How many times have you been stuck in another country unable to watch your favorite shows and channels? Or perhaps you don't reside there and want to watch them anyway, expat or other? Hulu, Spotify and BBC iPlayer all check IP addresses to ensure you are connecting from the country they are serving, in the BBC's case because they don't want you to get a free ride without a TV license which they are assuming nobody in a foreign country would have paid for.

VectorLinux is a long-standing distribution that seems a bit underrepresented in the PR department. I took the opportunity for an early look at RC2 of the upcoming version 7.0 to see what we can expect after more than 2.5 years of development. You can read the full article on Muktware.

This one has got a lot easier over the last releases. There is now a build script on slackbuilds.org that allows you to build a package with the latest driver from staging as kernel module. Choose the first one on the list, unless you want to mess around with fwcutter. I don't, and I always found broadcom-sta to work perfectly for me in Slackware and Arch. It's different in Debian and related distros though where it's called brcm80211. This package supports chipsets including but not limited to BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322. Mine is a BCM43225.

This blog turned one year old yesterday and has had around 130 000 page views by the time of writing, a definite up from 36 000 in the first six months. Not as much as some others have but hey, it's supposed to be fun. Jim Lynch over at Eyeonlinux.com has identified what he calls The Dark Side of Distrohopping, and I'm not planning to get as stressed out over testing and writing as he seems to be, but then if I remember correctly he is trying to make a living from his sites.

A while ago I read about this project, a small collection of scripts with the aim at creating a more GNOME 2 like user experience with the name of GNOME Shell frippery, so I had to try it out on my experimental install and took a few more screenshots to illustrate the effect. I'm also suspecting that many users are still unaware of it.

LXDE, the Lightweight X11 desktop environment, has gained quite a following over recent years seemingly coming from nowhere, and many distribution spins are now using it for their user interface. This is really a follow-up to my previous post about beautyfying Xfce. Because both are using gtk+ the same themes will work and the same engines are needed to make them look as intended.

Regular readers will know Xfce is one of my favorite environments, and the one I have been using for the longest period of time, since early 2006 to be exact. It already comes with a large selection of themes and typically all you need to do is get a few icon sets to spruce up your desktop and you're done. Or keep using Tango, nice and simple.

After my recent trial run of the latest Kanotix I bumped into a bug with Iceweasel and gtk-qt-engine under KDE 4, as described in this 572162 and this bug report 543402, and possibly 523824.
Iceweasel on exiting leaves a process behind that consumes 100% CPU power on one core which can only be terminated by killing the PID.

I recently moved to Berlin temporarily and when my girl-friend came over we went to visit the Zoo. She loves animals and I love nature, and Berlin Zoo exhudes this special serenity that is so hard to find. There's plenty to do and big patches of green, bamboo forests and the like, the offices and care taker school built in the style of a Chinese pagoda while others are reflecting African architecture, you can spend all day there. And right next door, actually on the same grounds, is the Berlin Aquarium, but you'll need to schedule an extra day for this if you want to do it all properly and see everything. I would also submit that the Two Oceans Aquarium in Cape Town is both bigger and better with its massive Kelp forests and Shark tank, the Penguin area and Whale exhibit and the like. Not surprising given that Berlin isn't anywhere near the sea. Btw, the name is a bit misleading, as the two oceans actually meet a bit East of the Cape Peninsula.
Apparently San Francisco's Aquarium of the Bay is also one of the best and one of only three in the world that house a living Kelp forest, and that will be my next destination when time and money allow.

Me and Big Brova

But back to our visit to the Zoo. I'm quite aware that some are of the opinion animals belong into the Wild and not locked up behind bars so to speak, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but let's not get into that debate here. At the very least they seem very well cared for.