For those of you who are on twitter, feel free to tell me about your accounts as I’m still looking for some interesting people to follow . And by the way, here’s my account. You can follow the link or just get the latest tweets from the right side of this website.

today I would like to briefly introduce you to a new technology reviewing website that has just been launched yesterday, on the 2nd of November. It is called technobuffalo.com and features mostly user generated content along with some high quality youtube videos of a handful of professional editors. The main idea is to give everyone the opportunity to blog about anything technology related. By posting your reviews, previews, comments or whatever you think the world needs, on technobuffalo.com people browsing the site will happen to stumble across your articles very easily (at least, that is what the website’s creators hope for) and tell you, what they think of it. Through the facebook-like social network of this website users are encouraged to discuss and evaluate each other’s content and thereby achieve good quality content along with decent page viewing statistics. To post to your own customizable blog you just need to register with technobufallo and start editing your very own content.

As mentioned before, this website was just launched yesterday. Now, how did I know of that? Back in April when I was waiting for my 13″ aluminium macbook to be delivered (and believe me, that took a loooooong time!) I was browsing youtube looking for some nice videos about my first apple product (being a passionate linux user this felt like the ultimate level of shame…). I stumbled upon Jon4Lakers youtube channel who made videos of himself unboxing the macbook, reviewing it after one day, one week, two weeks and a lot more cool things you need to see when you are shacking with anticipation Although this Jon Rettinger obviously was an apple enthusiast and therefore presented the products reviewed in a certain light, he still found some decent ways of describing and evaluating new products. Since then I’ve been subscribed to his channel and watched most of his videos. As time went by his videos became more professional (new camera, switched from bedroom to writing desk, better lights, a generally improved presentation) and started to cover new kinds of hardware and software. Some months later he started to have some other guys (e.g. Lasse Pulkinnen – watch the lumberjack review!) posting to his channel which somehow showed that there is a big potential of users being interested in this kind of tech reviewing (they now have more than 50.000 subscribers). Today you can find videos about the newest smart phones, a really great comparison of the XB0×360 and the PS3, coverage of interesting prototypes like the new Vaio X, reviews of Windows 7, a report about one of those great problems with the Dell customer’s service and, of course, just about anything apple related.

Despite the fact that a big part of the content on technobuffalo.com (until now) is produced by mac users, there already is a great variety of content. While I’m still missing some linux coverage I think that this project might be having a great future as it offers a unique combination of a facebook-like social network with user-generated tech-blogs. Let’s see where that goes! By the way, they also offer some very nice giveaways

Thanks for reading.

• “Fluxbuntu – Step-by-step Install
• How-To : Report Bugs with LaunchPad, CoLoCo Edubuntu Presentation, >From VMware to VirtualBox and Learning Scribus Pt.5.
• Review of Bridge Construction Kit.
• Preview of Gusty Gibbon
• Letters, Q&A, My Desktop, My PC, Top 5, the new My Opinion column, and more!

As announced in the title of this weblog entry something special recently happened. In connection with me attending the Philipps-University (yay, I surely won”t forget about this name!) from October on, I left Büdingen and moved to Marburg. That’s mainly the reason why I’ve not been posting here for some time. I was and still am quite busy doing what is necessary. We’ll see if that’s going to change

Although these articles don’t really represent the maximum of my capabilities as I had to write them in a short time, I’m happy to have been able to help out. Somehow they must have been quite OK as I’ve been given the opportunity to write something else for the next issues. I hope you”re looking forward as much as I do for Issue #5 featuring an article I’m nearly satisfied with (and let’s hope the editors and proofreaders are satisfied with it, too ).

Reading this (3 day-old) news you might be interested in #4′’s features:

• Edubuntu – What’s in it for the kids?
• How-To : Hosting Code on LaunchPad, Learning Scribus part 4 and Keep your kids safe in Ubuntu.
• Preview of Miro 0.9.8. * Interview with Ubuntu Developer Colin Watson.
• Letters, Q&A, MyDesktop, MyPC, Top5 and more!

“Ubuntu HQ’s goal is to collect all Ubuntu related articles in one place. You can find recent news issues, application reviews, howto’’s and other stories. Every article has a “Full Story” link to the original website and an easy browsable archive of howto’s. You can vote articles up or down and add comments. Check it out!”

I just had a look at this nice website and found two interesting articles:

• Control your Compiz Fusion via Tray Icon
• Running a faster Open Office

Sounds like a mixture of digg.com and howtoforge.net but as it is Ubuntu only, this might be a good resource for the ever-growing ‘buntu community

Editing the article to fit into the wiki I had to ask some simple questions, just to make sure I was doing the right thing. And, again, I was surprised. Everyone is friendly around there. Of course, we all know of the unbelievable friendliness of Ubuntu-related forums (German forums don”t count here ) but being able to ask somehow dumb questions isn”t something I expected to be so greatly appreciated. What more can a community based project have than good content, progress and friendly and obviously motivated members! Wow, good job!

But let’s stop felicitating them and give some details: From the index page you can access the different categories squarely listed. They have some basic how tos like software management meaning instructions on how to install, remove and update different pieces of software, the essential from-windows-to-linux-guide and more advanced themes like guides on viewing and editing photos, setting up servers, etc.. Something special is the Laptop Testing Team. They test different versions of Ubuntu on their laptops and analyse how good these things work under linux and what you can do to outwit some major problems. That reminded me of something. A few days ago I started writing about how to set up and configure Ubuntu on my Asus W2JC Laptop. I might continue that and contribute it to the wiki. Well, if it’’s good enough, of course.\r\n\r\nSo, to sum things up, if you’re interested in a growing, community based Ubuntu wiki you really should have a look at the website mentioned above and seriously think about contributing. I will.

Finally I’m back here and writing something for my weblog. I know it took me quite a long time to push myself and really do something else but hanging around and enjoying my free time. But here I am, back again. There are many things I want to say, mostly just things that happened but also a new piece of hardware which I bought and which I am currently enjoying very much. Read on and see some nice pictures of the new hardware and everything around it.

As I mentioned before, I reached my A-Levels: Three weeks ago I had my last exams and on Saturday the 23rd of June I received my final grade certificate (if anyone of the 121 others gets here, feel welcomed ). In the next days I used my new free time to realize that I really finished school which was pretty hard to understand. Today I think I’ve gotten used to this situation and I’m looking forward to moving away from this strange place that I’m still calling my home and starting studying at university. Read more about this later.

A friend of mine who regularly seems to seduce me to buy new hardware (thank you for this ) somehow influenced me, willingly or not, to use some money and buy myself an AV-receiver. He was the one who once recommended me the Teufel Concept E Magnum, a set of 5 speakers and a subwoofer with an incredible sound for “just” 150€ which was practically one of the best things I have ever bought! Already having this 5.1 set including a 5.1 sound card (for the linux users: Terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun – works perfectly under Alsa) I use this speaker set for my computer mainly to listen to music, watch DVDs and stuff like that. Unfortunately I never had the chance of using these speakers for my TV and radio. But with my new Denon AVR-1507 AV-receiver this works just fine. I”ve got my speakers and my subwoofer directly connected to it and I have the impression that the sound even improved by using this new receiver. I bought it via amazon and got an allowance between 30-40€ because the package it was originally shipped in was damaged. Well, thank you Mr. and Mrs carrier . I still paid a lot for it though: a bit more than 200€. Experts may say that this is quite a low price for an AV-receiver but for me it still looks like a lot of money…

Being happy about my new receiver I then had to find a place for it and connect it to nearly everything electronic in this room. This was fun but believe me, I nearly went crazy with all these small cables and wires! I’ve now got my TV, my DVD player, my computer and even my laptop connected to this receiver and to the 5.1 surround sound. Let me just say: This rocks!

Because of all these new connections I had to replace my three cables with which I had connected my computer to my subwoofer and the speakers with a new optical one. Have a look at the funny picture on the left showing two of them in comparison. Just guess which of them costed 3€ and which of them made me pay nearly 40€

Having installed all cables I finally had to set up my computer to use the optical cable. I guess it might be interesting for people willing to use these cables to know how I got this to work. I did a bit of research and somewhere in a forum I found a thread about this. I just had to use the alsamixer to activate “IEC958 Out” which practically enables this port. After this I disabled “IEC958 Loop” to prevent the digital output from only using signals from the digital input – at least that’’s what was written there. At last I edited my ~/.asoundrc and replaced pcm “hw:0,1″ with pcm “hw:0,0″.

A funny experience I made was, after having moved my computer from the left side of my screen to the right to connect it to the new cable, my mother’s Ubuntu machine from one floor above recently had a much faster internet connection than before. I guess my computer standing between the router and my mother’s computer somehow blocked or at least slowed the wireless network down. This fixed she enjoys reading her emails in real time without having to do housework or read a book while loading the incoming mail. I”m sure she now agrees that my new AV-receiver was a good investment.

There’s now only one problem left: I didn’t manage to configure neither Alsa, mplayer nor vlc to do exactly what I want yet. When watching a DVD I can’t just use its sound options and let them control whether I hear stereo or surround sound. I have to do this through my av-receiver which is actually a loss of quality. I hope to find a solution to this soon but I”m sure that somewhere out in the ubuntuforums (did I ever mention them before? ) there’ll be a friendly linux user knowing what to do. By the way, if you are the one, please let me know how to do this and comment on this post.

As promised, some more pictures of the new AC-Receiver and my whole sound- and computer-system:

Before I’ll come to end, there a few things to mention. Remember? It was “News, news, news”

Yesterday I talked to a guy called “OldPink” on IRC Freenode. Well, let’s not make any jokes about his name but come to the point :p. He told me he had a blog, too, so I read some of his posts and I was really impressed. I especially like the length and the style of them, it’s just how I wish them to be. So, perhaps you”d like to have a look at his website at mbhoy.com.

I forgot to mention that Issue #2 of the full circle magazine has been released. But I’m sure you’ve already registered for the fcm-newsletter to receive notifications on upcoming releases.

So, that’s it for the moment. I’ll try to post here more regularly so I don”t have to throw everything together and write about so many different themes in one post. I”d be pleased if you gave me some feedback about whether you liked this sort of mingling different themes because I’m really not sure if this is the way I want it to be.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

After firms of other Linux distributions such as Novell, Xandros and Linspire started cooperating with Microsoft, generally understood as related to Microsoft’’s unfounded patent menaces, rumours of Canonical doing the same became public. Although Mark Shuttleworth’s blog is not an official proclamation instrument of Canonical, it may be believed that what he says there is almost congruent to Canonical’’s official position. He there states what is a very common opinion abut Microsoft’’s patent menaces:

“But I don’t believe that the intent of the current round of agreements is supportive of free software…”

It may be assumed that these agreements are a consequence of Microsoft’’s FUD policy. Let’s hope that Ubuntu keeps following the road of independence and logical thinking.

“This issue includes:

• Installing Ubuntu Feisty Fawn
• Howtos: Linux directory structure, MythTV, Scribus, and more
• Interview with Deluge BitTorrent Client developer
• News, reviews, and much more!”

If you”d like to contribute to the magazine directly or help translating it, please visit the wiki.