Going below the equator (SA update #1)

August 29th, 2011

Flag of South AfricaIt’s cold here! I arrived at Johannesburg airport yesterday morning, having hardly slept. My bad: we left at 11pm, more or less, and in the first hour and a half they were handing out food and such. So then, I figured to try the video on demand part ;-) It was cool! Gnomeo and Juliet, Rio, Thor, another movie I’m interested in (will watch on the way back). The plane was also a gigantic whale! 2 levels… geez! I found that a good place to sit is probably either near a door or in the center isle in the center — provided no one is sitting next to you. All because of legspace. Sitting next to the aisle isn’t great: people walking by, and you shouldn’t dump your legs in the aisle because of that…

Anyway, Around three I realised sleeping would be a good plan. Around 7, people were waking up and around 7.30, breakfast was being served. That ain’t much sleep. Ah well.

I got off the plane (as one of the later ones), took forever to get money (I’m apparently withdrawing from my savings account?!?!) and then lazily made my way to the pickup point: a hotel. There, I picked up internet and tried to work. No luck, too tired. Waited for hours till the pickup showed up (as scheduled) at 17:00. It took another 30-45 min before we were finally off, and then a 2 hr drive to the reserve. We were just in time to have dinner (though it was cold and leftovers). Made my way to bed, read a bit, and slept with earplugs (too much wind making noise). Earplugs caused me to sleep in till 6:44, which was nice, I guess. Breakfast was supposedly served at 7, though in reality everyone was slowly working up to there, so 7.15 was more like it. I will so sleep in till 7.15 tomorrow!

Anyway, no pictures yet. So far, SA didn’t look tantalising, but that’s probably because I was dead tired and almost asleep in a hotel for most of my stay here. The reserve (where the conference is taking place) does look cool! Tonight: game drive! ;-)

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Vienna, here I am!

August 22nd, 2011

travel logoI had to wake up way too early on Friday to get to my 7:10 plane to Vienna.Funnily enough, by the way, I managed to squeeze everything into one piece of carry-on luggage. Not sure yet on whether or not I’ll do that again for the next hop — I do appreciate some more leg space, but I’ll have a transfer and I also appreciate having everything there. To ponder about. Anyway, I got up way too early, wasted time at the airport and touched down near Vienna. Then, I hopped on a train to Graz and got moving to Baptiste and Katherina.

I had a wonderful weekend there. Most of the Friday consisted of catching up on much-needed sleep :) The rest was good too: Graz is actually a really nice town. Visits recommended! Sunday I got back to the station, and bak to Vienna. I quite easily found my hotel. It has turtles. Agnieszka wondered if they were ninja turtles, I’l try to find out.

Anyway, Vienna, here I am! Now entertain me ;-)

PS: I’m here for a conference, which takes up most of the week. Might decide to play hookey a bit though. ;-)

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New PC: svn password tweak, GUI corner tweak

August 16th, 2011

So, I’ve just returned from a brief visit to NL, and come back to find my new work-pc humming along nicely. All new. Brand new. Brand new… and completely untweaked! AAAAARGH!

Thankfully, I’ve documented most of the tweaks in this blog (so even if no one reads this, it helps me :). The most annoying remaining part is missing software — easily installed, but still:

  • Thunderbird
  • SVN
  • LaTeX
  • Some firefox plugins (youtube worked, but flash wasn’t happy or something)
  • possibly: ghostview (though perhaps i’ll go evince), others (to be found)

Speaking of SVN: there was a problem (hooray! a new tweak to document here!). SVN apparently is integrated with the GNOME Keyring daemon. Possibly convenient, except that GNOME doesn’t know my passwords. So I got a “password for ‘null’ (Gnome keyring):” prompt… and a refusal to work.
Crap.

Found the solution here. Basically: edit your Subversion config file ($HOME/.subversion/config) and set password-store to empty (“password-store =“).
Now to refind the tweak for getting rid of the bottom dragging corner — yuk!

editFound my old post, which only contained a link. To preserve this info more safely:

  1. create or edit $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0
  2. add the following:
    style "default-style"
    {
    GtkWindow::resize-grip-height = 0
    GtkWindow::resize-grip-width = 0
    }

    class "GtkWidget" style "default-style"

  3. restart Gnome

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Kindle goodiness??

August 6th, 2011

kindle logoOkay, I know this is silly… but ever since Tenerife, I’ve been wondering about an e-reader. You see, if you’re hauling all your luggage on your back, less weight and less bulk counts. A lot. On the other hand, if you’re backpacking, you have marvelous experiences with nature all day long. But in the evening, you might be resting in a mountain hut, in a tent, or anywhere else removed from civilization (read: television). Which means that you best be packing whatever it is you need to wind down.rgeous views don’t necessarily cut it — I like reading!

Well, carrying more than 2 pockets wasn’t really an option. I read fast. Especially when there’s not much else to do. So 2 books don’t last a whole holiday. As such, I wondered… an e-reader could potentially contain thousands of books, and thousand is more than two.

For months, I’ve been going back and forth between the Kindle 3 3G and the Sony PRS 650. Both have awesome screens. The Sony’s firmware seems a tiny bit cooler (PDF reflowing, support for ePUB format), while the Kindle 3G is cool because it offers 3G access to Amazon’s Kindle store. Almost everywhere. Then again, Sony’s trinket has a touch screen. Oh my oh my, how to choose??

One issue cropped up: PDF reading. You see, I don’t often go backpacking. I travel for work more often, and I usually take a big stack of papers along to read. If I were to splash out on an e-reader, wouldn’t it be great if I could take all relevant papers with me everywhere and read them easily? Frankly, when I went backpacking, I considered taking a small stack too…

Both the above readers are 6 inch (15 and a bit cm). If you have a PDF with only text, the Sony thingy can zoom in and out (Kindle apparently not so much without conversion, and the conversion apparently sucks). But if there’s formulas, it starts to suck. Apparently on both. From the few colleagues I know who have one, all mentioned that they gave up on work-related reading. Damn.
It would probably feel like a half-solution. Grr. Not good enough.

Along comes Amazon to help me out. Sure, you cannot read ePub on Kindles. In general, it’s more locked in than other devices. But: now they have the shiny new eInk Pearl display in a whopping 9.7″ (24.6 cm — almost the 29.7 cm length of an A4) format! Welcome, Kindle DX Graphite 3G! Can’t wait till I get my hands on this wonderful item (it’s actually a gift — how lucky do I get to be??). So yeah, excited and curious… will it be cool? will it be too big or perfect?
Will let you know later!

PS: They got E-inks in colour? cool :) Not necessary though, but cool :)

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2004 voting “irregularities” in Ohio

July 26th, 2011

voting logoIn 2004, something was weird about the Us presidential elections in Ohio. Now, more and more is coming to light. See the full story here.

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Bruno Mars’ cool videos!

July 6th, 2011

Being in a hotel, I have access to television once again. I noticed something: Bruno Mars makes cool videos! The music isn’t bad, either. Not fantastic, but not bad. But the clips are cool!

Lazy Day
[iframe http://www.youtube.com/embed/a9W1xZGYh4w 425 349]
(I love the whistling part :)

Just the way you are
[iframe http://www.youtube.com/embed/39gs4hEGQt8 425 349]
Cool playing with cassette tape!

Grenade
[iframe http://www.youtube.com/embed/0ZVXCM6R1-U 560 349]
I like the dragging of the piano all the way. I expected something to happen at the bridge though. I don’t really like the song. In my defense: it was shown often on MTV a few months ago during my evening exercises in the gym (video, no sound) :)

edit: fixed the embedding (doh: don’t embed the youtube url directly, change the “/watch?v=” part to “/embed/” ).

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Playing with GIMP

June 29th, 2011

Gimp logoThe other day, for work, I wanted to make part of a picture stand out. I opened GIMP, but not sure to proceed. And then I hit upon an idea: have the original in B&W, and have the highlighted part in colour!

Sometimes this looks really good, sometimes it’s more okay than amazing. But, at any rate, it’s neigh-on trivial in GIMP, as this tutorial shows.
Short short version

  1. duplicate background layer (right-click layer, “copy”)
  2. make new layer grayscale (color menu -> desaturate, try the options)
  3. add layer mask (right-click layer, “add mask”, select “white”, click add)
  4. paint on the mask with black to remove those parts of the layer (brush tool or pencil tool)
    fix mistakes by painting with white (press ‘x’ to toggle between background and foreground color)
  5. save image

And what does that get you?

voting booths voting booths (b/w)

Pretty nifty for my first serious GIMP’ing, no? :)

Edit: just found out how to easily have lines around a selection:

  1. select something,
  2. choose a brush or pencil of appropriate size and color
  3. Click Edit > Stroke selection; choose the lower radio button (“Stroke using a paint tool”)
  4. done!

Yeah yeah, trivial stuff huh? Two things: 1, last time it took me way too long and the result was entirely unsatisfactory; 2. this works on any selection, not just a square or circle. And that is cool :)
Outlining Switzerland on a map of Europe in 5 sec is cool :)

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Trainternet

June 17th, 2011

God I love NL for a change!!!

— Posted from my train. Without using my phone. Le :P

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[ubuntu] where’s my lower right-hand corner?

June 17th, 2011

Ubuntu logoIt’s gone in the new Ubuntu (blame Gnome). Used up by a resize handle. Which I don’t want. Apparently, there’s a way to get rid of this, see here. Untested for now!
Edit: tested, it works. To recap: make sure the following is in your $HOME/.gtkrc-2.0:

style "default-style"
{
  GtkWindow::resize-grip-height = 0
  GtkWindow::resize-grip-width = 0
}

class "GtkWidget" style "default-style"

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Skype issues

June 9th, 2011

Skype has two issues with the current Ubuntu:

Posted in software, unix/windows | Comments Off on Skype issues

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