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I’ve been getting a lot of IM spam recently. Especially from my Yahoo and AIM accounts. The easiest way to eliminate instant message spam is to go to Tools>Privacy in Pidgin. Then select “Allow only users on my buddy list.”

This doesn’t work very well for me since I give out my IM name(s) a lot. I don’t always remember to add people too. I will also often remove people from my contact list who I no longer remember or recognize.

We’ll I’ve found the perfect Pidgin plugin for this situation, Bot Sentry. I first heard about it on Makeuseof.com and it just took me a bit to try out. Bot Sentry will ask a verification question to whomever tries to send you message, unless they are on your buddy listed or have been approved by you previously. Here is what it will look like on the Spammer’s end.

Spammer: hi i want to spam you
YourNameHere: Bot Sentry engaged: you are now being ignored! Your message will be delivered if you can correctly answer the following question within 10 minutes: How do you spell the number 10?

So far it’s working great. It does have some small issues with at least two other plugins I know. Psychic mode needs to be changed to only display for users on your buddy list. Bot sentry will actually modify this setting and notify you upon first run. Guifications will display typing notifications for the spammer if you have it enabled. There doesn’t seem to be a way to disable it for just those on your buddy list. You can however disable the notification completely.

ProfessorTomoe posted some nice Arch wallpapers in the forums a few days ago.

I’m trying out with Mac4Lin, a very complete theme that attempts to mimic OS X. It includes themes, skins, and icons for compiz, metacity, pidgin, audacious, etc. While it isn’t original art the package is very impressive and I appreciate the effort.

The documentation seems to be a bit dated but it is easy enough to install if you are already into themes.

While not necessarily a part of Mac4Lin, I decided to try out Mac menu bar Gnome panel applet. I was very surprised how well it work. I was disappointed that XUL apps don’t work with it. Basically all non GTK2 applications will not work with it.

I highly doubt I will stick to this setup but I do wish there were more Linux themes that were this complete. Unfortunately the ones that are tend to mimic OS X or Vista.

I don’t currently dual boot but I have in the past. I’ve always wondered if a Linux swap partition could be used by Windows for it’s virtual memory/swap file. I never wondered enough to look for a solution though.

Apparently it is possible and has been for some time. How? With an open source driver called SwapFS, which works with NT, 2000, and XP.

The SwapFS page also contains links to similar drivers. One of them which I used while I did dual boot, EXT2 IFS. It made my EXT3 partitions visible to Windows. I was able to read and write to the partitions too. I did have issues deleting some files that were created under Linux though.  This may have been fixed since I last used it.

Due to very strange Windows XP errors my uncle ended up installing Linux. He installed Ubuntu Ultimate Edition. He was able to do that fine but called me when his Sprint Aircard didn’t work. (more…)

B-Con posted a thread on the Arch Linux forums asking which Arch packages users rebuild. Firefox comes up a few times because users rebuild it for official branding. Allan then posted a link to a nifty script to automatically rebuild Firefox with official branding. I’ll post it here as well and hope that WordPress won’t mess it up.
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PJ on the Arch Linux Forums posted a cool Pacman Wallpaper:

Updated 02/19/08: Various resolutions posted in the thread.

SwiftFox is an optimized build of Firefox. It uses a few methods to do this, most notably the compile options. I don’t use Swiftfox but I had to compile Firefox in Arch. I figured I would apply some of Swift’s optimizations to my own build. If you need a crash course in rebuilding Firefox in Arch Linux read the Arch Wiki for Firefox recompile. If you want more details of SwiftFox’s optimizations check out it’s source code page and Wikipedia entry.

Here are the following changes I made to the mozconfig file:
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Tupac is a front end to the Arch Linux package manager, Pacman. It’s very similar to Yaourt in that it has colored output and searches the AUR but does this all much faster. The speed is due to it’s cached implementation. All actual package installations are done with Yaourt. It was created by Pajaro and written in PHP.

Aside from the speed increase, search functionality was also improved. For instance if I search “city sim game” in Tupac I get the following results: lincity, lincity-ng, and opencity. If I do the same search in Yaourt or Pacman I will get many more unrelated results. For example I get back packages related to audacity and metacity.

Tupac is also written with other frontends in mind. As a proof of concept Pajaro has also more recently released Qupac. While still a new project it is very functional.

The only downside I could possible see with tupac is the fact that it is written in PHP and so depends on it being installed. Yaourt is a bash script and tupac it depends on it as well.

Both tupac and qupac can be found on the AUR.

I recently read a blog post that brought up some neat features of VirtualBox. It is a kinda how-to on getting VirtualBox+Windows to integrate into an Ubuntu desktop. I personally don’t have a need for virtualization but have used VMWare, Qemu, and VirtualBox to load up different distros.

Out of all of those mentioned above the only one I currently had installed was VirtualBox. I even had Windows XP on a virtual drive. There really wasn’t much to do with my setup to get seamless windows going. I hit Right CTRL+L and that was pretty much it. I even had Compiz going and didn’t run into any problems.

Since I didn’t really need Windows for anything this was more of a tinkering expedition. I loaded up some Silverlight sites. Most of the sites ran fine, which was to be expected. I tried watching Bill Gate’s keynote video, the audio was fine but the frame rate of the video was low. I’m sure this was just more of a hardware and/or configuration issue on my part though.