Personal Tech – New York Mulls iPod Ban on City Streets
A New York state senator has proposed the idea of making it a crime to use electronic gadgets like iPods and Blackberry phones while crossing the street. He seems to think that fining people will somehow stop them from doing stupid things like walking in front of a bus. While the intention of protecting the public is commendable, I doubt this will work. There’s a reason pedestrians have the right of way…
MacNN | Apple pays $700,000 for bloggers’ legal fees
Last year apple lost their case against PowerPage.org on appeal at which many bloggers, including me breathed a sigh of relief. The court added teeth to their decision recently ordering Apple to pay the EFF and PowerPage $700,000.. ouch. This decision sends a clear message that Journalists, no matter what medium, have the right to protect their sources in such matters.
“Live” [insert-media-here] OS distributions have been around for a while, but in the last few years they’ve really come into their own. It wasn’t that long ago that one of the most useful tools to a PC tech was an MS DOS bootable floppy with a collection of hardware diagnostic tools. Today, it’s hard to even find a floppy drive, let alone a collection of diags that would easily fit on a single disk. So why am I writing about live distros? A recent experience with a VMware virtual machine reminded me of why I keep all these live distros around. I had a virtual server that I’d configured originally with a small 4GB virtual drive. I later increased that to 15GB, but forgot about the fact that windows won’t let you modify a partition that the OS is on. (more specifically one with a page file). Thankfully I had a few of those live distros on my laptop’s hard drive as ISO images. I mounted a Knoppix 3.6 image and rebooted the virtual machine with it. One of the utilities included with Knoppix is QPartEd (a frontend for gparted) which works much like Partition Magic allowing you to extend partitions to fill the entire drive. I extended the partition, saved, rebooted the VM and after a quick disk check, everything was the way I wanted it. While distros like Knoppix are the swiss army knives of the LiveOS generation, there are other more single-minded tools. One such tool that should also have worked in this situation is the GPartEd LiveCD. It’s a distro focused only on partition modification. It’s tiny by comparison with Knoppix and will fit on a 3″ CD. With a little finesse it could probably be written onto small low-end flash drive as well. I can’t possibly cover all the neat LiveOS distributions out there, but the next time you need a bootable toolkit, try one out. Here’s a short list to get you started: http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php