Pat’s Blog

Lots of interesting talks for this year’s OLF. Lots of familiar faces. Some new. Should be a good time indeed. Here’s the Schedule. See you in Columbus!

Please sign the following online petition to push for MainConcept to release Mainactor as Open Source software. Dan Dennedy has volunteered to initially maintain the software if this happens. It would be a shame if this application is gone forever. Multimedia is one of the few weak spots of Linux. A lot people liked Mainactor […]

Growing up I remember watching a show on PBS called The Computer Chronicles. It lasted 15 years and is a great look into the rise of the home computer. You can download a bunch of episodes from Archive.org. Some of my favorites are the Commodore related episodes and an introduction to Unix from 1985. Good […]

My latest article will be in the September issue of Linux Journal. It covers hacking cell phones via bluetooth (moving files to/from a cell phone, creating ring tones and accessing the internet through your cell phone). You can read the article here if you’re a LJ subscriber or wait till hits the news stands any […]

I finished setting up a bunch old school arcade games on my MythTV box via MythGame. So far all the games are working without issue. I can even use my usb based game controller. The only caveat was I had to install the joystick package from the Ubuntu repos. Besides xmame you can also […]

I recently re-watched the film Pirates of Silicon Valley. While an entertaining movie it really bypassed a huge chunk of the early days of home computers. No mention of Commodore, no mention of Atari, no mention of Tandy. Someone watching the film would think that Apple was the early dominant company in the infant PC […]