A few years ago a friend was showing me his tattoos at a geeky event I organized. He turned around, pulled down his collared shirt -- and my eyes popped out of my skull. He had a DB-9 port tattooed to the back of his neck. He then proceeded to show me other parts of his body as that wasn’t his only “geeky” tattoo. A few months later I met a friend’s wife who had her name tattooed on her arm -- in binary code. It wrapped her arm like a bracelet of ones and zeros. These geeky tattoos were few and far between, so I went in search of tattoos of the geeky kind. Here's a tour of some of my favorites.

The Transistor

As I mentioned, the first geeky tattoo I saw was on the body of my friend, Eric Gradman. He’s the one with the DB-9 port on the back of his neck. “I got this tattoo at a time when lots of people were getting barcodes on the back of their necks. I have a bit of an aversion to permanent numeric ID markers.”

He tells the story of how he got another one. “I'd been drinking at Zeitgeist in San Francisco for about 7 hours when we decided to get tattoos. Transistors are in every piece of electronics we use and their discovery revolutionized the world. Nobody really uses BJT transistors anymore; they use FETs (which use a different schematic symbol) but the BJT symbol is so classy. Even hippies smile when they see it, mistakenly believing that it stands for world unity.”

011000100110100101101110011000010111001001111001

I’ll bet you know what language the above is–- but I’ll also bet you can’t read it (hint). Lots of people get binary tattoos with their name or special words. The only problem with binary is the quantity of ones and zeros. After researching geeky tattoos on Flickr, I found some very simple binary art that I particularly liked. “I am a geeky person," explains Robert Maki, whose body it belonged to. "Since I love computers and people call me a geek, I decided to get it tattooed on me, in the most primal language of computers.”

Love in 3D

Meg Watcher's tech-head body art is also some that I stumbled across on Flickr. She has a traditional Mom and Dad in a heart on her arm –- with one very cool twist -- it’s tattooed in 3D red/blue lines. “I really liked the look of old-school offset red and blue 3D drawings and wanted to get it done in tattoo form,” Meg told me. I got out my 3D glasses (which I have on my desk) and spied it through the blue and red shades -- and it looked pretty good. If you have a pair of shades, get em out and see for yourself.

Showing the <3

A friend of a friend of mine (thanks for introducing us Joz), Ed Morita, writes a blog on baking and his pastry creations make my mouth water. Earlier this year, Morita asked his readers to help him decide where to get a tattoo featuring the Wordpress logo. “I have been a blogger in some form or another since 2004, and five years is a long time to be using any sort of brand. WordPress has been a big part of my life, and like other big things in my life I think that it is time for me to get inked.” (See photo.)

My Bar Camp LA buddy Jason Cosper wanted to show his love for Apple but only to fellow Apple lovers. “Why get an Apple logo when you can get something that the really hardcore people will get? Also, it's easier to explain it away as a simple Celtic knot when people I don't want to talk to ask about it.” (See photo.)

Fellow Bar Camper Jeremy Kitchen has two Linux tattoos. His first is the classic penguin, “Tux” holding a sign that reads “1337.”

“I was 19, wanted a tattoo, was very gung-ho about Linux, and thought it might be cool.” Last month, he convinced co-worker Terri Haber to join him in his second Linux themed tattoos. His image of choice: Tuz -- the new Linux logo, which was changed to bring awareness to a rare disease that kills Tasmanian Devils.

Time traveling

Our final geek tattooist comes inked with so much good stuff I don’t know where to start. How about with the inside lip tattoo of “geek” (showcasing his inner geek!). What about the yin/yang Tron circuitry on his forearms? The Atari console with green screen and punch cards? The Flux Capacitor? And I can’t forget the Logan’s Run Jewel on his palm? I’d like to introduce fellow SG member: FEJ

In homage to his Dad, FEJ has a complicated tattoo of an Atari console, punch cards, green screen and Dad tattooed in 8-bit binary on his arm.

“Dad had punchcards around the office when I was a kid. I remember seeing them and wondering about them, and as I got older, admiration for him being able to use them in the early days of programming. He worked for Rockwell which made the eProms for the Atari and Activision game cartridges. We had a modified 'Adventure' cartridge with s eProm quick release that allowed us to change games that way. We got games almost a year before they were released.”

And the Flux Capacitor? “One day it just popped into my head (I didn't fall and hit my head on the sink) and knew. Those that know what it is always point it out.”

My favorite of all the tattoos in this article is FEJ's Logan’s Run palm jewel. In this future world, to combat overpopulation and consumption, everyone reaching a certain age is killed. “When someone turned 29, the jewel in their palm glowed and they are supposed to go to 'Carousel' and ultimately be executed in the ceremony. Those that fought the system became 'Runners' and went looking for 'Sanctuary.' I like to think of myself as a 'Runner' on the constant spiritual journey looking for 'Sanctuary'”

Heathervescent is a writer, technology consultant and agent of cacophony. She was unable to find a tattoo of Cronenberg’s back port from eXistenZ and was constantly distracted by this collection of the worst Unicorn tattoos! You can read more of her adventures at heathervescent.com and follow her @heathervescent

When I first tried Linux around 1995, it was nearly as user-unfriendly as Windows ME. The fonts were ugly, connecting to the Internet -- at a blazing 56k, no less -- was one success easier than unassisted brain surgery, and getting printers and other peripherals to run was about as easy as getting Corey Feldman away from a flock of paparazzi.

I was intrigued by, and believed in the Free (as in beer and speech) software philosophy, though, so every few months I'd dig out whatever distribution was currently advertised as the most user friendly (Red Hat, then Mandrake, then back to Red Hat) for the good old college try.

I finally settled on a very simple and painless Mandrake installation, which I wrote about on my blog in an entry called "Penguin Time," which has the glorious distinction of being the first piece of writing I was ever paid for -- Clamor Magazine bought it from me to run in a special Linux issue. (No, I haven't cashed the check; it's framed and in my office, thank you very much.)

Eventually, I hosed the installation with careless use of conflicting software installs and other silly uses of sudo that shouldn't have been available to a noob like myself, and I found myself using a HD install of Knoppix, which lead to a pure Debian install (from the tiny network install CD, which is really cool) before landing in my current distribution of choice, Ubuntu (which is an ancient African word that means "can't install Debian.")

While Linux is still not entirely ready for people like my parents, it's really matured over the years, and in many cases it "just works" (unless you get reckless with sudo, like I did yesterday) without a lot of hassles and tweaking of configuration files and compiling from source (not that there's anything wrong with that.)

In fact, Linux has grown up so much and so well, today I can devote an entire column to some of the cooler media players available to Linux users, rather than the once-obligatory HOW TO on getting your printer to work, or mounting and unmounting a CD-ROM device with just five lines of script.

Note that these are audio-only players, so awesome tools like VLC, Xine, and Kaffeine are beyond the scope this column.


XMMS
XMMS gets a place on my list of cool media players because it's the first one I ever used, and it's still reliable ten years later. It's lightweight, looks and feels similar to WinAmp, and runs in any desktop environment without any complicated configurations or annoyingly complex dependencies. If you're looking for a very simple player, and if you really miss the glory days of listening to Art Bell talk about Y2K in WinAmp, XMMS is the player for you. There are a few forks, including Audacious and XMMS2.


Rhythmbox
Rhythmbox was one of the first (possibly the first, a statement that I can't confirm but will certainly start a holy war somewhere) music players for Linux that attempted to bring iTunes' functionality to a *nix system. It will organize your music collection in all the ways iTunes does including ratings, artist, genre, etc. It will download, update, and play podcasts, as well as stream Internet radio stations. You can share your library across a network (I've tested this with iTunes on my iMac, my Powerbook, and also in Linux on an old Dell lappy) and it can mount shared DAAP libraries (like iTunes, if Apple hadn't done something to iTunes 7 that apparently busted the standard) and portable MP3 players. There are plugins that will display album artwork, update your Last.fm account (and play Last.fm streams) display song lyrics, and burn CDs from playlists. As I said, it pretty much does everything that iTunes does, and integrates just as seamlessly into Gnome as iTunes integrates into OS X.


Banshee
Banshee, like Rhythmbox, is built on top of a multimedia library called Gstreamer, which lets developers build cool multimedia projects like, well, Rhythmbox and Banshee. It has many of the same functions as Rhythmbox, with a similar interface. It will burn CDs from a playlist selection, build smart playlists from tags, sync your iPod, and handle podcasts and Internet radio streams.

There are some very cool plugins that can do all kinds of neat stuff, from recommending music and artists to you (using Last.fm), to updating your metadata (tags, covers, etc.) using MuzicBrainz, to displaying 3D covers of your albums just like Coverflow.


Amarok
Amarok's motto is "Rediscover your music," and after you've spent ten minutes with it, you'll understand why.

Amarok is much more than just another music player or iTunes clone; in fact, it blows iTunes away. It is Kryptonite to iTunes Superman. It's the Death Star to iTunes' Alderaan. It's --- well, I guess I should tell you why it's so great, huh?

If you're a music lover, and you're old enough to remember albums ( they're like CDs but bigger and easier to scratch, kids) and you were one of those people who read all the liner notes, tried to track down lyrics before lyric archives existed online, and devoured musical biographies like A Saucerful of Secrets, Catch a Fire, or Learning to Die, Amarok will give you a pants party. In addition to organizing your library in all the usual ways, it has bunch of integrated ways to, as they say, "rediscover your music" with tools that can transform any album from a passive listening experience to a freakin' A&E in-depth special on the band. You can search for song lyrics, link to artist's pages on Wikipedia, download and display album artwork, and get a list of similar artists for whatever you're currently listening to (I didn't know that Spoon is like Wilco, and according to Amarok, I'll probably like Spoon because I like both Wilco and the Flaming Lips, for example.) If you're listening to a stream (it integrates the last.fm player, so you can scrobble your library or tune into any last.fm station, as well as the usual sources of Internet radio streams) and you want to learn more about the playing artist, Amarok will give you links to Wikipedia, similar artists, and show you if there's anything in your library that matches the current track, and how good the match is. This is such a cool way to learn more about music and discover new music, it's like having Uncle Joe Benson and Rodney Bingenheimer sitting in your living room with you.

Like Rythmbox and Banshee, it also integrates a simple but powerful CD burning interface, linked by default to k3b; just highlight a list of songs, choose "create CD," and watch it go to town. Amarok can also mount and handle a wide variety of media devices, including iPods and all the other standard MP3 players, as well as your iTunes shares (sort of. Amarok has the same problem with iTunes 7 that the other players have. Thanks, Apple.)

If all of these features aren't enough for you, you're in luck. Amarok has a ridiculously large collection of user-submitted scripts that do everything from making .sig files from your current tracks, to controlling your player via a bluetooth remote, to auto searching and downloading .torrents of a song, artist, or album that's currently playing (don't steal music kids. Stealing is bad, mmmkay?)

Great. Which one should I use?

All of these players will handle most formats, like Ogg, MP3, WAV, and WMA. If memory and screen real estate is an issue, something lightweight like XMMS is perfect. If you just want to hear the music and don't care about organizing the library or tracking down lyrics or other information about the track that's playing, it's going to get the job done for you quite nicely.

But if you're looking for a more full-featured experience, and you have the cycles to spare, Amarok wins by eleventy billion thousand million miles. I have never loved a music player as much as I love Amarok, and I've never had as much fun flipping through my library and learning more about my favorite artists. Next in line is Rhythmbox, which does most of the things Amarok does but with simpler graphics and fewer plugins. However, the trade off is fair: Rhythmbox is lighter and less resource-intensive than Amarok (on my machine, anyway.) Banshee is okay, but it falls into a gap between Amarok's feature set, and Rhythmbox's smaller footprint. I'm interested to see what further Banshee development brings, but I took it off my machine as soon as I was done trying it out.

These players are all very easy to get and install, especially for users of any Debian-like system; just apt-get whatever package you're interested in, and get ready to rock.

This experience was enlightening for me. There are a lot of different projects in the FOSS world, and many of them, like these, overlap. This is great for user options and choice, but I wonder how much it's holding back development of really killer apps. It also illustrates the need for a broad adoption of open standards that all developers can consistently work on. As a Mac and Linux user, I was really annoyed that I couldn't get iTunes 7 or my Mac-formatted ipods to work well with any of these players. I'm really tired of software and hardware developers limiting what I can do with the stuff I buy.

Did I miss a media player that you love? Did I forget to mention a feature from one of these players that makes it rock even harder, like inward singing? Let me know in comments.

For those about to rock, Wil Wheaton salutes you.

MythTV, is a popular free (as in beer and speech) alternative to TiVo and other commercial DVRs.

MythTV was just updated to version .20, adding some spiffy new features:

For non-propellerheads, MythTV is also available pre-built and configured from Monolith Media.

Ed. Note: This story incorrectly identified the update as "2.0" when it is, in fact, ".20." It has been corrected, and Suicide Girls regrets the error, as well as the editor's stupid dyslexia.

The steady removal of features, DRM restrictions, and privacy concerns have prevented a lot of people from purchasing a TiVo or other DVR, leaving Linux-based MythTV as the only alternative.

MythTV is an open source DVR that runs on Linux, using a wide variety of video capture cards to mimic the all the "good" features in commercial DVRs and none of the "bad" ones (with no monthly fees, no less,) so why isn't the world using MythTV, sending TiVo to a cartridge-filled landfill in the desert? Unless you're a Linux nerd, it's really, really hard to install and configure. (I say that as a Linux nerd who tried and gave up.)

Enter Monolith Media (no relation to my publishing company, Monolith Press.) According to Engadget, Monolith Media is offering pre-installed, pre-configured, dedicated MythTV systems.

MythTV lets you use all the same search and programming features as TiVo or ReplayTV, but unlike the commercial alternatives will always allow you to skip commercials, and retain and use your recordings as long as you wish. Monolith claims that their system also includes all the features of a Microsoft Media Center, including mp3 storage and streaming, and the ability to author and create DVDs of any recorded program.

The Oregon State Linux Users Group is rather fond of Firefox. When the open source browser hit fifty million downloads, they painted a giant Firefox logo on the quad at their school using cornstarch and kool-aid. When it hit one hundred million, they launched a weather balloon to carry the iconic design one hundred thousand feet into the sky.

Over the weekend, the LUG members topped their previous stunts with a 45,000 square foot crop circle of the famous logo:


Okay. Seriously. How can you not love nerds?

(via foxtales.)