Archive for August, 2005

The new me

Sunday, August 28th, 2005

Tweek, my old, trusty, caffeine-addicted alter ego, shamelessly stolen from South Park, is gone. This coincides nicely with my page not being the first hit when searching for “tweek” on Google Images anymore, it seems. (I haven’t counted recently, but I saw several dozen hits (or as of lately, since I moved the image away, misses) per day for a rather lengthy period of time.)

Anyway, back to the point. Tweek wasn’t really me any more. While he usually stumbles around in a perpetual caffeine-induced bad trip, I have almost quit drinking coffee altogether. I’m down to one single cup each day, or morning, rather, to get me started. Sometimes it takes two, but one is usually sufficient. OK, sometimes I drink more, but that’s typically when we go visit someone, and they serve coffee.

Anyway, back to the point. Again. Damn it, I always digress. I’m supposed to write about one thing, but end up writing about another. Just like this. Damn.

Allright, I have other things to do now, so I’ll just drop him here. This is the new me. Say hi, Vidar.

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Who do I vote for?

Friday, August 26th, 2005

The more I listen to our beloved politicians, the more convinced I am that I have to chose between the Black Plague, cholera, cancer, tuberculosis and several unpleasant sexually transmitted diseases.

Before, unless my memory is playing tricks on me, it was possible for a trained ear to determine which causes were important to any given political party by listening to their pre-election yapping. But as of lately, all they have to present are some vague, meaningless, horoscope-like twists and turns that desperately try to appeal to as many voters as possible without alienating anyone.

Luckily, there is one topic left that the numskulls dare have an opinion on; the so-called predator debate. As one representative for Senterpartiet put it, “We have to shoot all the wolves to preserve the biological diversity in our woods.” Honestly, how bright can one get without hurting oneself?! And these are the kind of people we have to choose between.

I wish they could introduce negative votes. Then I would at least know that I tried to prevent one specific group of morons from having any influence instead of actually helping someone.

If any politicians are reading this, and think that that was a good idea, you’ve got my vote!

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LastFMProxy

Tuesday, August 16th, 2005

Audioscrobbler and last.fm have been a couple for a while, but recently they both got a huge makeover and were merged into the awesome new last.fm.

One minor irk, though, was the fact that you now need to use a separate player to listen to the radio. They have their reasons for doing this, and it’s not a huge problem, since their player is released with full source, under a free software license. However, it’s not a secret that it’s lacking some functionality which more mature players have.

This is why I wrote LastFMProxy. It’s basically proxy, acting like a player, but instead of playing, it simply relays the stream to your player of choice. Problem solved. :)

The idea isn’t entirely new, though. The last.fm staff have been thinking about the very same thing, and the plan is not dismissed yet, so at some point the official player might carry the same proxy functionality. But for now, this is the route for those who want to cling on to their old player. :)

Posted in tech | 1 Comment »

Blue toothache

Wednesday, August 10th, 2005

This post is a bit belated, but hey, it’s not like anyone but me is reading this, is it? ;)

Anyway, since my recently acquired gadget with telephonious capabilities has bluetooth support, I swiftly ran off to my local geekstore, Clas Ohlson, and picked up a Bluetooth dongle. I went with a
Billionton one, which happened to work very well, and it has a reasonable range (it says 10m, but it works nicely from one end of the house to the other, so I’m happy).

It turned out, though, that the hardware aspect was the least of my worries. I went on to try gnome-bluetooth, which didn’t seem to want to cooperate with my system at all, apparently being written for an earlier PyGTK version than what I have installed. I tried fixing the obvious API changes, but it still made GTK scream for mercy, so I gave up. (gnome-obex-send and gnome-obex-server worked well, though, so at least I can push files from either end to the other.)

Still wanting more I went on to try obexftp and obexfs, neither of which could do more than spot the address of my gadget. Bah. But finally, feeling adventurous, I installed some KDE bits and pieces, as well as kdebluetooth, which provides an OBEX method to konqueror. Lo and behold, it worked! Now I can browse all my phones public files by simply going to obex://[00:0f:de:a7:21:89]:7/. Nice and handy.

But to be honest, I can’t say I’m using the latter much. For daily things, like downloading the odd ring tone or theme, or uploading some pics and video snippets, gnome-obex-send and -server do their jobs very nicely, from the command line. Once a keyboarder, always a keyboarder, I guess.

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New Swallow the Sun album

Wednesday, August 10th, 2005

Holy smokety poo!
Swallow the Sun, the most smashalicious death-doom metal act to hit the surface of the planet in long time has a new album coming up; Ghosts of Loss, scheduled for release August 24th (in Finland - the rest of us will have to wait until October. Drat.)

Anyway, should you happen to be into this particular branch of music, their debut album, The Morning Never Came, is the safest procurement you can make.

Posted in general, music | No Comments »

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