A Week with my New Laptop

Last week I bought a Toshiba Satellite L655D-S5050, which is what I consider to be a very nice laptop. I had a bit of a problem getting my WiFi to work in Ubutnu, and even using an Ethernet cable didn't work, but upgrading to 10.04.1 fixed this problem.

I now have a really nice laptop that I got for a crazy low price running a secure OS and its perfect for 3D modeling/animation in Blender, and I successfully ran the Beta version on it.

I would HIGHLY recommend this laptop to anyone.

Government Censorship

I was just reading some scary articles about a bill the Obama Administration will be suggesting soon (don't get me wrong, I like Obama, its just that everyone does something really stupid in their life, and sadly, he is doing it right now). You can find some of these articles, like this one from the EFF, and here and here which tie in very closely with internet censorship. So, here is a nice guide to keep you safe from a government takeover.

Use Linux for your computers opperating system.

Although this is the hardest one to do for most people, its is also the most important. Linux is the worlds most secure opperating system, so as long as you keep it up to date and use a secure password, the government will have a very hard time trying to hack your computer, which would be a great way to spy on you and censor your every message. However, this is not as hard as you think. There are many great Ubuntu distrobutions which are very easy to use, particulary Ubuntu which is very easy to setup, and even lets you keep your normal Windows or Mac opperating system on your computer as well. Ubuntu also includes the tools you need to encrpyt your files and so on.

Create a public key

This is probably the second most important thing which you can do, but it can be somewhat complex as it involves encryption and more work to use the encryption. They can't spy on you if they can't read what your saying, so really make an effort to encrypt all sensitive data. I good guide on this can be found right here. The more you encrpyt, the better! Encrpyting your e-mail can be made easiear with the EnigMail Addon for the Mozilla Thunderbird Email Client.

Use Tor

Tor is a program which encrpyts all your network traffic and sends it all over the world before it reaches is final destination. This hides your orgional location as well as encrypting your network traffic. (For the techy people, it also hides your IP address).

Always use https links

When you see a link or url that starts with https:// not http:// (note the extra s at the end), that means that the connection is encrypted, although, this type of encryption can easily be fooled by governments that have too much power, so watch out!
See also: Encrypted Google Searches

There is always more you can do to stay safe online, so if you have an addition you would like to add to this post, just leave a comment, and I will get it in as soon as I can.
To the people who think that the government should be monitoring our messages:

As the rest of use know, the government can easily abuse this power. It starts out as "We are only monitoring suspected terrorists" and then it moves to accusing people of being terrorists just to monitor them. Or its "We are only monitoring suspected criminals" to "We are only monitoring people who we think may be doing something wrong, but have no idea what or where they are doing anything wrong" to "We are monitoring everyone to make sure they don't do anything wrong." And when they start monitoring everyone, all privacy is gone.

Blender3D 2.54 Beta

I'm am a huge fan of the Blender 3D Modeler. I've used it to create 3D models, do special effects, and I've watched some rather good movies made in blender. The beta version of Blender has a new GUI making it look much, much better, and it also includes support for Python scripting, which I am particularly looking forward to playing with as I am a Python geek.

The New Blender GUI

It does take a little getting used to because of the new interface, but I am sure once you become more practiced with this latest version, you will never go back to the old version.
You can get the 2.54 Beta Version, or, if you want to use one that is absolutely stable, you can use the latest stable version.

One last note about the beta version, it requires Python 3.1 which you can download at the on python.org.

BBot 5.0 Comming Soon

It seems like just yesterday that BBot 4.0 was released, but BBot 5.0 is now in the beta phase with the following new features:

• The ability to ignore messages that match a regular expression (regex)
• A new, easiear to use config file
• 3 API functions to allow any module to easily read any value from a section in the config.
• The config is divided into sections, so your module can easily have its own section.
• New anti-spam features
• The factoid system now uses sqlite3.
• And More!

You can get BBot on SourceForge. Or wait for the 5.0 version to come out.