KGB Pics and Random Musings January 23, 2009 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy, KGB Readings

Here are some pictures from Wednesday’s KGB event.  Let’s thank Ellen for always having her camera handy.  This time I even snapped one of her.

So, on a totally unrelated note I recently purchased a second hand Eeepc, and a few months before that, an iPhone.  For the past week or so, I have been intensely hacking the Eee.  I put Eeebuntu on it (Ubuntu Linux tailored for the Eee).  I jailbroke my iPhone and installed several non-Apple-approved applications on it.  Surely, the geeks among you must have noticed the iPhone’s similarity to a tricorder?  Watching those shows growing up, I always wondered how they were able to both read and type on those tiny little screens.  Now, I get it.  But what really fascinates me about these new devices of mine is Linux*.

I started hacking Linux in my junior year of college.  I installed Slackware from 20 or so floppy disks onto my IBM SLC2, which was a 486 clone.  The kernel version (for the non-geeks, the kernel is the core of any OS) was 1.2.13.  Now they are up to 2.6.XX something.  Yesterday I managed to connect my Eee pc to my iPhone via Wifi, and then use my iPhone’s EDGE network to connect to the internet through T-mobile’s T-Zones program on a phone that’s only supposed to run AT&T.  Not to mention other configurations I have done that I’m not at liberty to say on an open forum.  Needless to say, all this technology is both miraculous and baffling.  I’m not sure if I really need to be this connected, but it sure is fun playing with this stuff.

* Yes, I know the iPhone doesn’t run Linux, but for this argument let’s assume it does.