Archive for May, 2010

“Professional defibrillist”

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

A professional defibrillist, at your service!Let’s face it, House has its moments :) (Season 4, episode 7).

Motivational poster

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

You wouldn't download a car‘Nuff said.

PS: How to skip the non-skippable contents on a DVD (didn’t try myself).

3’s a charm!

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

2:22:48. Slowly getting mobile again. Sleeping was pretty tough though, knee started hurting after 16km (right before the steep ascent up Kirchberg). The last 25 minutes basically sucked. Guess a need more training, but: I made it :) Again :)

1 half marathon is no half marathon,
2 half marathons is a half marathon
3 half marathons is an easter half marathon! :)

Swing party!

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

No Denis, not a “swingers’ party”, a swing party — a party with music from the 1920s and 1930s. Right here in Lux! And it was great fun :)
Well, what else can I add? The YouTube link is not from my party, but it gives a good impression of some of the fun to be had :)

Shopping spree

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Saturday two weeks ago was busy. I was in NL for Bianca’s birthday, a high school reunion, and… a shopping spree!

I was successful. :)
My old TV was showing its age, and I figured I deserved a nice, shiny, new, flat model. Then I dove into things and discovered LED TVs rock compared to ye olde regular LCD TVs. So I wanted one. Problem: the things were damn expensive.

I had held off on purchasing a new one, but it kept itching, so I gave in and decided to settle for a regular LCD model. Imagine my surprise when I went into the first store and found a model suited to my tastes (80cm), with LED backlighting, for a more-or-less affordable price!

I had to check this out. Went to another store, they offered a similar model for an equally similar price… Hmmms, very, very interesting. But if I was getting a TV with all sorts of modern capabilities, including HDMI, I also wanted decent sound. I had heard Gabriele’s new sound system, and it rocks compared to my meagre speakers (I was using my laptop-speakerset… not a great solution). Hence, let’s check out 2.1 sound systems… le OUCH!! That was some expensive shizzle. Nevertheless, the difference between even above-midrange laptop speakers was staggering.
By the way, why 2.1? Well, the point-one for the big bass — you need that for the sound, obviously. Why not more than two speakers, you ask? Easily answered. I don’t have much space, and a correct placement of the speakers would mean the rear speakers are floating somewhere in the room. I don’t want that clutter.
I listened to various sound systems on offer. The first two sounded indeed good. The third just bass-stunned me into an “I want that”-mode. Oh yes I wanted that fat bass sound (and I can tell you, while writing this, it makes you happy to have it :).

Fahnestock clipsHence, haggling commenced. Both the telly and the sound systems were sold out except for the store models… for the sound system, I’d say no big issue, for the telly… hmms. I think I drove a reasonably hard bargain, then they popped up with the required cables. Damn. So we haggled back and forth on those a bit, and finally I decided I didn’t need an expensive HDMI cable (it’s digital — get real, with a regular DVD player, the cable is not the limiting factor in quality. Plus, it can’t exactly lose quality — it’s digital!). For the sound I was slightly more anxious. So I got the more expensive optical audio connection. As it turns out: my bad. My very bad even. The speakers of my brand new sound system are connected via ye olde copper wiring to the amplifier (I guess Fahnestock clips. See the image — yes, it is roughly that pathetic.

Sound isn’t any less for it though :)

Le anyway, I struck a deal and got myself the equipment. By now, I have set it up and actually bought some CDs to listen to my new fat bass-sound :)

Incidentally, both the birthday party and the high school reunion were fun too :)

Ubuntu 9.10, here I am!

Sunday, May 9th, 2010

Ubuntu splash screenIt’s Sunday, I am terribly lazy and not in the mood to do anything. So, naturally, I booted into windows, installed the necessary BIOS update from Samsung, rebooted, crossed my fingers and hit the update button.

Huawei E1750Reason for being a bit worried and holding off? Well, early reports on 9.10 sounded as if there were some chinks to be worked out. Plus, I am not exactly running a standard PC… I love my little cutsey netbook, but move outside the pre-installed established OS at your own risk. Main worry for me was my USB modem. It took some tweaking to get it running. No clue if that would hold up under the shiny new Ubuntu… and I don’t exactly have a spare net connection to fix things if it breaks down.

As you can guess from this post, that part worked out… more or less. It seemed to work out of the box, but then it recognised the USB modem as a USB stick, and while the network manager managed to connect, I couldn’t get on the Net. Unplugging and replugging solved that. Kind of curious if I have to do that every time now :)

Other than that: first impressions are good! The menu bars’ autohide feature is improved, providing me with more screen real estate (important on small screens). I still need to check some things:

  • Does the printer still work?
  • Does the automatic resolution adaption for beamer/tv still work?
  • Do the Fn-keys work (quick test: seems as good as before)

But overall, first impressions are positive.