At the start of the year I got hold of an old desktop PC (HP Compaq) running Windows XP. It was a great little bargain at a computer fair, just $50 for the base unit with XP fully installed. I have since formatted the box and, after looking around, I’ve decided to put XBMC on it as the primary OS (media centre).

I had a look at a few other free “Media Centre” OS alternatives, however, XBMC won hands down and it also helps that it’s Linux based.

Since, I’ve managed to pick-up an external 2TB Western Digital hard disk drive for $98, so it’s now become the ultimate media centre, 1000′s of films and songs all playing though my TV and at the touch of a button… however, it gets even better! I’ve recently come across something that may result in me no longer need the extra data storage!

I stumbled upon IceFilms.info while browsing a forum. It was suggested to someone to watch one of the latest TV shows “streaming” live though XBMC, so I did a little research.

The Icefilms.info concept is simple and brilliant. It’s a up-to-date repository of every TV show, and Film, ever! All free to stream and watch directly though XBMC, all you need is a internet connection though your XBMC player – Awesome!

You can run XBMC though Windows or Linux, however, as XBMC is a Linux based OS (media centre) I prefer it as a standalone OS on my TV.

I’m so glad I stumbled across it… and also I’m now finding many alternatives to it as well, so now the only issue now is…. what to watch!

Here is a small video clip I found on YouTube showing the IceFilms.info addon in operation:

Where can I get hold of the “view my profile linkedIn buttons“?

Here:
http://www.linkedin.com/profile?promoteProfile
I’d seen this LinkedIn promotional page before, but it’s lost some serious SEO ranking in the “natural search results”, due to the linkedin “share” button becoming more popular.

The Share button is LinkedIn’s equvilent to Facebook’s “Like” button and Google’s “Plus1″ button. It took a bit of searching for me to find the LinkedIn “View my profile button” when I needed to use it, but I found it thanks to an image post, and following that back to the LinkedIn page.

This page gives you a list of buttons and the corresponding HTML you can use to link directly to your LinkedIn profile like so:

For those of you a little more serious about online promotion and marketing yourself, I’d suggest a professional online resume, I offer these as a service on my SEO Consultant and reputation management website.

Enjoy.

Wow! Talk about distro hopping… The last couple of months has been a super busy time for me sorting out a ton of websites, working with various clients, and to top it all off… getting my own computer up to speed.

I use a Lenovo G560. It’s a great laptop, but I’ve been hunting for the ideal OS for a while until I settled for Arch Linux. I’m not a Windows user, and I’ve been using Linux for over a year now. I love it.

I was using Arch Linux for a good 3 months, but after a long tired day I (stupidly) decided to do a full system upgrade:

Pacman -Syu

It caused a kernel panic (to non Linux users, this is like the Windows “blue screen of death”). As Arch Linux is “cutting edge updates, something went wrong with the latest drivers and my graphics card on my laptop. This was a real pain! Especially as I had a ton of pending deadlines and had a load of work to do that day!

I learned how to “Chroot” into the system, which was awesome (and been very useful), from there I had to try and fix/figure out the error causing the kernel panic. I burned far too much time trying to get it going again, so, in the end I had to cut my losses and decided to start fresh with a new installation.

Thanks to me backing up all my really important stuff on my external hard drive and also on Dropbox I saved any headaches on file loss. This is never an issue. It’s more the time spend setting up and building the system to my liking.

The formatting of Arch Linux was pretty devastating to me (seriously!?), as I’d actually spent so much time building my “perfect OS” but, oh well, that’s always going to be an issue with running a “cutting edge OS”, with as they say “bleeding edge updates” – it’s all a learning curve.

I have since tried the following Linux distributions on my Lenovo G560:

• Peppermint OS
• Minut Mint 11
• Linux Mint Debian
• Linux Mint LXDE
• Sabayon Linux
• Chakara
• Linux Debian
• PCLinuxOS

And a few more I can’t think of off the top of my head. I know it’s a ton of distros to try out, and they were ALL tried as a “hard install” on the laptop, not in a virtual machine, so I’ve gained a lot more experience on a variety of Linux distros and come a little closer to finding the Linux distro I want to call “home”.

Currently I have rolled back to Linux Mint 9 (LTS), and I am on that at the moment. I’ll give my overviews of each of these distributions listed above, in separate blog posts, if and when I have the time, but so far, I’ve not found anything better for my current needs than Linux Mint 9.

Linux Mint Debian was the closest to take my Laptops “home” distro, and recently they’ve announced “stable upgrade” repo section, so it looks like I’ll be heading back over to LMDE soonish… It was my favourite out of the selection listed and was Soooo QUICK! I was using it for a good week, but they had an error with the graphics drivers that forced it to boot into “tty1″ and lose the GUI, I able to fix it, but I wanted something more stable, so, at the time, it forced me to try something else.

For now I’ll be sticking with Linux Mint 9 and getting my other websites and projects up to speed.

End of the World?

Well… Here’s news for you all. The world didn’t end and everything is still here! Luckily I didn’t get that $100,000 loan to blow it all in one night!

Today in Australia it’s the 22nd May and all is well! Apart from a little rain here and there, although, i’ll allow that as it is Winter.

I think it’s time for another #hashtag inspired by Charlie Sheen’s “#BiWinning”, it’s time to stop worrying about the end of the world and #WinOn!

Lets #WinOn … No more “end of the world nonsense please”

I just discovered a quick and easy way for Linux users to increase the size of a .vdi file for a Windows XP hard drive running in VirtualBox.

This method will not work if you’re looking to decrease the size of the .vdi file, and I have not tested this on Vista or Windows7, but it worked just fine for me with WindowsXP.

First logout and shut down the running virtualization of Windows XP.

Open up a terminal window and type:

VBoxManage modifyhd --resize 20480 POINT-TO-THE-PATH-OF-.VID-FILE

Hi there, it’s Ollie here (CoolestGeek – @OlliesBlog). It’s been a while since I’ve blogged on this URL. I’ve had many other projects that I’ve had to keep going, maintain or indeed get started. I was simply waiting and waiting for “just the right time” to put up a blog post and then get back into a regular habit of doing so. Of course, I never broke this spell of “putting it off” so I ended up waiting for ever and ever… until now

Since I last posted on this blog I have become an avid Linux Operating System user, I started off using the Linux Mint Distribution in around April 2010 (roughly) which, in itself, has it’s own story to tell – Why I left Windows.

Back then I thought it would be a good time to get my blog up and running again and track my progress with using and learning Linux, however, this blog was beyond a “quick fix” to get going again, and of course lots of other jobs in my day to day life needed doing, so I ended up learning and progressing with Linux in my spare time and CoolestGeek.net was left in the back corner gathering dust.

During my learning curve I did make A LOT of physical notes on paper as well as save 100′s of .txt notes that I’ll slowly post up onto this blog in case others run into the same problems as well as for my own benefit so I can look back and easily solve issues I may run into again.

Another delay for this blog being restarted was simply due to so many things happing in my life, such as, business, work, travel, parties and moving house, not to mention some technical issues I’d run into, such as planning out how to develop my various websites and the branding issues I’d brought to light with using this blog (it used to be OlliesBlog.com).

Finally, I’m ready to get going again. I will just empty my mind and thoughts onto this personal blog, I also thought that this would be an excellent platform for tracking many things for myself. As I mentioned before I now use Linux, and I began using the supposedly more advance “Archlinux” in February 2011. I have again made 100s of notes upon installing Archlinux, and as this is a Rolling Distribution, I continue to do so.

I hope this is a good insight as to why I’ve been away and hope you all enjoy my new blog and format. Feel free to comment and get this community going again.

Ollie aka CoolestGeek – @OlliesBlog