Brewed a English ale

Using a john bull english ale kit. Hacked with barley, oats, crystal and marris otter. Hops include a load of willamette with tiny bit of saaz (different for english ale) for dry hopping. Came up to 1062.

Chess on linux

Lately iv tried to pick up chess again. I have played since little but have dropped it on and off. I stopped playing 4 years ago and its hard picking up where you left off.

To play chess on a linux box there are a few programs out there to meet your needs. Firstly though, it takes time writing lines of complex AI so projects are separated by engine and GUI board handler.

Open source engines include, my favorite GNU Chess, Crafty, Sjeng, Phalanx. There are a few others around as well as none-open source engines.

GUI Boards include xboard which is the most popular and supports loads of engines. Theres a list on the official website of all the supported ones. The windows version is called winboard.
My favorite board though is eboard.

It only supports GNU Chess, Sjeng and Crafty. However it makes up for it with a internet chess server features and board preference options. Its available for Unix-like systems. There no windows version ;). I have a good setup of GNU chess and eboard running on openSUSE 10.3 with no problems.

I do have a copy of chess master 8000. Its a little old now but it just works. It has tutorials by International Master Joshua Waitzkin. Don't know him? Never seen 'searching for bobby fischer'? Well, as a child he was a chess prodigy. He beat his first grandmaster Edward Frumkin at just 10. Sacrificing a queen and rook to mate. View it here.

Wii on the Potatoes yeah?

My sister bought a Wii last week. I don't really know what to make of it. I do like the controls when playing sports games on it or Nintendo produced games however the others are shoddy bad from what I have played.
All that being said I'd rather have a Wii than a over the top ps3 or xbox360 which are hardware bloated. As far as I can see the only time you need that much cpu is for a server of some kind. So the wii kinda hit the mark on that one.

Past week Iv put in some potatoes on the allotment. Hopefully, come autumn, Ill have some chips!


I also have corn, tomatoes, spring onions and pumpkins. Self-Sufficient(-ish) or what? I was going to have hops but they wont get started. I sowed them in September!. Hopefully they will grow soon. And no I'm not going to buy rhizome (hop roots). Wheres the fun in that?

1st of April and this is no joke

Today I spent most of the day working on my grandparents allotment. Surprisingly warm so I enjoyed it. Put some seeds in with mark while its spring.


I haven't been in a Linux or beer mood to blog here so iv been playing on facebook, livejournal and weebly. I don't want to leave this blog because it was my first and it has a lot of useful things (for me anyway).

Hopefully ill get back to blogging regally.

End of Netscape

Well its finally ending with AOL setting the support date set to 1st of March.

It recommends Flock or Firefox.
blog.netscape.com/2008/02/20/netscape-9-users-time

Weebly

For a few days now I've been playing around with weebly. It's a free personal website host and creator. Offers a sweet ajax editor with nice wordpress/blog-ish designs. You can create normal pages but theres also a blog function with rss and categories too. So you can have a blog and a few pages. I may move my junk website from google pages.
At the moment sadly, apart from adding header images, you cant edit the designs. Although they are working on that.

dnh500.weebly.com
weebly.com

Install Restricted Formats, OpenSUSE

If your new to opensuse 10.3 you will notice theres no direct way to install mp3 support unless you get the Fluendo MP3 decoder. You can however download:

• Flash
• Java
• Latest Amarok (with MP3 Support) for KDE, or Helix-Banshee for GNOME users
• Encrypted DVD (libdvdcss)
• Extra xine codecs, for MPEG-4 etc. (libxine1)
• K3b with MP3 Support (k3b-codecs)
• Win 32 Codecs (w32codec-all) (xine)

With just one click install at
http://opensuse-community.org/Restricted_Formats/10.3
Just select your desktop gnome or kde.

BTW: if you went with the Fluendo MP3 decoder way you wont be able to get equalizer working in amarok.

KDE Lock screen on lid close

On openSUSE KDE 3.5.7, Kpowersave 0.7.x you can turn off the screen lock when you shut your laptop lid by going to 'Configure Kpowersave' (right click the battery/adapter icon in the system tray). Click the general settings tabs and look for 'Lock screen'. Un-cross "lock screen on lid close".

Click ok. And should be done.

Installed openSUSE 10.3

Wanted a change from debian based distros. So I downloaded a copy of openSUSE to give it another go. Installed fine although something went wrong with the xserver I managed to find my way around sax2 (a YaST module) to get everything working fine.

Iv installed the KDE desktop version as you can see.

I love the kde menu and quite happy to say with this till I fancy a kde4 desktop.

It seems very fast and solid. My mepis install was very slow even with fluxbox. This seems to be on the same level as ubuntu. I may get back to some linux posts in the coming days.

Coordinates from Google maps

Google keeps the coordinates, latitude and longitude in one of their API's. You can pull the coordinates of a location by running a short javascript line.

Just put this in the address bar while on google maps
javascript:void(prompt('',gApplication.getMap().getCenter()));