Practical guide to TCP Syn Port scanner from SecPoint
February 22, 2012
Do you know if your server or your home computer has unnecessary ports open to the internet? These days most of the people have multiple devices which are constantly connected to the internet; each and every device comes with many services with open ports running quietly in the background. The user might not even have an idea of those services running, but the open ports often open new possibilities of threats from the outside world.
The tool portscanner comes to the rescue: see how.
- Create a radio station in five minutes with Airtime 2.0 on Ubuntu or Debian (February 22, 2012)
- Book Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by Tony Mullen (February 17, 2012)
- How to kill movie piracy: charge $1 for movies, and 50c for episodes (February 14, 2012)
- MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game (February 4, 2012)
- Free Software Magazine will go blank on the 18th of January (January 15, 2012)
- Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of Apache's competitor NGINX (January 5, 2012)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 100 (October 13, 2011)
Opinions
How to kill movie piracy: charge $1 for movies, and 50c for episodes
February 14, 2012
Movie piracy is the next big thing. The RIAA is quickly realising that their reputation is nearly beyond unrecoverable, after taking to court single mums, dead people, and children. In the meantime, in Australia they are having secret meetings to try and work out a way to prevent movie privacy. The solution is simple: to kill movie privacy, allow people to download movies, make it cheap, and make it easy. Yes it's hard. But yes, it's rewarding.
- Is GNU/Linux just not cool anymore? (February 10, 2012)
- Download Sites: Rogue Pirate Hangouts or Vogue Free Media Distributors? (February 2, 2012)
- What if Diaspora's pods just cannot challenge Facebook's monolithic structure? (February 1, 2012)
- Apple's iBook EULA exemplifies Everything that's wrong with Proprietary Software (January 31, 2012)
End users
Create a radio station in five minutes with Airtime 2.0 on Ubuntu or Debian
February 22, 2012
Airtime is the GPLv3 broadcast software for scheduling and remote station management. It supports both soundcard output to a transmitter, and direct streaming to an Icecast or SHOUTcast server. Web browser access to the station's media archive, multi-file upload and automatic metadata import features are coupled with a collaborative on-line scheduling calendar and playlist management. The scheduling calendar is managed through an easy-to-use interface and triggers playout with sub-second precision.
- RAW Processing in a Rush with GTKRawGallery (February 21, 2012)
- See all of your installed applications in Ubuntu Unity (February 15, 2012)
- Bulk renaming using Thunar (January 27, 2012)
- Object and Camera Path Tracking in Blender - "Monkey See Monkey Do" (January 24, 2012)
Hacking
Practical guide to TCP Syn Port scanner from SecPoint
February 22, 2012
Do you know if your server or your home computer has unnecessary ports open to the internet? These days most of the people have multiple devices which are constantly connected to the internet; each and every device comes with many services with open ports running quietly in the background. The user might not even have an idea of those services running, but the open ports often open new possibilities of threats from the outside world.
The tool portscanner comes to the rescue: see how.
- Find time zones using the command line (February 20, 2012)
- Using "t" to manage personal tasks (February 17, 2012)
- Python Scripting in Blender: A Piece of Pie - Part 1 (February 16, 2012)
- Archiving emails as text files, with command line help (February 7, 2012)
Games
MegaGlest: a fantastic, free software strategy 3D game
February 4, 2012
When the Glest team started "Glest" as a college project a few years ago, they probably didn't expect their game to go such a long way. While "Glest" stopped being developed a couple of years ago in 2009, it was forked in two different projects: GAE (Glest Advanced Engine) and MegaGlest (the game I am reviewing in this article). So, how is it? The answer is simple: this game is incredible, polished, enjoyable, addictive, smart, and plain simply fantastic.
- Why games are NOT the key to Linux adoption (January 19, 2009)
- Computer role-playing games for GNU/Linux (November 14, 2007)
- Free software games, the return (March 28, 2007)
- The free Tron Universe—Armagetron (March 26, 2007)
Interviews
Interview with Igor Sysoev, author of Apache's competitor NGINX
January 5, 2012
NGINX is the new start rising in the landscape of web servers. Well, it's hardly "new" -- it will soon turn 10. However, it's definitely rocking the web server world, with Netcraft showing a huge increase in usage in the last few months.
I was fortunate enough to catch up with NGINX's author, Igor Sysoev, who agreed on answering a few questions for us. So, here is a glimpse on their business model, their new 2.0 version, and more.
- Interview with Adam Green and Jonathan Gray, founders of The Public Domain Review (September 6, 2011)
- Interview: Nina Paley (author of "Sita Sings the Blues" and the two "Minute Meme" animations) (March 15, 2010)
- A talk with Brandon Whichard about Zenoss, the cloud, Amazon's EC2 and more (November 27, 2009)
- Interview with Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree (July 7, 2009)
Humour
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 99 (May 26, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 98 (May 19, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 97 (April 14, 2011)
- The Bizarre Cathedral - 96 (April 7, 2011)
Reviews
Book Review: Introducing Character Animation with Blender, 2nd Edition by Tony Mullen
February 17, 2012
This is the Blender 2.5 update to Mullen's very successful book on character animation. Since Blender 2.5 introduced a fairly dramatic change in interface design, this is a very useful update. This is a thick and extremely dense book that covers character animation from start to finish.
- Book Review: Character Development in Blender 2.5 by Jonathan Williamson (February 15, 2012)
- Book Review: Annie's CS101 by Dmitry Zinoviev (February 10, 2012)
- Book Review: Machinima by Matt Kelland, Dave Morris, and Dave Lloyd (February 9, 2012)
- Spark: A Tablet Running Open hardware and KDE Plasma Active Pre-installed (February 8, 2012)
Announcements
Free Software Magazine will go blank on the 18th of January
January 15, 2012
Free Software Magazine will shut down on January 18th to protest against SOPA. We am not sure what we will be putting on the site yet. However, the contents won't be there.
- FOSDEM 2012, Hardware Security and Cryptography, Call for Papers (January 14, 2012)
- Let us Pray: Yea Verily, Filesharing is a Religion. Official. (January 12, 2012)
- Allwinner A10: A GPL-compliant computer for $15 (January 11, 2012)
- Raspbery Pis are in the oven! (January 11, 2012)