Biodegradable Geek

A free, self-hosted, and open source alternative to Basecamp

In my search for a Basecamp alternative – because it’s not free, and I’d prefer something I can host on my own server – I have come across an excellent piece of software called ProjectPier. This is a branch from ActiveCollab — an open source project that later became a commercial product. ProjectPier is simple, [...]

Simple and Effective Productivity Tip When Working on the Computer

This falls under “Why Didn’t I Think of This Before?” Not being able to remain focused and get things done while working on a computer is common. There’s a countless number of things to do even offline. You can, and probably do: Organize folders/desktop/etc Finally get around to actually opening up an ebook you’ve downloaded [...]

How to Speed Up Fullscreen Flash Playback in Linux

Hardware acceleration is not available in fullscreen mode for Linux yet, at least not with Adobe’s Flash 9.x plugin. This isn’t much of a problem with small videos, but it results in choppy, sluggish playback in fullscreen mode. Fortunately, there’s a simple way around this while we wait for Adobe to address the issue. Workaround [...]

The Secret to Making Money Online by DHH (video)

The following video is a talk by David Heinemeier Hansson (usually referred to simply as DHH) given at Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium, for the day-long ’08 Startup School conference. The talk is primarily centered on building a profitable Internet business, and the whole VC/Startup hype currently sliding through the interwebs. DHH gives good points for [...]

How To Use Fixtures to Populate Your Database in Rails

UPDATE: I’ve been using this method for awhile now: http://railspikes.com/2008/2/1/loading-seed-data Seed data is data that the app is dependent on. It is data that has to exist if you were to wipe the database clean and reload your schema. Some examples would be a list of cities/states, a list of categories, or the initial ‘admin’ [...]

Mounting CUE/BIN/NRG/CCD (& other) Images on Linux Using CDemu

CDemu is basically a Daemon Tools alternative for Linux. It is a kernel module that lets you mount disk images to a virtual disk drive. It is capable of mounting TOC/CUE/BIN, NRG (Nero), CDI (DiskJuggler), CCD (CloneCD), MDS/MDF (Alcohol 120%), B6T (BlindWrite 6) and TOC images, and probably whatever else libMirage can handle. Installation isn’t [...]

A Million Years into the Future

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine sent me this prediction of the future. I don’t know the origin of it, except that he found it on somebody’s profile on Xanga. Some parts sound familiar, but I can’t tell if this is from a book, movie, comic, etc. 5 years Wafers using Silicon [...]