Boot multiple iso images from your thumbdrive

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/ details how to install a boot loader so you can have multiple .iso files on your thumbdrive to boot to.

This seems quite usefull to me.

Church Children's Story

Here is my handout from the childrens story I did. Perhaps you can change it for your needs the next time someone asks you to do the story.

This is adapted from my memory of the childrens story I heard when I was about 7 or 8, and from http://crazytieguy.com/airplane.htm

CloneZilla

I've used this on a few machines and am quite impressed. CloneZilla is like Norton Ghost Just not $70 for use on 1 machine; Open source AND supports PXE boot.

I went the bootable CD route (about 130mb) - but you could put this on a thumbdrive.

Opted for the basic disk clone, and simple compression that is optimized for speed.

A feature I greatly like is the ability to push a harddrive straight to a network share (SAMBA)

in a windows environment. This saves me packing around an external harddrive, and keeps my images on the domain where they hit the backup server.

In CloneZilla, if you're on a domain and wish to use the SAMBA feature, when asked for your username enter it in the form domain\username.

My favorite part is that each section of the wizard actually builds the relative simple commands for you, then shows it to you. This way it's teaching you should you ever need to extend features not presented in the GUI. As an example for connecting to a network share to store or retrieve the images: mount -t cifs -o username="mydomain\myusername,domain=mydomain" //servername/sharename /home/partimag (where /home/partimag is the local linux file system). This bit of thoughtfulness is greatly appreciated by those of us that don't use Linux on a daily basis.

If at anytime in the wizard your change your mind, or made a mistake, cancel out, then press 'enter' to tell it your canceling, then choose to restart the wizard. It felt a little backwards the first time I used it, but it's way better then rebooting a live disk every time you want to change something.

Now I just pop the disk into a sick machine, boot (about 2 minutes) attach to the network share, flash my prepped windows 7 image with office configuration from the network onto the local machine (takes about 10 minutes) and save 1 hour and 15 minutes of installing and configuring when some random machine gets sick. Windows 7 (with the exception of INTEL NIC and integrated audio drivers?!) just figures out new hardware, and we're good to go.

The only downside I've found is that that it cannot take an image and put it on a smaller harddrive (while only looking at what was used) - though it does only store what was in use, and can upsize if you go to a larger drive. therefore, for your master images consider creating them from a drive that is small to give you the greatest rollout options. Lucky me grabbed a 500GB drive off the shelf for my first image, and I've still got 40GB drives in the field! I'm willing to concede that Ghost wins there, but it's still not worth the price if that is the only feature i'm missing while saving $70 + seat licencing.

With the CloneZilla server, and PXE boot, they report flashing 41 computers in a few minutes. That sounds pretty cool for a school, or a facility that has enough money to standardize their hardware and rollout dates.

http://www.clonezilla.org/

http://partedmagic.com/

##my notes on creating full disk image

##take all defaults unless otherwise stated;

device image

SAMBA_Server

DHCP #so we can see the network

Server: UCCS2

Domain: UC

Share: /iso #/image is the default

username: uc\me

Beginner Mode

Save Disk

##my notes on restoring full disk image - so my coworkers don't feel threatened by linux

Language: English

Don't touch keymap

Start Clonezilla

Device_image

SAMBA_Server

DHCP

Mount SAMBA Server: uccs2

Domain: uc

Account: uc\me #your FQDN for your user

Directory for image: /iso #whatever you sharename is on that server

Enter your domain password, 'Enter' to continue

#see that //uccs2/iso mounted to /home/partimag

Beginner Mode

Restoredisk #Restore an Image to local disk

Choose image #CloneZilla appears to read the contents of the folders and recgonizes what it's built)

Choose Local HDD to restore to, 'Enter' to continue, 'y' overwrite data (x2)

multi-monitor wallpaper

The program at dualmonitortool.sourceforge.net works very well on my 4 screens for setting a unique/spanned image on each monitor.

Nerdy songs

Alodia found an electricity song and I find the Unit Circle Trigonometry song quite disturbing.

The Matheatre guys are great.

GOOGLE

Watched this video on Google. It's rather interesting.

(I wanna go work there, but only in the kitchen!)

ChromeOS - old build but runs

http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/ Actually runs on my acer netbook. wifi works, boots fast from usb pendrive.

It has Debian at the core and has apt-get.

I'd appreciate it more if the terminal more consistently opened when I pressed ctrl-alt-t (it only works sometimes) but for what it is, it's quite fast.

http://www.slitaz.org/en/ still has my vote for lightweight installs - but without yum or apt-get it's not too exciting; tazpkg get-install does work, but it feels clunky and second rate.

proxy your browser; ultrasurf

for those of us that don't want to have to setup our own proxy server.

http://www.ultrareach.com/

it appears quite painful to packet shape for us administrators. that being said, i want to use it!

Trip Stats

I like to track stats on my little car, so here's the numbers if you're curious. It is interesting how much of a difference wind makes (42 vs. 30 MPG for the same road). Having a tail wind instead of a head wind increased gas mileage by 40%.

Date Start Stop Miles Gallons Notes MPG
02/04/10 Home Ogden, UT 312.5 9.18 Freezing fog, black ice, and variable speed 34.05
02/04/10 Ogden, UT Rawlins, WY 598.1 7.34 Some tail wind 38.91
02/04/10 Rawlins, WY Longmont, CO 817.9 5.18 Tail / Cross wind in WY 42.42
02/06/10 Longmont, CO Idaho Springs, CO 992.0 5.44 Winter Park and Around Golden 32.02
02/10/10 Idaho Springs, CO Evans, CO 1347.2 9.77 DIA / Around Golden and Greeley 36.36
02/11/10 Evans, CO Rawlins, WY 1568.8 7.36 Heavy crosswind and head wind 30.11
02/11/10 Rawlins, WY Tremonton, UT 1886.0 8.77 crosswind and head wind in WY 36.15
02/11/10 Tremonton, UT Meridian, ID 2164.4 7.87 Good roads cruise control set at ~78 mph 35.37

Total 60.91 Overall Average MPG 35.53

Physics Limericks

Roger Clemens was stuck on a lake,
With no wind, oars, or fuel — big mistake!
So he thought like a rocket,
And emptied his pocket,
And left all his change in his wake.

Physics Limericks from the texbook for Harvard Physics-16

Pidgeon: Impossible

http://laughingsquid.com/pigeon-impossible/

visualize choose your own adventure

http://samizdat.cc/cyoa/

great writeup an illustration of a breakdown of the choose your own adventure books and changes over time.

cpu index

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html

makes for an interesting read. there are several search tools to find not-so-common processors. may be a good resource if you're trying to bring objectivity to your next netbook purchase.

DTV map

We Still don't have a TV (gave our big one to kev)- internet pipe is all we use, but if you are one that uses it, check out this handy dandy map from the FCC to show you which direction to look to to fry your eyes.

from the looks of it, bad guys would only have to hit one mountain top to put this place is chaos. thats a little scary. the only station not effected would be the PBS station, and we all know no one watches that anyway.

Leslie says Hi!

now I haven't gone too far from the spirit of nerdy tales. I introduce to you our next star up and coming nerd, Leslie!

Peek

I have been really leaning towards getting a netbook, but truth be told, the peek may be a much better solution to what I want to do with it. just give me access to info. the geekypeek.com site lists some behind the scenes info from the developers. looks like targets got one model old for $15 for the hardware.

there are quite a few email to network gateways, and if there was something else you wanted, its pretty trivial these days to make the bridge yourself. i could actually see myself with this thing on a backpack trip, where its unlikely i'd have a netbook.

MRTG

I keep rediscovering MRTG. one of these days I'll have to put it to use. a little graphing utility written a language I now know a little about, perl.

#twatch ethernet+LCD

I found some guys over at Dangerous Prototypes who seem to put out some pretty cool work. the latest, an ethernet enabled LCD for around $40 is very snazy. to bad the shipper seed studio is in china with paypal only (I hate paypal). I have nothing against china, just a lack of love for paypal.

Some of ians other work included a web server on a business card with an EXCEPTIONAL writeup on hackaday. it seems to have every thing in the writeup including do-it-yourself board etching and SD card FAT.

some where in all the clicking around I found HXD, a tool supposedly good for raw editing of SD cards with out a file system, something i have needed at work for awhile now.

additional taxation

Those of you that live outside of ME HI OR CA or a few other states know who you are.. your the guys that get your cans and bottles for free. for those of us stuck in the good old C-of-A we are subjected to the CRV California Refund Value price addition to our beverage purchases.

now i'm not one to gripe. I have a recycling center only a few blocks away. They are fast, but they suffer the problem that NIST has plagued this country with.. the weight standard.

so get this.... new 'eco friendly' packaging ensures my 5cent bottle doesn't last as long (I do reuse and put other water in it by the way) but when I go to turn it in, this bottle is worth LESS than the taxation I Paid for. - since I suffer from making a point without making one, let me spell this out for the slower among you.. if some bottles weigh more than others, yet they all are worth 5 cents, only the heavy ones will be worth the full amount, the lighter ones will return less when you submit them if they are put on a scale. this begs the question what weight does the state define as a 5cent weight?

so california pockets the difference? with the recession and all, maybe they can make jobs like Oregon does with putting gas in cars... instead of weighing this stuff, pay a dude to count it and get me my whole 5 cents back.

so do I calculate the difference and put the appropriate water back in the bottles to throw the scales?

Missile Silo coordinates

over on siloworld.com they have a nice list of Missile silos. Wired has a nice writeup on a guy that converted one to living conditions. I always heard rumors of these around denver, and wanted to make time to go explore one growing up, but I never got around to it.

anyone wanna go halvesies with me and buy a silo? =)