dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

posts Articles


Ultimate answer? Buying hardware nice is!

... to quote Yoda. Anyways, last Saturday I've been buying pieces for the multimedia center aka webserver aka vcr aka mailserver aka streaming media toy aka whatever that I'm going to build. It's going to feature a Pentium 4 3GHz [was cheaper than a 2.8 and even 2.6GHz one …

Sound effects

I was getting bored getting a Red Alert every time somebody spoke my name at IRC [the sound is bundled with GAIM messenger], so I went looking for free sound effects. First, I came along this site with loads of various sounds, grouped by category and these misc sounds. Quite …

Creating a better overload

I've been programming at the overload feedreader [or should I say channel reader? Nah, feedreader sounds better...] the last few days. Mostly behind-the-screens work, but I've put in some small changes in the frontend for good measure too. Take a look at it: I hope you like it. This is …

Expose for windows

OK, after being exposed to windows for four days at stretch last week at work, I came along a cool application to make working with only one desktop a bit worthwhile: Entbloess, Expose for windows. This will show smaller versions of your current open windows, so you can tab through …


Everyone else has had more sex than me

A thing that has amused me since last week is this great animation and song [Flash alert, but worth the loading]. There's also a page with the Flash version and the songtext and one with two versions [original and radio edit] as Quicktime .mov. The radio edit is worth watching …


Feeds, channels, labels, tags...

OK, so I fixed some cross-browser issues of overload feedreader, put a new version of it online and was wondering about naming of several things now. As it's a feedreader, it reads RSS, Atom feeds. Those are not only used for weblogs, so I skipped mentioning "Blogs" altogether, unlike several …

X.org and eyecandy

I forgot to mention I installed the nice graphical environment x.org on my desktop, as it enables me to have neat [mac OS-X-like] shadows and transparency. Too bad I had to use an old version of my window manager [old beta of xfwm4], because I couldn't get my recompiled …


No one would have believed...

Did I mention we went to War of the Worlds last Monday? I don't think it was exactly a "wow, cool!" experience, but the movie at least is quite intense and enjoyable. Too bad the very cool soundtrack of the play that was released on vinyl some decades ago wasn't …

A little tale of just enjoying life

Here it is, finally. I wanted to post it together with a shitload of nice pictures we took, but decided in the end to just post it :) It reminds me a bit of the 'A quite verbose story about a week offline' post of a year ago, and is mainly …

Headphones and server b0rkage

OK, so my server was down from about 11PM yesterday to 15PM today [GMT+1 and DST], which was caused by general hardware b0rkage. I don't know why, but the two newest drives in it go berserk now and then. Maybe a leftover from the broken motherboard that used to …

This week of my vacation

OK, so this is my so-called vacation. Lets see... Tomorrow I'll work, in the evening I'll [hopefully] enjoy The War of the Worlds, on Tuesday I'm getting my hair done [badly needed ;)], am I going to do some administrational stuff and then we're going to visit my GFs grandparents. Wednesday …

Time to focus

OK, hereby I declare the coming months my Time To Focus Time(tm). I need to get back to being efficient, cleaning up my todo list [growing bigger and bigger], and make myself useful/valuable again. I'm aware I still haven't posted my story of the last vacation, which is …

Back from vacation

It was a short one, and generally a bit too wet one [way does it always rain on me?], but altogether quite relaxing. Catching up on me e-mail and newsfeeds now. Didn't have an internet connection somehow, so I plugged the ADSL modem right in my laptop and now it …

Been quiet, will be for another week

I've been rather quiet for some time now, due to the warm weather, a lack of interest [my feedreader is becoming rather full of unread items] and a need of a break. That break is coming now: we're leaving on vacation in another hour. Just me, my beautiful GF and …

Belgium != The Netherlands

OK folks, check this Google maps page. Look close. Look closer. Now laugh hysterically or cry. Fortunately this bug can be fixed by zooming in. Zooming out will make us only less important...

Some small updates to overload feedreader

Yeah, there it is again. My current major webproject ;) Anyway, I have modified the stylesheet for the html version quite a bit, so items should be better distinguishable, especially when having more than a few on page [which you'll mostly have I guess]. I'm about to do some major updates …