Garmin Forerunner 635

Quale sarà il prossimo Garmin, il Garmin Forerunner 635?

Garmin Forerunner 735 XT, la nostra opinione

Non mi è ancora chiara l'opinione sul Garmin Forerunner 735XT, detto anche Garmin Forerunner 735 xt, ma appena lo troverò a disposizione, valuterò come analizzarlo nella corsa.

Garmin Forerunner 935, recensione

Non è una sorpresa, ma il nuovo Garmin Forerunner 935 sarà recensito presto.

Garmin Forerunner 235, recensione

Garmin Forerunner 235, davvero da comprare?

Marathon Ranking

I have added a new blog, called marathon ranking. This site aims to inform sport tourists around the world about Italian Marathons, and shares experiences from Bloggers who have attended such events in the past.

This is the post indicating the top 10 Italian marathons.

Diego Maradona jr. is training with Juve Stabia

After winning the 2009 Italian beach soccer championship, Diego jr. has decided to start training with Juve Stabia, playing in the Pro League, second division. This represents a possibility to come back to the professional soccer in Italy. Castellamare di Stabia is located 30 kilometers southeast of Naples, closed to Sorrento.

In an interview with napolimagazine.com, Diego stated: "I am currently training in Castellamare di Stabia. I am trying to reach the best physical fit, since after three months of Beach Soccer, I am not at my best level. I should start well the initial training. I really hope to play with Juve Stabia, since the team is strong and competitive. Several friends like Marco Capparella and Gaetano Grieco play there, I hope I will demonstrate in the team my strengths."

Diego junior coming back to Quarto

Diego jr. did not make up his mind: after one week in Caivanese (left, the stadium), he decided to come back and play once more for Quarto, in the same division. This is 2 years after he helped the team to get promoted to the fifth series in the small city in the Naples area.
Reasons for the change are not entirely clear: maybe the fact that Caivanese was last in the ranking, possibly the lack of challenges within his former team, maybe the good relationship with Quarto's president and his good memory of the past.
The crude reality is however that Maradona junior has not yet found his true dimension.

PS: as an aside, it appears from the Italian press that the transfer from Caivanese to Quarto did not take correctly place from a procedural standpoint. This means that Diego jr. will not play until June 2009 in official games.

Maradona jr. plays for Caivanese

After his appearance to the beach soccer world tournament in 2008 where he scored in the Final game with Brazil, Diego jr. decided to come back to the "real soccer".
He has the chance to train for few weeks with River Plate's second team in Buenos Aires, Argentina in October 2008, but he finally decided to come back to his root, in a place close to Naples.
He got a job in the sixth Italia football division, playing for Caivanese boys. Caivano is a small (35000 abitants) town near Naples, its stadium holds 1300 spectators and is in artificial turf.

The most famous Caivanese alumn is Ciro de Cesare, who played in first division at the beginning of this century.

NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT and Linux distributions

If you are coming here by googling, you can definitely find an answer to the question: is the NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT supported by Linux? The short answer is yes.

As Christmas gift, I got a new NVIDIA Geforce 9600GT, 1GB.
I was quite worried on how to get it working under Linux. My standard Linux install (Mepis 6.0) was for sure unable to support it, since it is an old one (but a very stable one).

After partitioning a new 500Gb hard-disk into 10 pieces, I have decided to give a try to several distros, mainly on the Distrowatch top 50.

DreamLinux (v3.5):
The distro recognized immediately the Geforce, although the 3D effects were not automatically activated into the Live CD. However, a simple "sudo nvidia-install" outside X loaded the drivers and the 3D effects came into play. Additional details can be found here.

Sabayon (v.3.51):
The Sabayon liveCD recognized the Geforce as well as offered the possibility to activate the 3D effects. Well done, zero effort from my side.
However, since I installed Sabayon into the hard drive well before Christmas, I wasn't able to get it working in the Hard Disk installation. It took me few hours to address the issue: "sudo equo install nvidia-drivers" fix it and "fusion-icon" activates the 3D effects.
The upgrade to Sabayon 4.0 required around 30 hours, but the effort was pretty limited from a brain power perspective. Few glitches (artwork, compiz, xorg.conf) were still there, but it is pretty straightforward to fix them.

Mepis (v.7.92):
2D graphics are loaded

PCLinuxOS (v.):
3D graphics are loaded into the Live CD, a small changes is however necessary to make this happening (from the "PC menu", select System / Configuration / Configure your computer, then go into Hardware / Configure Graphics / Configure 3D effects and select Compiz Fusion)

LinuxMint (v. 6.0) & Ubuntu (v. 8.10):
2D graphics are loaded into the Live CD, the Ubuntu developers have not included as standard the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, a small changes is necessary to make this happening. (From the "Gnome menu", select Control Center / Hardware Drivers and the system automatically proposes a menu to download and install the NVIDIA 1.77 drivers)

Beach Soccer and Maradona jr

As you probably have noticed, Diego jr. has played for Italy at the Beach soccer qualification for the World Cup in Marseille. Apparently he had good games, and his team qualified for the the games that will be during the month of July. Italy lost twice with Spain and Russia at penalties.