Wednesday, February 24, 2016

What did we leave behind on the Moon

The following Globe displays the approximate locations of various artefacts we left behind on the Moon. Its by no means the entire list, to see the full list, please refer to this document  the “Catalogue of Manmade Material on the Moon” (pdf) compiled by NASA’s History Program Office.



I've based the locations on the map created by STEVEN PESTANA over at https://anthropoceneacolyte.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/lunar-artifacts-map/ with a few additions by me from recent times.. ok just the Indian mission(location not accurate).

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Assigning multiple drives to Steam on Linux


So I moved one of my work machines home and since i don't really need any of the windows applications i permanently switched over to the Ubuntu installation(was a dual boot setup).

Now a few months later i need some extra space for my Steam games. So decided to install them on the old windows partition. Those of you who are in the same boat already know that NTFS partitions(or most non ext4 partitions) don't auto mount.. so heres a culmination of my figuring out how to do that..
..and get Steam to use the NTFS partition as the directory for downloading and installing games.
I believe that this can also be used to mount external hard drives.. though you'll need to leave them plugged in at all times to avoid problems.

Note: The instructions below was culled from several forum posts, which will be mentioned and linked at the end.

1) Hit Ctrl – Alt – T on your keyboard to open Terminal. When terminal opens, run the commands below to view all partitions on your system. The drive should already be attached to your Ubuntu machine.
sudo blkid
you should see something like this
in my case I need to automount the two NTFS drives named "ReactorCore" and "Rehoboth" so from now on wherever you see those names, replace them with your drive labels

2) You need to note down the UUID(Drive Id)
in my case its 10B062CCB062B83C for Reactorcore and 7E02626002621E01 for Rehoboth
(you can drag to select and copy it out of the terminal and into a notepad or wherever)

3) Go back to the Terminal and run
sudo gedit /etc/fstab
this opens the fstab file.
which should look like this without any entries for your ntfs partitions

Scroll to the bottom and add the following entries for your drives

UUID=10B062CCB062B83C /mnt/reactor ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0 

Note: the UUID is what tells linux which drive to mount, and the name "reactor" is the name it will show up under.. it can be anything you like.

So my fstab file now looks like this:


4) Save the file and close it. Terminal may have some messages, its ok.. either close that terminal and start a new one or continue in the same.

5) After that, run the commands below to create the mount point you specified in the fstab file.
sudo mkdir /mnt/reactor

In my case i did this again for the second drive "rehoboth" as well

6) Make yourself "owner" of the mount point by running the commands below
sudo chown chaitanyak /mnt/reactor

Replace "chaitanyak" with your username, and "reactor" with your mount name


again, do this for all the drives you are mounting.

7) Restart your computer and go to /mnt to access the drives.

you can drag them to the side panel to create bookmarks for easier access


8) Launch Steam, in the top menu click "steam" and go to settings
now on the side menu click "downloads"
and you'll see the "Steam Library Folders"  button
Click it

9) now you see this.. a list of the folders on various drives.. in your case it will probably just be the first one..

click the "Add Library Folder" to add one of your newly added drives..
which will show up under "mnt" as seen below

select the drive and click "new folder"


that creates the folder.. now back in the folder list, you can right click and set it as the default one.

Thats it! happy gaming!




Refrence links:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/440/discussions/0/864969482000076486/

http://www.liberiangeek.net/2012/04/auto-mount-windows-ntfs-partitions-in-ubuntu-12-04-precise-pangolin/

http://steamcommunity.com/app/221410/discussions/0/864969481983128260/

http://askubuntu.com/questions/226884/how-do-i-use-a-different-drive-as-an-installation-location-for-steam

Tuesday, February 9, 2016

India says no to Free Basics

Facebook had been trying to curtail #netNeutrality by providing free services on partner network providers, thus becoming a gate keeper controlling the data people can access.
They were using serious marketing techniques and some Ted talk like TV spots and huge billboards to make it look like they were doing it for the good of India's poor masses.

The Indian regulatory body TRAI finally shot them down.


    India says NO to Facebook Free Basics
    by Chaitanya Krishnan
    on Sketchfab