The Atheist Blogger

A reader expressed some concern over my tendency to post some very off-topic things, such as my upcoming series on Linux, and other non-atheistic things. When I registered this blog back in February, I already had a “personal” blog that I updated semi-regularly. As the popularity of this blog grew however, my efforts on my personal blog died out, so I decided to merge the two together; making the entire process easier for me.

Due to the fun nature of my course (programming + robotics!!!), I find many more things to talk about in my personal work, so naturally more posts would be about those kind of topics. Evidently there are people out there who read my blog for the posts concerning atheism (well I am The Atheist Blogger after all), and care very little or not at all for my posts about anything else. I have therefore devised a solution, and pay attention, because this gets tricky.

If you don’t mind reading posts about atheism and my personal exploits, you can continue using my usual feed: http://atheistblogger.com/feed. This feed uses FeedBurner so it reduces the stress on the server (by a little bit at least) and also keeps some nice stats. If you are apathetic about what you read, please use this feed as well!

If you only want to read my posts about atheism (and all related themes), you can use this feed: http://atheistblogger.com/category/general/feed. It doesn’t use FeedBurner and will deliver you all posts that I post under subcategories of “general” (atheism, religion, god, etc.)

If for some reason you only want to read about my personal exploits, or you want to have a separate feed for those posts, you can use the following feed: http://atheistblogger.com/category/personal/feed

Occasionally I will post something globally (such as this post or a related meme) and it will show up everywhere. Hopefully this will sort the problem out!

Just in case people were wondering, the main site will feature every single post, although if you knock of the “/feed” bit from the end of the above urls, you will be able to view the site with the appropriate filter.

Regular blog readers will know that I use Gentoo Linux as my main operating system, and people who stalk me on facebook will know that I am an Open Source advocate. So I’ve been throwing this idea around in my head for a while, because I know that some of my fellow bloggers use Linux or at least have tried it out. The idea is for me to write a series of blog posts about Linux, how you can get it, set it up, make it suited to your tastes, etc.

In addition to the tutorials, I would offer support to people who are following along and run into problems (it’s bound to happen with any OS change). The main gist of the posts would be to inform, perhaps dispel a few myths, and generally help people out on certain issues. The reason I want to do this now is because obviously I am very passionate about Linux and the free software community, but also because I am approaching the end of term, and I’ll have free time on my hands.

I’m not promising the learning curve won’t still be steep, but my hopes are that people will respond a bit better if they have posts aimed at the average user, without all the techobabble. There are also no promises that everything I say will be entirely accurate, or the “best way” to go about things. The beauty of Linux is that nobody can ever learn everything there is to know about it; it’s a group effort. Naturally when I am corrected on something I will hasten to edit the post. The same goes for when people ask questions about the tutorials; I want to make the posts as accurate and understandable as possible.

The tutorials will cover the Ubuntu operating system (which is what I started out with) due to its ease and stability in comparison with others. However for the most part, people should be able to follow along using any of the major distros, such as Fedora or OpenSuse. For the first few tutorials I will be covering installation and how to set up your system to work for you. I will then move onto the more complex areas, including how (and when) to effectively use the command line.

So all I really need now is feedback on the idea. How many of my readership would be interested in learning about Linux? I’m not going to stop posting about atheism / religion, but it wouldn’t be a personal blog if I didn’t share my hobbies with everyone :D.

Oz Atheist tagged me in this “six random things about you” meme that’s going around. I started writing this out this morning before lectures, and had to run out the door, leaving it incomplete. Then, when I get home, I find out that Hannah has also tagged me, and seeing as she lives in the same county of England that I come from (Wiltshire FTW!) I am honour-bound to respond to both tags. Update: Heather also tagged me! Firstly the rules:

Rules

1. Link to the person tagged you (Linked to both).
2. Post the rules on your blog (doing so now).
3. Write six random arbitrary things about yourself (that’s gonna take some thinking).
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them (hehehehehe).
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog (Geez…let me finish the meme first).
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up (in my todo list).

Six Random Arbitrary Things About Myself

1. My middle name is Michael (after my father). Not exactly a random thing but I doubt I’ve told anyone before on this blog.
2. I have a slightly crooked little finger on my right hand due to the fact that I broke it at school, and my mother refused to take me to hospital because she didn’t think anything was wrong with it. A few weeks later when it had swollen a bit she took me, and the doctor told us it had broken and fused in the wrong place. Of course, there is no point re-breaking and re-setting a little finger, so I still have the crooked thing to this day (although admittedly it isn’t as noticeable as before).
3. I have used the same small blue backpack for the last 10 years to carry stuff in. It might have a broken front pouch; its torn in places where it really shouldn’t be torn, and it probably needs another wash, but its my lucky pack dammit! (Not that I believe in luck of course, but “lucky pack” sounds cooler than anything else).
4. I installed putty on my Nokia E71 phone, just so I could log into my server from anywhere in the world. I then used putty to watch the first Star Wars movie in ascii-animation over a telnet connection whilst very bored in a Information Security lecture last week.
5. There are two distinct shelves on my bookcase. One for computing books:
   • Software Engineering 8
   • Using UML
   • 3 C++ books
   • 4 books on PHP, MySQL, and Apache
   • 2 books on CSS
   • Visual Basic 2005 (eurgh)
   • HTML 4 (awwww, so old…)
   • ASP.NET 2.0 (never touched, thank FSM)
   • Visual C# 2005
   • Database System Concepts
   • Big Java 3rd Edition
   • Design Patterns
   • 3 books on JavaScript
   • Ajax

   …and one for atheistic books:

   • The God Delusion x 2 (hardback, paperback)
   • 50 reasons people give for believing in a god
   • The Quotable Atheist
   • The End of Faith
   • Letter to a Christian Nation
   • Climbing Mount Improbable
   • The Selfish Gene
   • A Devil’s Chaplain
   • Freedom Evolves
   • The Demon Haunted World
   • Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
   • The Blind Watchmaker
   • The Jesus Puzzle
   • The Portable Atheist (not portable in any way, shape, or form)
   • God is not great
   • How to be a good atheist
   • I Sold My Soul on eBay
   • Imaginary Friend

   I am an atheist computer geek…and I love it.

6. I used to have 20:20 vision. Hours of staring at computer screens last year, coupled with horrible lighting effects used in a video game I made, finally wore my eyesight down to the point it is at today. If you work with computers, heed my words: When they tell you to take 20 minute breaks every 2 hours, do it.

My 6 victims targets choices

Friendly Atheist

The Atheist Jew

Moiz Khan

A Division By Zero

Splendid Elles

Chicken Girl

Right…now I’m off to tell people about this.

I really didn’t want to create yet another post about Spotify invites, but they’ve just given me an extra 5 invites to use. Due to the popularity of the service, and the fact that I don’t know how many invites they will eventually give me, I am going to start regulating stuff.

From now on, I won’t be accepting people’s requests from comments. If you want to be put on the waiting list, please use my contact form, specifying the “Reason for contact” as the option: Request Spotify Invite. The current waiting list is compiled from comments in date order (so if you have already requested an invite through the comments, please don’t contact me again!).

Due to blog reader indieboy86’s research into the matter, you can use Spotify outside of the EU! Simply use a proxy server with your browser. The server with HTTP Proxy: 217.112.93.9 and Port: 6654 seem to work for most people, but there are several available on the web.

As I get new invites, I’ll simply send them to the first people on the list. If the invites don’t work for some reason, please inform me and I’ll send them to someone else (this keeps the system fair). Also, if I notice someone hasn’t accepted their invitation within a week, I’ll give it to someone else.

So as of this blog post, 5 new invites have been sent to readers: Fake_Brasilian, griffon8, Tone, Jake Collyer, and Paul Klipp.

It seems I had a bit of a misunderstanding with Spotify’s release area, and so currently people in American and Australia cannot use the service. So far two people out of the five have given back their invitations, and I have had one confirmation of a successful install, so until I hear back from the other two, I have a couple of invites going spare.

Same rules as last time, first come first served, only make sure you live in Europe! I know there were a few people on the original invite list who were in “waiting” but since I have no way of knowing where you are located without contacting you, I’m going to have to do it this way.

So just to clarify, only ask for an invite if you live in Europe!

Of course there are still no guarantees the service will work for you, but so far it works in England, Belgium, and Luxembourg to my knowledge, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work elsewhere on the continent.

Again, apologies for this! Hopefully all remaining invites will *eventually* make it to people who can use them!