Step One: Downloading Ubuntu

Go and download the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu. You can get the most recent release from here.

Step Two: Burning the liveCD

Put a blank CD in your superdrive, and fire up Disk Utility. Click on the CD drive you want to burn to in the left hand pane then click on burn. Now you need to navigate to the .iso image that you downloaded earlier and press burn. Finally, a list of options will be made available. Choose 10x burn speed, or the lowest possible available, and make sure ‘Verify burned data’ is checked. These two options will ensure that the data written to disk isn’t corrupt before we use it to install Ubuntu. You’re superdrive should whizz into action, and eventually the liveCD will be burned and ready to go.

Step Three: Making some space for Ubuntu

Open up Boot Camp Assistant. No, I haven’t gone crazy, and no, we won’t be installing Windows. Using Boot Camp is the best way of making a partition the OSX understands and can deal with. Press continue, and imagine it says Ubuntu instead of Windows on the next screen. Here you can choose how much room you want Ubuntu to occupy on your hard drive. I’d suggest anything upwards of 6GB, depending on what you’ll be putting on the Ubuntu partition and how much space you want left for OSX. Once it has finished partitioning click “Install later” – there’s one more thing we’ve got to do to make Ubuntu bootable.

Step Four: Installing rEFIt

This is the final step that’s going to be carried out on OSX. Because MacBooks don’t seem to know what Linux is, we need to install a bit of software that will let us boot Ubuntu. rEFIt does the job quite nicely, and can be downloaded from here. Follow the installation instructions and pop the Ubuntu liveCD you burned earlier into the superdrive.

Step Five: Booting into the Ubuntu LiveCD

Make sure the liveCD is in your drive, and restart your MacBook. When booting make sure to hold down the option (alt) key. This will allow us to choose to boot from the Ubuntu liveCD. When the option screen appears, there should be two choices, OSX with a picture of a hard drive and Windows with a picture of a CD. Windows is the one we want, so use the arrow keys to select it and hit enter. This will hand over control to the Ubuntu liveCD, and should boot into a desktop environment.

If it doesn’t, then there’s a problem. If, like me, you have a MacBook 5,2 you’ll get this problem. The only way around this problem is to add an extra option at boot. To do this, hit any key when a nice purple splash screen appears. Then press function+F6 and select acpi=off. Then press escape and then enter, and it should boot fine.

Step Six: Install Ubuntu

Here’s the business end of this guide. Double click on the ‘Install Ubuntu 10.04 LTS’ icon to get started.

1. Select your native language and press ‘Forward’.
2. Select your local time zone and press ‘Forward’.
3. Choose your keymap. I’ve found that the guess option doesn’t work well at all for Apple layouts, so just pick the right one and press ‘Forward’.
4. Select manually. Selecting any other option won’t work. Press ‘Forward’.
5. Click on the fat32 partition. This is the partition that you created earlier. Press ‘Change’.
6. Change the file system type to Ext4 (or 3 or 2, whichever one you want), tick the ‘Format’ box and choose the mount point at /. Then press ‘Forward’ and then ‘Continue’.
7. Enter your account credentials and press ‘Forward’.
8. Make sure you press advanced here. Change the partition that the boot loader is being installed on to ‘/dev/sda3′. Not doing this will result in an un-bootable system.
9. Finally, press install and wait for the magic to happen.

Step Seven: Post install

After installing, reboot. You should have taken the CD out, and you should get the rEFIt screen giving you an option of an apple or a penguin. Go for the penguin, and Ubuntu should boot.

If you needed to add and extra parameters when you were booting the liveCD, you’ll need to add the same parameters when booting into Ubuntu. To do this press control-x when grub appears, and add any needed parameters to the end of the second but last line.

I hope this guide helps you to install Ubuntu, and any comments, criticism or otherwise are very much appreciated.

Made by Propagation of Sound

The old pirate bay
The pirate bay are letting their users torrent retro style, with a new website showing the pirate bay when it was first released.

ASCII YouTube
Most videos on youtube can now be viewed in ascii format today.

Google discovers 3rd dimension
View streetmap photos in 3D with a pair of cheap red/blue glasses. Disclaimer: beware of birds

Google offers digital books in a new dimension
You can also read books in 3D now. Not too sure why you’d want to though

Duke Nukem Forever Demo
Possibly the most famous vapourware in non-existence has a demo named AprilFools.zip I’ll let you decide whether it’s real or not

Man arrested at Large Hadron Collider claims he’s from the future
We finally find out who is to blame for the infamous baguette episode at the LHC

Google translate for animals
Take your pick from cat, dog, bird, rabbit, guinea pig, hamster, tortoise, horse, chicken, sheep, donkey, or pig

You must have expected some outlandish April Fool’s gag
Unclyclopedia act all serious for once. Apart from the rabbit with a pancake on its head

Google to go nuclear
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true

Store anything in Google Docs
Ever wish you could ctrl-f your keys? You can now

xkcd command line
Featuring comic puns for all your favourite commands, including nano and cat

Gmail vowel outage
Apparently they’re still investigating as to whether the letter y was affected or not

Stage One

To begin your plan, you must first incinerate a pope. This will cause the world to sense a grave disturbance in the force, unsettled by your arrival. Who is this ripe bastard? Where did they come from? And why do they look so good in a supervillain costume with gimmicks?

Stage Two

Next, you must seize control of the internet. This will all be done from a underground secret headquarters of doom, a mysterious place of unrivaled dark glory. Upon seeing this, the world will flee in terror, as countless hordes of winged monkeys hasten to do your every bidding.

Stage Three

Finally, you must send forth your secret death ray, bringing about pain, suffering, the usual. Your name shall become synonymous with fuzzy bunnies, and no man will ever again dare interrupt your sentences. Everyone will bow before your dashing good looks, and the world will have no choice but to restore your credit rating.

Make your own evil plan over at http://www.darksites.com/evilplan.php

• You can’t sync bookmarks from your web browser to your iPod touch. I mean how hard can it be?

• Syncing iPods on windows is a right pain. Half the time it crashes, an when it doesn’t it takes twenty minutes to sync a couple of songs. I know windows isn’t the best as far as operating systems go, but you’d think that Apple would actually go to some effort to get their software working well on the most used operating system in the world.

• Even when you use iTunes on OSX it’s more than prone to crashing and RAM hogging.

• Apple can’t be arsed doing a 64-bit version of iTunes. Every other iLife program is 64-bit, so there can’t be any big reason why iTunes can’t be.

• The iTunes store is way more expensive than it’s other competitors (such as Amazon MP3 and play.com) I feel sorry for the millions who know of nothing but the iTunes store, and are forking out good money for music that’s often half the price elsewhere.

• iTunes insists on authorising each computer you play your non-DRM-free iTunes goodies on. This might not seem like a bad thing at first, but after you’ve had your iTunes library computer crash on you a couple of times it isn’t. Apparently I’ve used up 3 of my 5 authorisations, when I only have two computers in the house and I know for sure that my iTunes stuff is only on one of those.

• It’s virtually impossible to find and set up genius mixes. I know this isn’t exactly iTunes’ killer feature, but when it was released I spent at least 3 days trawling the internet trying to find out where the genius mix button was. And don’t ask me where it is cause I’ve forgotten.

• You have to enter your password to download a free application. Extra unnecessary time wasting step much?

• The store homepage is a mess of scrolling down and scrolling across. If I had a pound for every time I’ve got stuck on one of those retarded scrolly-across boxes…

• The artwork is continually messed up on my iPod touch, and I now have podcast covers on my normal albums. And everything appears to be fine in iTunes.

And I’m sure there’s much more I could talk about. Seriously Apple, pull your act together.

Positives

• It displays the news stories in a pleasing font and style
• It allows quick and easy access to each of the main and sub sections of the paper
• It has offline browsing, although the option to download whole sections is somewhat tucked away at the bottom of the home screen
• It has a slick tag browser, and the photo galleries are well designed
• Once you’ve read an article it’s entry in the news browser is greyed out so you know which articles you’ve already read

Negatives

• The settings pane is clunky and difficult to use
• You can’t seem to be able to search for individual articles (but you can search for contributors, topics or sections for some reason)
• There is no easy way to refresh a page (for example if you want to follow a football or cricket match live)

Improvements I’d like to see

• A landscape mode for reading
• Reader comments added at the bottom of news stories
• Push notifications for new articles
• A list of articles that are in the actual paper based paper today

All in all I think it’s a pretty good attempt at a first app, but it will only become value for money once the updates start rolling in

For those of you not in the know, this is a theatrical light, and one of the classic range produced by Strand in the mid 1960s. If you’ve got £450 burning a hole in you’re pocket, you can head on over to Ebay and put in a bid!

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

The motivation for starting Project Euler, and its continuation, is to provide a platform for the inquiring mind to delve into unfamiliar areas and learn new concepts in a fun and recreational context.

You can use whichever programming language you want (so long as it’s powerful enough) and you can take on the problems at your own pace. I’ve solved 7 of the the problems myself, so see if you can beat me, and happy programming

Link : http://projecteuler.net/

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to fund the introduction of sheet music to libraries across the country

and is aimed at getting a wider variety of sheet music widely available for free-of-charge borrowing in libraries across the country. You can sign the petition here: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/sheetmusic/. Please sign and spread the message!