For a few months now (since the demise of bluefrog actually) I’ve noticed that the level of junk mail has gone up on my own mail server. Yes, I use spamassassin to filter and tag, but the volume of stuff that’s tagged has gone up (as well as the volume that slips through.) I’ve had to flush out the bayes filter more than I would like after some massive bayes poisoning attempts (those messages with lots of random words or text.) I’ve also been following news on the topic and thought I’d detail some of it here for those that haven’t been paying attention.
Tag: free
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Freenx on Ubuntu (Dapper Drake)
NX server and client is a GREAT remote X approach that can tunnel over fairly narrow links well and does phenomenally well over a LAN. I frequently use NX in place of VNC when working with Linux based systems because the performance seems much better and the client has a nice way to choose from preset sessions. (You can also do individual applications, etc…) One of the benefits over X tunneling is the compression…. Anyway, I’ve gone through setting this up several times on various ubuntu 6.06 installs and thought I’d go ahead and document this on the web page so I didn’t have to keep hunting links each time….
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Mandriva 2007 download now available
Several days ago there were announcements of the release of Mandriva 2007, only thing was, the download wasn’t available yet. Well, today the download appears available. I haven’t looked to see what differences there are between the free and the powerpack download (powerpack can be downloaded by club members as well.)
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Google puts historical articles online, searchable
Wow, this is nice – and frankly, something I could probably spend hours with. Search Engine Watch tells us that Google will debut a searchable news archive that takes us back through around 200 years worth of news stories. Yes, folks, google is putting the last 200 years of history online. I remember the newsgroups being google-ized was a big deal and that just took us back to the beginnings of the modern internet…. Well, in actuality the articles aren’t hosted at google, but at either the content providers or their aggregation services….
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Project Gutenberg July 2006 DVD
I just noticed over the weekend that Project Gutenberg has updated their downloadable DVD/CD of free etexts. (Tracker at this link.) The last update of the dvd has been a few years (as far as I can tell (2003?)) It should be noted that you can now create your own image of selected works through a web interface. Given all the hoopla over Google releasing free book downloads, I would have thought that there would be more people reminding us of Project Gutenberg which boasts 19,000 FREE downloadable ebooks (which has been quite a labor intensive process – they’re all in text or html format.)
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Linspire’s Click n run is now free
First, Linspire released the freely available “freespire” release of their operating system (based on debian linux). Now, users will no longer have to pay an annual subscription for the click n run service. That’s now available for free as well. There is a writeup here. Previously the annual subscription fees were $20/$50 per year depending on service level. This does not mean all software through cnr is free, there is commercial software available there for a fee. I know that not long ago there was some talk about opening up cnr (click n run) to other distributions, possibly starting with debian based distros such as ubuntu.
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Google will allow downloads of out-of-copyright books
It’s certainly a brief story, but to the point…. Google will allow pdf downloads of the books in their book search that are already out of copyright. Of course, copyright law is a strange and peculiar thing to many people, so this doesn’t mean that EVERY edition of “The Canterbury Tales” is now freely downloadable. So, it may take a bit of digging to find the free downloads for some of the titles you’re searching for, but they can be found and downloaded. They do categorize by “limited preview” and “full view” books. It’s possible to JUST search “Full view” books as well.
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Free (and legal) music downloads coming by Christmas 2006 and DRM
I’ve seen several news reports picking up this story from yesterday. SpiralFrog will provide an advertising supported, free music download service and is expected to launch in time for Christmas 2006. There is an agreement with the Universal Music Group and SpiralFrog and the concept is that users must agree to watch advertising before downloading the free music. Testing will begin in the US and Canada before the end of the year. It sounds as though they will use DRM from Microsoft on the free downloads…
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Skype and USB phones….
I’ve seen skype I just haven’t used it personally until very recently. In fact there was a place (dialpad?) that I had used once upon a time for a few free long distance calls online. It was neat, but had some limitations (delay). It quickly became non-free and frankly the microphone I have hooked up to the PC fell back in the corner beside the desk and I haven’t dug it out in quite a while. A few weeks ago though my Dad discovered Skype and ordered a cheap ($17) “phone” that plugs into the usb port of the pc and can be used with skype and a variety of other services. (in fact, it works as a generic usb sound card so… there might be other possibilities for using it to record wav files directly, etc.)
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KDE 3.5.4 on SuSE 10.1 VMware image
It was just announced that there is a VMWare image available for download that includes SuSE 10.1 with KDE 3.5.4 installed and it’s also been updated to the most current releases of the other desktop software available for kde from opensuse. VMplayer (at least) is required, which is a free download from VMWare. VMPLayer can really be a useful way to test out a system before commiting to install it on a machine.