dammIT

A rantbox by Michiel Scholten

Articles


New year, new chances

So I'm sitting here in a computer lab [windows...] at the Vrije Universiteit, enrolling on a new course: Advanced Topics in Software Design. Sounds kinda interesting, but it will be lots of work. Thank Light we're doing it in a group of three :) Last night was the first time in …

Katrina

OK, a shout-out to g1powermac and Vermyndax, who seem to be in the path of the Hurricane Katrina. And of course all others in New Orleans and the rest of her path, because this is going to be one hell of a -- well -- wet hell. An interesting overview can be …

IRC is more fun

Grab a whisky [Speyside or something], join #morphix at irc.freenode.net and start talking about religion, conspiracies and goverment control. Ah, and history, and Bohemian Rapsody... Definitaly more fun than Google Talk [try connecting with your favorite Jabber client with your gmail account, server 'talk.jabber.com' and port …

Changing Gaim icons for fun and profit

Today I found an alternative iconset for the Gaim instant messenger application I use. I quite liked the overall look of the icons, so I copied it over the original ones [after having made a backup of the directory of course]. In Debian this is the /usr/share/pixmaps/gaim …


Pwned

For anybody having seen this word: Pwned explained [Player versus Player comic]. Also, check their Support the PWNED bracelet [for more cool than those pink/yellow/whatever colored awareness bracelets people are wanting you to wear].

Upgrading to kanotix' 2.6.13

While studying for some upcoming re-examinations, I installed Kanotix' linux kernel 2.6.13 on my laptop, and removed Lilo in favour of Grub. The kernel was already running fine at my desktop, but laptops are, well, tricky. At first my Centrino based wifi card wouldn't work [ipw2200 chipset]. Turned …

Some wise words

No, not my own wise words, but I think they are worth reading. First, a piece about top posting [be it in e-mail, newsgroup postings or wherever]: A: Maybe because some people are too annoyed by top-posting. Q: Why do I not get an answer to my question(s)? A …

What to do with all this power?

A small follow-up on my previous post about my mediacenter project to get an overview for myself and anybody interested. OK, so now I [almost] have a quiet Shuttle mediacenter with 3GHz Pentium4, 1GiB PC3200 DDR RAM memory, a Maxtor 250GiB harddisk drive with 16MiB cache, a NEC 3540A DVD …


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 …