Felt Penguin Ornament

I am a Linux fanatic, I love any penguins that look like Tux. I was in Walmart a few years ago and found a penguin ornament. I bought it for my works tree then promptly made a design based on that.

This is a very rough draft of my penguin ornament. Use whatever colors and things you'd like to dress up Tux =]

What You'll need:

Felt, Black for the body, white for the belly, a goldish yellow color felt for the beak, red and white again for the hat and color of your choice for the scarf

Small google eyes. Not sure of the mm
12-08-06: 7mm eyes

A small white pompom

Directions:

Cut out the body, cut 2. Attach the white belly to the body using DMC 310 one strand, folded in half, knot the end just like sewing thread. Refer to the picture in the same area you find the pattern.

Wrong sides together, sew the body together with black sewing thread leaving the bottom open to turn and stuff later. Make sure your stitches are small and as close to the edge as possible without missing any areas. Turn the ornament right side out and check for any missed areas.

Stitch the hat together wrong sides together then turn right side out. The hat base (the white square) fold into a long square then sew together with white sewing thread making a circle. Turn that right side out and glue that to the bottom of the hat. I use a hot glue gun because it seems to stick a little better. But be careful of your fingers, I've burned myself a few times already =] Also, using hot glue, attach the pompom to the end of the hat. This is the reason his hat is flat at the tip...To accomodate for the pompom.

Take two small eyes and glue to the top of his belly part. I use just craft glue for this.
Fold the beak into a triangle (in half) and using the hot glue, glue the beak just below his eyes. Again, be careful on the little pieces.

Glue the finished hat onto his head with the hot glue. You can also put some fiberfill (stuffing) into the hat for body, before you glue it tho. =]

Cut a 12" by 1/2" strip of felt whatever color you'd like and tie that around his missing neck above his arms and below his face. You might want to experiment with the width and length of the scarf. You can also cut the ends in strips to make a little fringe. Tie that around him, you might want to glue a small section of the back down, as well as underneath where it's tied just so it doesn't come apart. He'll catch cold if he doesn't have his scarf on =D



Stuff his body to the desired girth you'd like him to have. and sew up the bottom.

Attach thread or ribbon to the back however you'd like to.

I had some christmas buttons I bought last year, so I glued one snowflake to his hat, and a present to his hand. (fin). Embellish how you'd like to.

This pattern is release under the Creative Commons Licence Share Alike
licence...Copyleft of course.

Viola! You have a penguin ornament! =] Email me if you have any questions. gsmraxe[at]gmail[dot]com

Three successful Slackware 12 installs

Two of my machines used to run Fedora Core 8. One is a Compaq laptop 32 bit system, the other is an AMD 64bit (non dual core) chip. I had quite a few problem with Fedora, as I stated in KPLUG emails between myself and Carl. When I started with Linux, my first distribution was Slackware ( 3.5 I think). I decided to try the latest (Slackware 12) on both of these machines and install it on my Mothers HP laptop.

Slackware still has the same text install, partitioning the disks is still done manually before setup is run. Although, after it installed and rebooted, I was anticipating a lot of manual configuration with the sound cards and video. To my amazement I only had to run alsaconf to configure my sound card on both machines, my laptop has an ATI video card which required no extra configuration.
The NVIDIA card in my Moms laptop wouldn't work with the standard VESA driver or nv but it did find the NVIDIA card on my desktop. I downloaded/installed the drivers from nvidia and added nvidia into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and X came up. I did run into the disappearing mouse cursor on both machines that have the NVIDIA card, but adding Option "HWCursor" "Off" brought the cursor back and adding under input device:

Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

allowed me to use the middle scroll button on all three machines. My MP3s play, and Amarok doesn't lock up my system anymore. Not as much configuration as I thought I'd have to do, or as much as I used to do with older versions.

I have a DLink DWL-G122 wireless USB device, I don't use it at home anymore, but for the December meeting, I wanted to have wireless on my laptop. I searched for the card model # and the REV B1 and found open source drivers for Linux. It was a painless installation, I loaded the module and the light on my NIC came on. I don't have access to a wireless network at the moment, so I'll have to wait until the meeting to see if/how well it works on a network.

CDRoms, USB drives and other removable devices have to be manually mounted, which is something I'm used to with Slackware, until I figure out how to set it to auto-mount when inserted. I did have a little trouble with the HAL daemon using all my CPU and grinding my system to a halt on my laptop. I stopped the daemon and took the executable flag off the rc script and the problem has stopped. Something I need to look into though.

I haven't yet tried:
USB HP Scanner (It's a few years old 3400 I think, it worked with Fedora)
Built in USB Card Reader (Desktop)
2 Digital Cameras (one Kodak 3600 one HP)
HP Photo Printer (can't remember the model)
Logitech USB web cam Quick cam I believe

We also have 2 printers, one older HP laserjet BW and I have an HP color laserjet 2600n, both work great with Slack.

Slackware vs Fedora

This really isn't a debate on which distro is better. Just which one I prefer. I had Fedora core 8 64Bit installed on my desktop. And the 32 bit version on my laptop. One of the main functions of my desktop is to play mp3s with Amarok. Using Fedora, Amarok would lock up on me, and the OS was slow too. Waaaay too slow. Fedora doesn't play mp3s by default, you have to tweak it to get that functionality (because of legal issues).

Desktop: AMD 64Bit processor (can't remember the model, but not the dual core), 1.3Gig RAM, 250Gb HD

I'm going to give a presentation on Amarok and mp3 players to my local Linux User Group on December 13th. http://www.kernel-panic.org/
So I need to be able to play mp3s with Amarok on my laptop for this presentation. Fedora refused, I did exactly the same thing on my laptop as I did my desktop. Still no mp3 playback. It played OGG and FLAC, but not mp3. It was also very slow.

Laptop: P-IV 2.4Ghz, 786M RAM, 120Gb HD

In my frustration, I decided that Slackware was good enough for me before, I'll install it on my laptop. I haven't run Slack on this laptop before...Slack can be a pain to get hardware configured. It's not like Fedora or Suse, it doesn't always auto-find everything for you. It won't automount USB sticks or mp3 players, that has to be done manually.

Slackware installed beautifully, configured X fine, I didn't need to tweak xorg.conf to get the video settings right. I just ran alsaconf and it found my sound card immediately. Amarok loaded up nicely, doesn't crash or hang, and the system is FAST!

I installed Slackware on my Desktop last night...Didn't get a chance to play too much, it installed, and rebooted in under 15 minutes =]
Again, it configured my video properly, used alsaconf for sound and it worked like a charm! I have no idea why in the world I ever strayed away from Slackware in the first place. It was my first distribution (Slackware 3.5) and I'm back to it again =]

Computer stuff

I just appropriated a new (to me) computer from my job. They love to just "dispose" of their older computers so if it's worth it, I take them home and put them to good use =]

I "appropriated" a Dell server, 2.8GHZ HT machine with 2 40 gig HDs and a Gig of RAM. I thought this would be a good time to replace my Linux server which is a 1.2Ghz PIII. This server acts as a firewall/gateway for the other computers on my network. It's also my webserver http://gypsy.sytes.net/ which isn't always up, but I'll get into that later.

I have DSL at home (6M/768K) which isn't bad, it's pretty quick normally, with a dynamic IP# and I use a Dynamic nameserver to get my gypsy.sytes.net address. I use Roaring Penguin's PPPOE software to connect, which works great, but my problem lies when my IP# changes and I lose my name on the machine. It's difficult to get it back again, I've written scripts to try to bring the name back to the current IP# but it always wants to hang on to the old IP. I'm hoping with this new modem, and a new server, I might be able to get this to work right. If I'm still having no luck, I'll call the TELCO and get a Static IP ($5/mo extra) and use that instead. Here is one script I use

#!/bin/sh

RMM="/sbin/rmmod"
MDP="/sbin/modprobe"
START="/usr/sbin/adsl-start"
STOP="/usr/sbin/adsl-stop"

EXTIF="ppp0"
EXTIP="`/sbin/ifconfig $EXTIF | grep 'inet addr' | awk '{print $2}' | sed -e 's/.*://'`"
HOSTIP="`/usr/bin/host gypsy.sytes.net | awk '{print $4}'`"
#TIME="`/bin/date '+%m-%d-%Y %w %T'`"


if [ "$EXTIP" != "$HOSTIP" ]; then

/usr/sbin/adsl-stop
NPID="`ps aux | grep noip2 | grep nobody | awk '{ print $2 }'`"
/usr/local/bin/noip2 -K "$NPID"

/usr/sbin/adsl-start
/etc/rc.d/rc.firewall
/usr/local/bin/noip2
/usr/local/bin/dynubasic.sh
fi
exit 0


Now this bash script gets the IP#s of my ACTUAL IP and the one that's attached to gypsy.sytes.net and compares them, if they're different, it tries to get it attached to the new one. This script isn't working right. If I get this to work, I'll post what I did.