Although caffeinated drinks are enjoyed by all manner of folks, there is a deep affection for caffeine in the geek community. This week we want to hear about your caffeine workflow–how do you get the caffeine from the bean to your brain?

Low-tech, high-tech, store bought, or hand-roasted in small batches with a loving touch, we want to hear all about how you enjoy your coffee or other caffeine sources. Sound off in the comments with tips on getting the best brew, buzz, or both to help your fellow readers enjoy a caffeine workflow just as well tuned. Don’t forget to check back on Friday for the What You Said roundup!

Mario needs to destroy the castle before he can continue his quest, but it is an extremely tough castle! Can he succeed once he unleashes all that awesome mega cannon power or will his quest fail in the end?

Cannon Something [via Dorkly Bits]

Answer: IBM Simon

If you imagine the first smartphone–like its predecessor the regular cellular phone–to be a monstrous and monochromatic block of plastic, you’d be correct. In 1992 IBM showcased the IBM Simon at the 1992 COMDEX (Computer Dealers’ Exhibition); in doing so they introduced the world to the first smartphone and it was just the kind of enormous brick one would expect from the first phone/computer mashup.

How smart was the first smartphone? By comparison to modern smartphones such as the iPhone and Android devices it wasn’t particularly clever. For the time, however, the Simon was revolutionary and introduced many of the modern features we take for granted in both smart and standard cellular phones. The Simon included a calendar, address book, fax modem, calculator, notepad, an email app, and simple games. It also had a completely touchscreen-based interface (3″ inches on the diagonal with a resolution of 160×293 pixels) with a touch keyboard that sported a very early predictive typing algorithm. You could even expand the memory with a PCMCIA laptop memory card. It retailed for $899 ($1340 adjusted for inflation).

Although the Simon was not widely adopted (the first widely adopted consumer smartphone was the Kyocera 6035), it paved the way for the features we now take for granted.

What if you combined an 8-bit RPG with global access in a sort of 1988 meets the modern Internet mashup? You’d end up with Realm of the Mad God, a sprite-fueled massive multiplayer adventure.

Realm of the Mad God mashes together so many different aspects of modern gaming that it’s immediately intuitive to use. You navigate using the standard FPS shooter WASD keyboard keys, you aim and use your weapons using the mouse and left click button, you gather gold and experience to get more gear, and so on. While that alone would make for a pretty fun retro-looking game, Realm of the Mad God has all sorts of neat innovations lurking under it’s block shell. Rather than follow the fixed-map-and-bad-guys model that most MMORPGs follow, Realm of the Mad God has built-in regeneration. Once players level up, they are summoned to fight the Mad God and, if they defeat him, the entire Realm is rebooted and regenerated with new content.

The game has a freemium model. It’s totally free to play and, if you’re so inclined and become addicted to the game, you can pay small fees to expand your on-character inventory, have a second character in the game, or partake in other fun (but not essential) upgrades.

Realm of the Mad God [via Boing Boing]

As of Ubuntu 11.04, a new feature was added, called the Global Menu, which is a common menu bar shared by all applications (shown above). Most of us have been used to each application window having its own menu bar.

The Global Menu is available on the top panel on the Unity desktop, no matter where the application window is. If you have an application window resized to be small in the lower, right corner of your screen, the menu bar for that application is still on the top panel. This can be confusing and uncomfortable if you are not used to it. If you don’t like the new Global Menu and want to move the menu bars back to each respective application window, we’ll show you how to disable the Global Menu.

Press Ctrl + Alt + T to open a Terminal window. Type the following command at the prompt and press Enter.

sudo apt-get autoremove appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt

NOTE: You can also copy and paste the command at the prompt. To paste text at the prompt, right-click on the Terminal window and select Paste from the popup menu.

Your system’s current status is read and a message displays telling you which packages will be removed and how much disk space will be freed up with this action. When asked if you want to continue, type “Y” (without the quotes) and press Enter.

Three packages are removed and you are returned to the prompt. To close the Terminal window, type “exit” (again, without the quotes) and press Enter.

You shouldn’t have to reboot for the changes to take effect. Simply close any open application windows and reopen the applications. Each application’s menu bar should now be on its own application window. If not, log out or restart your computer.

Removing the Global Menu feature does not remove it from Firefox windows. To do this, you must disable the Global Menu Bar integration add-on in Firefox. To do this, select Add-ons from the Tools menu in Firefox.

The Add-ons Manager opens on a new tab. Click the Extensions tab (with the puzzle piece icon) to see the list of extensions currently installed.

Click the Disable button for the Global Menu Bar integration extension.

You must restart Firefox for this change to take effect. Click the Restart now link.

When Firefox restarts, the menu bar will be on the Firefox window, below the title bar, as usual.

If you want the Global Menu back, you can enable it using the following command in a Terminal window, just like you ran the command to disable it.

sudo apt-get install appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt

Disabling the Global Menu is part of returning the Ubuntu desktop to its previous classic glory. You can also install the Classic Gnome Desktop, install the Classic Gnome Menu on the Unity desktop, and move the windows buttons back to right.

This DIY digital clock takes Persistence of Vision (POV) hacking to a new level by combining the more common POV tricks based on a spinning old hard drive with a sweet digital clock display created through POV.

Watch the video above to see the clock explained by it’s maker and in action. Although the DIY guts are quite complex the premise of it is straight forward: there are LED lights under the etched disk that blink at the perfect time to shine through the numbers and create and illusion of a digital display. Hit up the link below for more details.

Digital POV Clock [via Hacked Gadgets]

Every time you open a Microsoft Office application, you have to wait for the splash screen to disappear. If you want this to go away, here’s how you can disable the startup screen.

Note: Since we are creating a shortcut this will only disable the splash screens when creating a new document, but it will not be disabled when you open a document by double-clicking on it.

This guide assumes you have the x86 version of Office 2010 installed on a x64 edition of Windows. However if your configuration is different you can find the files to create shortcuts to in the following locations:

x86 Office on x86 Windows

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14

x64 Office on x64 Windows

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14

Just remember if your binaries are in a different location, you mustn’t forget to add the switch to the end of the shortcut or it wont work

Word

Right-click on the your desktop and select new, then click on shortcut.

Now paste the following into the location box and then click next.

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\WINWORD.EXE” /q

Now give your shortcut a name and click finish.

Excel

Right-click on the your desktop and select new, then click on shortcut.

Now paste the following into the location box and then click next.

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE” /e

Now give your shortcut a name and click finish.

Powerpoint

Right-click on the your desktop and select new, then click on shortcut.

Now paste the following into the location box and then click next.

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\POWERPNT.EXE” /s

Now give your shortcut a name and click finish.

This straight forward tutorial outlines how you can turn an old book into a secret switch–what the switch controls is only limited by your imagination.

The tutorial’s author, a renter, didn’t have the liberty to go punching holes in walls and turning his secret book switch into the trigger for a secret passage way. While his book switch simply turns on the lights in his wife’s office, you can easily adapt it to turn on/trigger anything you’ve got the skills to connect to the switch. Anyone have any suggestions for a good book to use for a party-mode trigger?

Hidden Bookshelf Light Switch [via Hack A Day]

If those guys only knew who they were really playing against…

And just for fun here is the video the comic is based on.

Gaming Level: Asian [9GAG]

Nintendo 3DS – Worldwide Commercial [YouTube]

Have you ever wanted to work on a project with the ability to track your changes as well as revert them? How-To Geek explains How-To use the popular version tracking system, Subversion (a.k.a SVN).

Image by Clearly Ambiguous

Prelog

This guide will aim to give you the ability to use the subversion client in general, and, if you have one, on your *DD-WRT router. This guide is by no means a definitive guide for Subversion and a lot of information can be found on the Subversion Red Book. This guide is only intended to give you the shorthand answer to the most basic of questions.

Overview

There could be numerous reasons why you would want to be able to “checkout” the latest code for a software project that uses a versioning system. Doing so enables you to benefit from the latest still unreleased changes, help with testing and even development. In this guide, we will go over some basic SVN terminology, show how to install the SVN client on Linux, Windows and if you have one your OPKG enabled DD-WRT router. We’ve also included an example of a project you can checkout and use for said router.

What is Subversion?

Subversion is by no means the only version control system in existence and alternatives include Git (which was created by Linus Torvalds the Linux kernel founder), Mercurial and PerForce to name a few. With that said, it is one of the free ones, it’s mature and is extensively used world wide.

Out of the Subversion “Red Book”:

Subversion is a free/open source version control system (VCS). That is, Subversion manages files and directories, and the changes made to them, over time. This allows you to recover older versions of your data or examine the history of how your data changed. In this regard, many people think of a version control system as a sort of “time machine.”

Note: This book is the ultimate collection of knowledge about subversion and you are advised to refer to it on all Subversin related topics.

What Is Versioning?

Versioning is a process where the state of a project at a point in time is saved. This sort of procedure is often used to manage software development, so that work can continue to improve the project or add features, while being able to track what has changed from the last overall “save” point. To elaborate, this sort of procedure can be useful for a single person but even more so for a group of people, all working on the same project. This is because, usually, when working on a project as a group, there is a distribution of responsibilities and different people change different aspects of the project. Without a versioning mechanism, it would be very difficult to keep everyone in sync on the latest working changes from everyone else.

Terminology

The Repository
The repository is the location where all the data from all the various places is saved. In the subversion world, from the client’s point of view, it is the server which holds the database of the project. This database contains all the files that are part of the project with all of their past versions.

Revision

When a repository is created, it is given the revision number of zero (0). This number is incremented by one(1) every time a commit is performed. The revision number is global for the repository. That is, that there is no individual revision number for individual files in the repository, even if nothing changed in that file for that specific commit.

The Working copy

A working copy is a local copy (or “checkout”) of a particular version. Usually this version when checked-out is the “latest” one (also called a “head“), but a previous one can be requested. The User may do with the local copy anything that he/she desires, with knowledge that, at worst, they could just checkout the code again. Moreover, this copy is “private”. This is because until you either update or commit your copy, you will not see other people’s changes, nor will they see yours.

Updating & Conflict resolving

A Local working copy can be updated. That is, If you “checked out” a certain version, and while you were working, the version on the repository has been updated, you can update your working copy to the latest. In fact, the server will prevent you from committing your changes before you update to the latest version to match the repository. This is done in order to force you to resolve conflicts locally, before you even think of committing changes to the repository.

Merging

Merging refers to the process by which, changed code is blended into one version. It may also entail resolving conflicts.

Commits

Committing is the process in which the changes you have made to your local copy will be merged back into the repository. This is the most perilous part of the process, as it is here that changes you have made, might impact other people using the same repository. That is why this is usually done after some consideration, with the team’s consensus and after you’ve resolved any merging conflicts.

The Workflow

The most basic workflow from the user’s perspective when using subversion is this:

1. Checkout the existing code (usually the “head“).
2. Make changes, add files and generally develop the code.
3. Update to the latest version, to make sure your local copy is in sync with the updates on the repository.
4. Locally merge and resolve conflicts if necessary.
5. Commit the merged changes into the repository.
6. GoTo step 2.

Lets get cracking

Install the Client

In order to be able to use subversion, you need to install the client on your machine.

On Linux

You need only to install the package. On Ubuntu/Mint, this would be done with:

sudo aptitude install subversion

On DD-WRT

If you’ve followed the “How To Install Additional Software On Your Home Router (DD-WRT)“, you are able to install the svn client by simply issuing:

opkg update; opkg install subversion-client

On Windows

While we deep geek users may start to forget that the GUI even exists at times, not everyone has. If you want to use a windows client to connect to an SVN repository, by far the most popular one is “Tortoise“. To use it, simply download the program and install in the regular “next, next, finish” fashion.

Create the “repository”

While we will not go into to much detail on how to setup a subversion server in this guide, the Google alternative is not a bad start for the novice user. To create a Google repository:

• Head over to the Google Code hosting website and “create” a new project.
  
• In the next page, fill in the required fields and select the type of “version control system” to be subversion.
  
  Note: You may want to glance over what is the difference between the licenses Google offer, before you select one for the project.
• Click “Create project”.

Once your project has been created, you Should be able to find the instructions on how to access it in the “Source” tab.

The nice thing about Google code, is that it will enable an anonymous read-only version for your project. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of creating your own project, you may anonymously checkout this writer’s repository.

One note about the hotfortech project: This project is meant to be a wrapper for the features that have been added to DD-WRT on How-To Geek (that I personally use) plus some personal tweaks. While this project is geared to work in conjunction with the articles published here on howtogeek, it is still my private project. That is, it’s highly suited to my Buffalo router (AR71xx architecture), my personal whims and is prone to the occasional borkage.

On Linux/DD-WRT

Create the directory to work in, for example on DD-WRT, that could be:

mkdir -p /jffs/svn; cd /jffs/svn

The full command on Linux consists of the SVN command itself, the “checkout” directive, the address of the repository and the directory to checkout too. Create an empty directory and execute the command below:

svn checkout http://hotfortech-dd-wrt.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ hotfortech-dd-wrt-read-only

Do note that in the example above, the read-only version is being checked out. If you opted to create your own repository, you will need to use the httpS link.

On Windows

Because tortoise is a shell extension, you will need to use the Windows file explorer’s context menu (right-click) to use it. In fact, if you try to invoke it from the start menu, you will get:

• Create an empty directory.
• Right click in it to bring up the context menu.
• Select “SVN Checkout”:
  
• Copy & paste the link for project (if you have one) into the “URL” Textbox:

• Depending on the size of your project this may take a while, but when the “Checkout” has been completed you should see something like:
• You may start developing.

“Update” & “Merge” your working copy
If your working on the code with colleagues, or you your self are updating the code from several locations (i.e. laptop, desktop or even router), you will have to update your working copy before you commit the latest changes.

On Linux/DD-WRT

The command to do this on these POSIX systems is simply:

svn up

On Windows

• Right click in the working directory and select “SVN Update”:
  
• If you encounter conflicts, try following the on screen instruction and use your judgment as to what to do about them.

“Commit” your changes
That is it, you should be conflict free and ready to update the repository with your changes.
The one point to note here is that it is a common practice to add a “log” message to the commit, as to be able to easily recall why the changes were made. In fact, Google’s repository makes this a mandatory pre-requirement to committing.

On Linux/DD-WRT

This is an example of the commit I’ve made to the hotfortech project that upped it to version 19:

svn commit -m “updated to reflect new ant-ads pack link”

On Windows

• Right click in the working directory and select “SVN Commit”:
  
• You should be greeted by a window that enables you to note a log message:
  
• Hit OK and when prompted for a password, give the Google generated password.
• If the commit was successful,you should see something like:
• That is it, you should be able to commit like a BOSS.

Final remarks
This should be enough to get you started. You are advised to read the SVN reference books to get a deeper and better grasp on all of SVN’s usages, options and caveats. Also, we remind you (again) that subversion is NOT the only version control system out there and GIT (which was created by Linus Torvalds the Linux kernel founder) seems to be gaining popularity in recent years.

If you will opt to run the “running-config.sh” from the hotfortech project on your router, you will find that it will currently install for you: The anti-ads-pack, the Opkg geek-init script, as well as things such as the full GNU “ls”, “less”, “BASH” and more.

/jffs/svn/hotfortech-dd-wrt/running-conf.sh

More features are pending and will be added in the future.

System administrators will code their way out of coding.