I saw RATM at Rock am Ring in ‘93 or ‘94 and it was one of the best gigs I have seen, the German crowds always go nuts. Here’s them playing Rock am Ring in 2000.

Go here to watch it full screen.

I love Ted Nugent’s music. Unfortunately he’s also rather deranged

Dwarf, dwarf’s penis, vacuum cleaner attachment – “What could possibly go wrong?”, I hear you ask. Well, if you add superglue into the mix then it can turn into a bit of an embarrassment:

The attachment broke before the performance and Mr Blackner tried to fix it using extra-strong glue, but unfortunately only let it dry for 20 seconds instead of the 20 minutes required.

He then joined it directly to his organ. The end result? A solid attachment, laughter, mortification and … hospitalisation.

“It was the most embarrassing moment of my life when I got wheeled into a packed A&E with a vacuum attached to me,” Mr Blackner said.

“I just wished the ground could swallow me up. Luckily, they saw me quickly so the embarrassment was short-lived.”

Daniel Blackner, aka Captain Dan the Demon Dwarf, is a member of the Circus of Horrors. You can catch them in the Millenium Forum here in Derry on the 7th and 8th September as part of the Big Tickle Comedy Festival.

Can’t wait to see what could possibly go wrong with the fireworks up the Captain’s crack!

Well, that didn’t take long. Yesterday I posted a scan of the Ryanair ad from the Irish News featuring Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, and I was wondering what he reaction was gonna be. I thought it would me someone from the DUP to complain first. Looks like I was wrong, the UUP’s Michael Copeland was faster off the mark:

A unionist politician has hit out at budget airline Ryanair over its latest ad campaign describing it as “crass and offensive” to those who served in the military.

UUP east Belfast representative Michael Copeland believes the new advertisement which capitalises on the recent withdrawal of British troops from the province “was scraping the barrel” and alienated a large section of the Northern Ireland travelling public.

The tongue-in-cheek advert for the budget airline’s new Belfast routes features a Private Eye-style photo of Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness proclaiming “Ryanair fares are so low even the British Army flew home” while Sinn Fein party president Gerry Adams looks on in the distance.

Mr Copeland said the advert was deliberately provocative and insensitive to those, like himself, who served in the Army.

Catch yourself on, Michael. It’s supposed to be light-hearted. Ryanair thinks so too:

A spokesman from Ryanair told the Belfast Telegraph last night that they thought the Ulster Unionist should book one of its cheap flights.

It’s not the first time that Ryanair used ‘controversial’ ads, in 2005 they used Churchill which got a number of complaints:

The campaign featured the wartime PM declaring: “We shall fly them to the beaches, we shall fly them to the hills, we shall fly them to London!”

The advertisement ran in the aftermath of the London July 2005 bombings.

Ryanair insisted at the time the campaign was intended to encourage the public to continue to travel as normal in the wake of the attacks, and the complaints were not upheld by the ASA.

And last year in August they posted the following picture on the front page of their site to protest the introduction of ridiculously strict anti-terror procedures:

I like Ryanair’s ads.

I just scanned this from today’s Irish News (p. 7 if you missed it).

I wonder what the DUP will have to say to that – lol

Still the Sweetest One I’ve Ever Heard in New York

Man: You got the prettiest laugh I’ve ever heard!
Pretty girl: Aw…
Man: If you pee on me, I’ll let you laugh a lot more!
Pretty girl: Oh. I was going to say that was the sweetest catcall I’ve ever heard, but then…

–Mulberry & Spring

Overheard by: has that ever worked for you?
via Overheard in New York, Aug 11, 2007

apt-get is the command-line tool for handling packages, and may be considered the user’s “back-end” to other tools using the APT library. APT is actually both a library and a front-end for dpkg to work with Debian’s .deb packages. It’s designed to track package dependencies, call dpkg and make the software installation easy.

Note: This entry is written with Ubuntu users in mind, hence the use of sudo when root access is required.

Package installation

Install a new package like follows:

sudo apt-get install foobar

You can also install multiple packages with one line, just separate the package names with a space:

sudo apt-get install foobar1 foobar2 foobar3

All required dependencies by the package(s) specified for installation will also be retrieved and installed.

Search

(OK, so you don’t use apt-get for searching, but apt-cache. Still comes in pretty handy though.) When you can’t remember the correct package name then you can search package names and descriptions using

apt-cache search foobar

Or, for a fuzzy search try

apt-cache search foo

This can result in a long list, every package that includes ‘foo’ anywhere in its name or description will be listed. To narrow it down to package names, or packages with words in their descriptions, which start with ‘foo’ try

apt-cache search ^foo

For names/words that end with ‘foo’ try

apt-cache search foo$

Installation from source

Instead of APT fetching the pre-built .deb for a package you can also use APT to build the package from its source code and get an optimised version for your system. Generally debs are absolutely fine to install, but you could see performance increases with CPU intensive packages (e.g. ffmpeg).

sudo apt-get build-dep foobar
sudo apt-get -b source foobar

The first line causes apt-get to install/remove packages in an attempt to satisfy the build dependencies for the package foobar. The second line fetches the source package for foobar. It finds and downloads the newest available version of that source package into the current directory. Source packages are tracked separately from binary packages via deb-src type lines in the /etc/apt/sources.list file. This probably will mean that you will not get the same source as the package you have installed or as you could install. With the -b option specified the package will be compiled to a binary .deb using dpkg-buildpackage. Depending on the package this can take a long time.

Once built, install the package with

sudo dpkg -i foobar-version-number.deb

Package removal and clean-up

To remove a package use

sudo apt-get remove foobar

The software package will be removed, but all of its configuration files will be left behind. This could come in handy if you ever plan on re-installing the package, everything will be back to the way it was before the uninstall.

To remove a package complete with its configuration files use

sudo apt-get --purge remove foobar

What happens to dependencies that were installed with the package? They are left behind. To clean these up use

sudo apt-get autoremove

autoremove removes packages that were automatically installed to satisfy dependencies for some package and that are no longer needed. If you have been trying out a lot of software then this might free up some disk space.

sudo apt-get autoclean

autoclean clears out the local repository (/var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/) of retrieved package files that can no longer be downloaded and are largely useless. This allows a cache to be maintained over a long period without it growing out of control.

sudo apt-get clean

clean is more thorough than autoclean. It removes everything but the lock file from /var/cache/apt/archives/ and /var/cache/apt/archives/partial/. You will likely want to run apt-get clean from time to time to free up disk space.

Upgrade

There are two ways to upgrade your system. First a software update:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This installs the newest versions of all packages currently installed on the system. Packages currently installed with new versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages not already installed retrieved and installed. New versions of currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without changing the install status of another package will be left at their current version. An update must be performed first so that apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.

Second, a distro upgrade:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get has a “smart” conflict resolution system, and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package files.

You’ve been wasting hours and hours playing the game since you got your first computer. Now you can finally watch the movie: Minesweeper!

Priceless

I’ve followed a few different tutorials in the past to install Beryl with my Radeon 9250 (9200/rv280) and always ran into a few problems. But this one on Howtoforge was the first one where everything just worked ‘out of the box’, really excellent! It uses AIGLX and the open source ATI driver

The following cards are supported with full 3D acceleration:

• 7000 / rv100 based cards.
• 7200 / R100 based cards.
• 7500 / rv200 based cards.
• 8X00 / R200 based cards.
• 9000 / rv250 based cards.
• 9100 / R200 based cards.
• 9200 / rv280 based cards.

Check the tutorial for more (un-)supported ATI cards.