop - Evo 410c
From: XXXX XXXXXX 
Date:Fri, 11 Apr 2003 16:33:34 GMT
Newsgroups: XX.os.linux

My linux experiment is well underway, I now have the basics of email,
contacts, calender, etc working.

One of the most useful things I do with my laptop under XP is to shit the 
lid, which causes the machine to hibernate ie dump itself to disc, so that 
when I open the lid I can carry on where I was working without any battery loss
.
can I do this with Linux?

I'm running RedHat 8.

thanks,

XXXX

Red Hat RPM database hosed

Sometimes when I ^C an rpm command the database is locked and
unusable. disser and randyh on our corporate irc suggested this:

First try this:


rpm --rebuilddb


If that doesn't work, try this:

kill -9 -c rpm
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db.00*
rpm --rebuilddb

I've been pretending that I'm running Windows and just reboot ;-)

Some amusing Flash videos

Apple-Style Switch Ad for Linux:
http://www.ubergeek.tv/switchlinux/

We Like the Moon: http://www.rat
hergood.com/moon_song/
Man is that a catchy song!

Mastricola Middle School's 'Change in DIrection' team places 3rd in NH State Competition!

Yesterday in Dover, NH was the href="http://www.nhom.org">Destination Imagination (DI) NH State
competition and Spencer's team (and the one I co-managed ;-) placed
third for their challenge in the middle school age group. The kids
were a little bummed out since the first and second place teams get to
go on to DI Globals
Competition down in Knoxville, TN the end of May. Regardless they
had a great time and are looking forward to next year's DI.

Congratulations to Spencer, Rebecca, James, Katie and Cassandra!

Using spam to aid genealogy

My surname is very rare -- in fact the one NOZELLs in the world (that
I can find) are all descended from Anthony Vincent Nozell who came
here in 1875 from 'Russia' and spoke Polish.

Anyway, I got the following spam that contains a whole bunch of nozell
email addresses -- some I don't recognise as couins' last know
addresses. Time to contact them...

From: 9ca0pgn@the-englishman.com
Reply-To: 9ca0pgn@the-englishman.com
To: nozell@worldnet.att.net, nozell@yahoo.com, nozell@netmantra.com,
    nozella1@yahoo.com, nozell@psn.net, nozell@twlakes.net,
    nozell@uswest.net, nozell@jps.net, nozell@mailexcite.com,
    nozell@grasshopper.net, nozell@idir.net
Cc: nozell@zko.dec.com, nozell@xx.xx.zko.dec.com,
    nozell@webramp.net, nozell@idrc.ca, nozell@umailme.com,
    nozell@montananet.com, nozell@kih.net, nozell@rootsweb.com,
    nozell@nyc.com, nozella23@msn.com, nozell@hotmail.com
Subject: Let's do it now! My sister is on line16881
Date: 01 Apr 2003 15:07:28 -1000

More Gnome packages

It is time to once again to see if evolution is a little bit more
reliable with sharing data with my palm pilot. Previous versions have
more than once messed up my address book and/or datebook info usually
by adding duplicate entries.

In order to have evolution talk to the palm, i needed to install a
boat load of debian packages.

apt-get install gnome-help ref="http://packages.debian.org/cgi-bin/search_packages.pl?keywords=sawfish-gno
me&searchon=names&version=all&release=all">sawfish-gnome gnome-control-center gnome-utils

Sigh -- I still can't fully sync my palm pilot with evolution.
AddressDB seems to transfer the info, but then times out and doesn't
call the next conduits. Turning off the Address conduit seems to let
the datebook and todo list synch up. Then turning the Address conduit
on again makes everything work. Strange.