I'm pretty sure that everyone who even reads this blog is familiar with Amazon Web Services. If not, here's the rundown. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a HUGE web platform created and managed by Amazon. The biggest point of this platform is that anyone can make an account (provided you have a credit card), and can start using it immediately. If you use only a little bit of resources, you pay a small fee, if you use a lot, you pay a lot....

Recently, I was forced to sell my trusted Ford Probe, because it was getting old and maintaining it became increasingly hard and expensive. It was my first real car that I paid for myself, so parting with it was hard for me. I really wanted to buy a new car that was a worthy replacement for the Probe, and I ended up buying a 2005 Mazda RX-8. Carputer Carputers are something that have interested me for a while, and it's something that comes up with every car I have used and owned....

Linux's Logical Volume Manager, or lvm, is a method for dividing a physical disk (or physical volume, PV) into blocks (or physical extents, PE). These blocks can be assigned to partitions (or logical volumes, LV). The process of assigning PE’s to a LV creates a map for translating PE’s to LE’s, called the allocation map. The purpose of this abstraction of disk blocks is to create great flexibility when it comes to allocating disk space to partitions....

PulseAudio has been the standard sound system in Ubuntu for several versions now, and seems to be replacing, or rather supplementing, ALSA and OSS. Its main benefits (for me) are: per application sound levels, and streaming to a remote PulseAudio instance over network. At home, I have a HTPC running Xubuntu with XBMC hooked up to my stereo. Because I usually control XBMC using my Android phone, I have no mouse or keyboard attached....