New Website!

Recently I have decided to delve into the world of imageboards, or chans as they are known. A chan is based on a popular japanese website style and has been the basis for such sites as 4chan and 7chan. I took a look at what is availible for making your own, and I have to say that I got lost very quickly..

There were several different open sorce bases for image boards and the vast majority of them worked in almost identical ways. they all seemed to use PhP and MySQL mainly for the processing and databases. Intrestingly though, there is a site that actually just allows you to create your own board and they host it for you. I considered this, but I wanted a challenge. I was inspired to take on this task as i came by a site called parachan, they stated that they were based on the yusaba x imageboard software, so I had a look and couldn't get it to work, and this basically happened with each and every software I tried, granted I only tried locally. I will give a list of the different imageboard software I came across below:

• Project Mitsuba
• Project Mitsuba is an opensource (AGPLv3 licensed) image board software written in PHP and using MySQLi. 

• TinyBoard
• Tinyboard is a light-weight, fast, highly configurable and user-friendly imageboard software package released under a non-restrictive open-source license. It is written in PHP and has few dependencies. 

• Kusaba X
• Kusaba X is open source imageboard software written in PHP, a continuation of the kusaba imageboard software, which Trevor has quit supporting. While other Kusaba derivatives are adding more bloat than functionality, Kusaba X is determined on adding functionality first. 

However, the one I settled with is called TinyIB, it aws incredibly easy to install and set up, and looks rather impressive, it carries the simple, early 2000s look that I wanted to have and is very easy to have comntrol over. I ended up calling my imageboard 11chan (the image below), not for any particular reason besides i'm too uncreative to come up with one.

11chan.comyr.com

Nexus 6 officially announced and Android L official name!

The Nexus 6 has been announced by Motorola this morning and I have to say, it has left me very excited! Below you can read what Motorola has said about their new flagship device:

• More room to view: With a six-inch Quad HD display, Nexus 6 is great for watching, reading, playing and doing.

•  More doing, less charging: An around-the-clock 3220 mAh battery gets you through your day and more. Plus, the included Motorola Turbo Charger gives you a quick burst of power when your battery needs it the most. All it takes is 15 minutes to get up to an additional 6 hours of battery life.

•  More epic shots: The 13 megapixel camera with Optical Image Stabilization and HDR+ lets you take your best possible photos with the least possible effort. 

• More sound in stereo: With dual front-facing stereo speakers, you’ll get an immersive stereo sound that is great for experiencing music, movies and games as you should.

•  More with Lollipop: Nexus 6 comes with Android 5.0 Lollipop - a sweet new take on Android. Lollipop introduces Material Design so that content responds to your touch, or even your voice, in more intuitive ways, and transitions between tasks are more fluid. Plus, new call and message notifications allow you to act on (or dismiss) them without interrupting what you’re doing. And much much more. 

Nexus 6 will be available for pre-order through the Google Play Store in late October starting at £405. There are two colors to choose from - Midnight Blue or Cloud White - and two memory options - 32GB and 64GB. Nexus 6 will also be available on motorola.com and through carrier partners starting in November.

But Motorola are going one step further, they will be releasing updates for there older phones,

This includes Moto X (1st and 2nd Gen), Moto G (1st and 2nd Gen), Moto G with 4G LTE, Moto E, Droid Ultra, Droid Maxx and Droid Mini.

Changing distributions (the mavels of Ubuntu)

Two days ago I changed my distro from xubuntu (an Xfce based distro) to Ubuntu 12 Lt version. It has been a while since I have used pure Ubuntu and I have to say I have missed it.

Ubuntu is a south African distribution of the free operating system, the name Ubuntu actually means 'together' because of the open source nature of the operating system.

That's just an interesting factoid, but yes, one might say that Ubuntu is my favourite distro, and I have to say, it certainly seems to be the opinion of most Linux users as it is the most popular Linux desktop available.

The interesting thing about Ubuntu as opposed to other distros is that it is aiming to expand past just sitting under your desk or on your lap, but also in our pocket.A kickstarter campaign was (or still is, I don't remember) up for a claim of a record breaking $30 million (again, I could be wrong, I remember that it was record breaking). The campaign was for a phone called the 'Ubuntu Edge' and you can see why, the phone has a very geometric design and looks beautiful inside and out, the specs are great with a 8-core processor and a huge amount internal memory and ram.

This phone will dual boot android and Ubuntu, I would imagine in the traditional sense of booting android with Ubuntu mobile, but also in a new sense, when the phone is in your hand, it will appear to be a completely normal, top of the range smart phone, however, when it is docked into a screen and a keyboard and mouse are connected, then it boots into a full desktop computer!

It will be able to have access to all your phones files on the android partition, including your music which you can play in rhythm box and your phone contacts.

you will also be able to do full video and audio calling from it via your contacts using mobile data or internet, quite like microsoft's Skype or Google's Hangouts.

I am looking very forward to seeing the final product when it is released and if other companies will follow this path, not only mobile companies, but Microsoft and Apple with their desktop operating systems.

New Project

Recently I have taken it upon myself to teach myself something new.

There has always been a section of computing which has fascinated me, the domain of web servers. Luckily for me, Linux (xubuntu of the time of me starting.) is so easy to set up a web server.

I decided this was something I wanted to do when I stumbled across a tutorial on how to set the Apache client on a Raspberry PI. Again, luckily for me, the steps where easily transferable to my version of linux, (Raspberry PIs use their own version called Rasbian, which a ubuntu based distro.)

The commands on how to install apache2 on a Ubuntu system is as follows:


$ sudo apt-get install apache2

 
This will install  the apache2 server on your device, by default, the directory of the html files is /var/www/. To test if it installed successfully, open your browser and type in: localhost

Now, you should see the stock Apache place holder html, in order to change the file and start building your site, you will need to gain permissions for the /var/www folder as well as the /etc/apache2 folder (you'll see why later.) From a fresh install, both these folders are either owned by root or by Apache, which means you are unable to make any kind of changes to the folders or their content.
To change the permissions, simply open the terminal and type in the following commands:

$ sudo chown -R <USERNAME>:<GROUP> /var/www
$ sudo chown -R <USERNAME>:<GROUP> /etc/apache2

*Replace <USERNAME> with your username, and <GROUP> with the group you want it to join, I personally would suggest adding it to your username group.

These commands change the owner of the directory to the user, and the group to what ever you want (Note that the group needs to be accessible to apache)

The -R function changes all files inside the directory as well, if you would prefer the files to be left unchanged and to choose which ones are changed, omit the function.

Like I said earlier, the defult directory for the html files is /var/www, if you want to change this  like I did. Because Wheatley's hard drive is quite small, I wanted to change the directory to a 64GB SDcard I bought specifically, the you need to navigate
to: /etc/apache2/sites-enabled and open 000-defult in your favourite text editor.

Look for the bit where it states the document root is /var/www and change this to what ever, (for me, it was /media/SERVER) and restart apache2 with this command:

service apache2 restart

Or

 sudo restart apache2

 After this, you may start working on your site, have fun!

Pseudo-social networking

The term 'Social Network' gets used, as I believe, rather incorrectly. Sites like Facebook and twitter (and sites that have come and died such as Bebo and MySpace) have always been marketed under the category of Social networking. However, I have found in my experience, that these sites only want to be social, or rather, where set up to be but ultimately where bastardised by the users that the sites where aimed at.

I call these sites 'Pseudo-social' for a good reason, These sites hide behind the mask of social. They are anything but. The user-base just spam other people with their selfish posts revolving around their on private microcosm of the real world. Initially, People are more likely to use the site to connect with family and friends etc. However, they soon descend into a terrible world of selfies and personal rants. (Which personal sites, like blogs were created.)

This is why I adore Google plus, It seems like a very unselfish,true, social network, A place where people share things with the community, I have to say truly that I wish my friends and family would make the switch.. Which tends to be the case with most things I talk about.

I encourage you all to switch to the more ascetically pleasing, actual social network, and as shameful as it is, I am going to ask you to add me to your circles.

Making the transition from Windows

Everyday I find myself closer and closer to saying goodnight Vienna to Windows, however I keep on being drawn back to the operating system that I, and many other people, brought have been up with. Why? because so many people in my life use Windows as their one and only operating system. I still need windows for most of my school work as word processors such as Microsoft Office only have Windows and OSX in their support. I have tried alternatives but they all miss certain tools that I may need. Libra Office, I have to say, is the closest it comes to what I need, However, it also comes in a bundle of things that i don't need and frankly don't ultimately have space for.

It's such a shame that so far I haven't been able to make the full jump into linux and find myself running back to Windows. The day that i cut the connections with Windows, is the day where all my problems software wise with linux comes to an end.

For notes, i have always relied on the evernote client. i was hurt to find out recently that evernote has, and will never have support for linux, however I have found a work around for this with the wine program, which does the job fine, so, again, one step closer..

Forcing myself to blog

Over the past couple of years, one of the things that I have always wanted to do regularly is blog, however, I don't have a very fast passed life for a personal blog, and Most of my interests aren't really worth blogging about. Combine this with the range of choices of different blogging sites to choose from caused me to feel over pressured to conform with the other people I know and create a tumblr.

tumblr is great site, however it seems to be a very image heavy option. I am a person who doesn't like taking pictures very much. I also found the community hard to understand and couldn't really find a spot in which I fit in comfortably.

Then I decided that I would turn the fact of there being such choice into an advantage. I looked around and found that the host that ticks all (well, most) of my boxes is blogger. Initially I found the layout and everything rather untidy which put me off from ever returning after one or two posts. However, the recent design changes have won my heart and I can feel me living here for a while (until, perhaps I can find something that has the customisation of wordpress, and combines the simplicity of blogger).

Blogger contains the tools to get small blogs found, it's partnership with Google certainly helps with that, the options for paying for adds for your blog have never appealed to me, however you can still find readers without spending a penny.

However, I do find the lack of themes to annoy me, which is something that also got my goat about tumblr, sure there are a few themes over a variety of types, however , many of them are paid for. It makes me feel sorry for Yahoo for buying tumblr for such a price, then thinking they can make that up from selling themes for £140.

But in final notes, blogging is something that I'm going to struggle to maintain, it is something that I am going to be forcing myself to keep going between studying and trying to have a life. Let it begin.