vidar.gimp.org

September 27th, 2005

New motherboard installed

I never got around to blogging about this when it happened, but here goes; When I first got my new computer, the power-supply exploded (literally), shooting flames, sparks and loud, angry noises at everything in its immediate proximity, taking two fuses and a sizable portion of my nerves with it. Unfortunately, this was after I had hooked everything up, and it gradually became clear that the motherboard (or CPU or RAM, I didn’t know for sure) had sustained some damage.

The symptoms were fairly perculiar; whenever there was a lot of sustained traffic on the machine, either disk I/O or a lot of video card activity, the machine would spontaneously reboot. (A short side note; backing up your system is a great source of a lot of disk activity. Great time for a crash, eh? No? Bingo.)

Anyway, yesterday I finally got my replacement motherboard, and it has been performing nicely so far. Due to the strange nature of the errors I’ve been seeing I’m not regarding myself 100% safe yet, but things are looking good so far. Whee. =)

Posted in tech | No Comments »

September 21st, 2005

Yet another redesign

So I gave my web site another make-over after all.
I haven’t totally decided on this one yet, either, but in my not-so-humble onion, it beats the all-white, slightly hospital-ish look of the last one.

And to all those who actually believed me when
I said that the previous one would probably be the last, my deepest apologies. Not.

Posted in general | No Comments »

September 2nd, 2005

Bits and peas

First and foremost, Linda and myself went for an ultrasonic check-up today. (For those who still haven’t heard the news, we’re having another baby.) All is well, and the little creature seemed to be quite comfortable kicking around in there. Also, we semi-spontaneously decided that we wanted to know the gender beforehand this time (we didn’t with Marius), so we asked, the nurse looked around a bit, and lo and behold, it’s a girl! Estimated time of arrival; February 5th, 2006.

In less uplifting news, I was randomly walking around in Google Maps today, when I came across a disturbing little view of the globe;
Click here, and note the bright area just around the marker, and make particularly good note of the sheer scale of it. Then zoom in, step by step, until you see what’s going on. People suck, that’s what’s going on. Bah.

Posted in general | No Comments »

August 28th, 2005

The new me

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.

Posted in general | No Comments »

August 26th, 2005

Who do I vote for?

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!

Posted in rants | No Comments »

August 16th, 2005

LastFMProxy

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 »

August 10th, 2005

Blue toothache

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.

Posted in tech | No Comments »

August 10th, 2005

New Swallow the Sun album

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 »

July 27th, 2005

Sony Ericsson K700i

So I finally bit the dust and got myself a new phone. Goodbye, monophonic world of cameraless outdatedness!

Anyway, I’m very happy with this phone. It suits my geekiness very nicely. First, it has a lot of useless features that people like me tend to like, such as an FM radio, an MP3 player, a camera (capable of both stills and movie clips), a themable desktop (whee), bluetooth, IRDA, the works. Tres chiq. And I recently discovered that the “layout” (theme) files are actually tar files with a bunch of PNG and JPEG files, all tied together with an XML description file. Even cuter. And it supports VCards, and Multisync for contact / calendar event syncronization, which Evolution apparently also supports. That last bit is untested for now, though. Man, I love open standards.

(Getting gnome-bluetooth up and running went less than smoothly, though, but it finally came around(ish), despite GTK screaming some profanities during the device scan. But at least I can send and receive files, so I guess I can’t complain.)

Posted in general, k700i | No Comments »

July 15th, 2005

SMAF-to/from-wav converter

The last few days have been spent scratching my head over the “mmf” files that Linda’s phone (a Samsung X640) seems to be so fond of. They’re ring tone files in Yamaha SMAF format, which you apparently have to sell your soul to get the specs to.

Specs or not, with a little bit of reverse engineering, I managed to concoct a small utility to convert to and from (some of) these SMAF files. Take a look at mmftool.

Posted in tech | 1 Comment »