Heading out of the main entrance of my university last Friday the 13th, picking my way through a crowd assembled there, I wondered why they where all craning their necks. Also, the police officers and some officials obviously waiting for somebody made me ask who was being awaited. "Maxima!" was …

Some very good reasons not to use Word and send people Word attachments. It would be nice that people start realising that: Not everyone has MS Office and/or cares about it Word and such aren't free [lots of people use illegal copies, causing them to think they can get …

OK, after finding me a tray icon plugin for the Linux version of Thunderbird, I came to the conclusion that the default icon Debian is shipping with it [the non-branded Mozilla icon], is just ugly. It's a aliased icon [read: jagged edges etc], brown, and doesn't play nice with my …

I just got myself a new laptop^Wbattery. The previous battery of my two year old Acer was down to about an hour of usage on a charge when it suddenly went over to another dimension and refused to provide my trusty workhorse with juice. I ordered a replacement battery …

It's the day against DRM today. Say no to those crippling techniques too. Say yes to being able to use your purchases on the devices you like to use it on, and not the one[s] where the companies want you to play it on. Say yes to Freedom!

Full Frontal Nerdity has a nice comic about "A few things in entertainment we'd like to see made into felonies for committing to film", mostly regarding the use of "science", applied by people who don't have a clue:

Currently, a command frequency meme seems to propagate through Planet Debian, and I thought I'd run that one-liner as well. Some interesting results yielded: At my laptop: 09:43:23 mbscholt@galadriel:~$ history|awk '{print $2}'|awk 'BEGIN {FS="|"} {print $1}'|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head -10 331 cd …

Avast! Every September 19 people around the world celebrate International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's been marked on all continents -- even Antarctica. Why? Because it's fun, it's anarchic. Its very whimsy -- trying to get everyone on the planet to talk like a stereotypical Caribbean buccaneer on the same day …

During a quite boring class of ICT in a Social Context [mainly about the Information Revolution and Codes of Ethics], I stumbled upon the idea of hacking a spammer. More specifically, hacking his overlay network of spambots. You may know that some spammers [mostly the "normal" corporations] have their own …

So I finally released aquamorph v0.4 [which is available from sourceforge.net now, so feel free to download and try it!]. I reduced my projects to a minimum [I'm even using Liferea as my primary newsfeed reader now instead of overload :/], so I have time for classes and such …

You hear it well, Satan's gone scating: I finally released a new aquamorph! At this moment it's only hosted on this not-too-fast server, so if you can wait half a day, check back tomorrow when I've uploaded it to a faster server :) It even has a manual:

He's dead, stung by a stingray. A worthy dead I guess :) A weird person, but he'll be missed.

Oh shiny consumer society, with its broad streets lingered with deadly McFlurry cups, Britney Spears listening sheep with iPods and our fast-food consuming I'm-not-fat-I'm-big-boned fellow humans. Mrs Bsag has a piece about "More", triggered mainly by the advertisements marketing campaigns sling at us: excess masquerading as progress, and increase in …

Yesterday we went to a very nice building of the University of Utrecht, located right at the sight of the Dom [nicer pics on the Dutch page]. Here, twenty-one students of my girlfriend's year -- including she herself -- where officially made pharmacists in a nice ceremony. Congratulations sweety! After a nice …

I finally came around to editing the notes I took while on vacation at Corfu, that nice green Greek island. I hope you'll enjoy this read ;) At least I can heartily recommend visiting this sweet little island. 20060805 - To Corfu! After my quick blurp a lot earlier today on a …

Hey, you damned $WEATHER_DEITY, it's the end of August, not October! Give us back our sunny free days!

It looks like I already [semi]consciously abandoned reading too much news. Or isn't "124379 unread items in 98 feeds" saying enough? ;)

I kinda like the restyle they did, but the special chars in the pronounciation key of their "Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.0.1)" source don't turn up right here [Firefox shows the unicode char-not-found character, which doesn't look that well in their nice clean site ;)].

OK, my two readers are getting a tad tired about this subject I guess, but today I'm making a list of all things, projects, courses etc I've laying around and prioritising them, hoping to mod quite a lot down the level of "todo this year". That's really necessary as I …

Found this in my mailbox this morning [at the end of my server's log]: Q: Why haven't you graduated yet? A: Well, Dad, I could have finished years ago, but I wanted my dissertation to rhyme.