Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Sometimes you want to pretend you're from somewhere else. Fortunately, there's no Law of the Internet that requires you to divulge your IP address, and thereby where, and (for all intents and purposes) who, you are. You can instead rely on the kindness of strangers who will form a virtual bucket chain to carry your data from one place to another, with nobody involved (or any evesdroppers) knowing anything more than the location of the next link in the chain. For this recipe you will need:

Have a whole bunch of ultra-high resolution images to upload to your website, but you don't have time to individually scale them to a Web-appropriate size in the GIMP? Imagemagick and bash to the rescue:

for i in `ls *.jpg`; do convert -resize 50% -quality 70 $i scaled/$i; done

…hey presto! That  9½MB file is now 50% smaller (in pixel dimensions) and a mere 750KB (in file size), and the same goes for the other hundred-or-so images in that directory.

David from Grafton asked if it's possible to run multiple Live CD images off a single DVD. A bit of Googling turned up these articles:

• Creating a Multi-boot DVD

• MultiCD Builds a Multi-boot CD / DVD With Many Different Linux Distributions And / Or Utilities

Let us know if either is helpful, David.

Yes it's genuine, and utterly incomprehensible. Must lose something in the translation.

(via BoingBoing)

A while ago we got this query via the contact form on the site, and as it's a question so often asked, I think it's worth putting the answer somewhere Google can see it.

I have loaded Ubuntu 8.04 and all is well except when I download other programs eg Banshee I have no idea how to install it or any other app. This is generally a very easy task in windows.

Those of you who have used GNU/Linux for a while are now doubtless spraying the screen with bikkie crumbs as you shout "It's EASIER than in Windows!!!", but there are good reasons why a new Ubuntu user wouldn't know that.

It's just been brought to my attention that the Coffs Coast Community College is offering courses this semester in OpenOffice.org and the GIMP, led by one David Bryant, a familiar face to ClubLinux regulars. Well done David! I would advise anybody interested to enrol ASAP.

Not only is the design of the Netherlands' latest commemorative coin very clever, it was developed with 100% free software. A must-have for freedom-loving numismatists everywhere.

Earlier this month the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced a "reboot" of it's High Priority list, a list of projects critical to allowing people to use their computers in freedom. I've finally had a look at the revised list, and think it's right on the money.

I didn't know it until about a month ago, but there's this thing called DVB-T, a standard for digital video broadcasts (the "DVB" bit) by terrestrial broadcasters (the "T" bit). You can get really cheap little USB devices to receive and decode these broadcasts, and Gary brought one of them in to the meeting before last.

Sudoku is a puzzle game consisting of a grid partially filled with numbers. The presence of a number in a particular square may tell you that in some other squares certain numbers cannot be placed, or that in some other squares certain numbers must be placed. You can then deduce how to fill all the squares on the grid.

The Debian package management system may tell you that if a particular software package is to be installed on your system, certain other software packages cannot be installed on the same system, or that other packages are required to be installed on your system.

Obvious next step - if you're insane - work out how to express a Sudoku puzzle as a set of Debian packages, and let the package management system solve the puzzle for you.