We did all of this:
Thanks a lot to the Malge for the tip about www.cooliris.com.
Posts Tagged ‘geeky stuff’
So what did we do on our vacation?
Friday, August 20th, 2010Fun a cappella takes on songs you’ve probably heard
Sunday, July 4th, 2010Is there anyone with access to any sort of electronics who hasn’t heard the original version of this song?
Compare to Christopher Walken’s rendition:
The original Knights of Cydonia by Muse (this song rocks):
…and this outstanding one-man a cappella cover of it:
For this last one, be sure check out the original first, if you don’t already know it (and everyone in Germany, if not Europe, already does, since it’s the Eurovision 2010 contest winner):
I like this guy’s version so much better! Also, he’s got better moves than she does.
Cha-ching
Thursday, July 1st, 2010With my thanks to the nerds of ISCABBS and lolboom.com and whoever made this.
Salut de Iași!
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010I’m back in Iași this week for something like my 7th (is that right? that number seems pretty low) trip to Romania since the initial one in November 2006. I’ve not been back here for a visit since March 2009 — it’s really unusual for me to not visit for a whole year, but then again, my team has come to visit me in Germany in whole and in part, so although I haven’t been here as much as I like, I think the contact to my group is still good — I hope they agree.
I’m making a little bit more* of an effort with the language this time, thanks to a nifty Berlitz phrasebook from my parents. I think it has helped a lot with my pronunciation, too: I learned that I have been saying some things incorrectly since the beginning. Oops. And this is despite the fact that modernization has been tricking me. How? Well, view this post in Windows (XP or earlier) and take a look at the character between the a and i in the title. Does it look like an ‘s’ with a little comma below it? Or just a box? Odds are, it’s just a box (unless you’ve already installed the European Union Expansion Font Update). Boxes instead of proper characters are ugly, so while the rest of the Latin (more or less) alphabet world was getting their personal computing and desktop publishing and graphical design on with all the characters they needed for their languages, Romanian has not been patiently waiting for the s-comma and t-comma characters to become part of Unicode 3.0 standard, and for the biggest share of the computer-user market to support it. Instead, they by-and-largely just pressed on ahead, substituting ‘s’ and ‘t’ for ș and ț. Perhaps locals had to compromise — they wanted to use computers and had to settle for incorrect characters (or sometimes using t/s-cedilla substitutions, which are a little better, but still not correct).
What’s the big deal? Maybe nothing at all for native speakers who know what the words sound like, or kids who started learning to spell in the post-XP / Unicode 3 world. But I sound like a schmuck ordering “mamaliguta” instead of “mamaliguța” and “papanasi” instead of “papanași.” But after living in Bavaria for six years, I know a șnițel when I see one — no matter how it’s spelled.
*Zero plus 10% still isn’t very much.
VLC + Handbrake + DVDs = iPod/iPhone video joy
Saturday, May 15th, 2010I’m leaving tomorrow on a business trip to Iași. It will be my first trip there in over a year, and a bit longer than my normal trips (a full work week; something I don’t normally do).
Now that I’ve got this iPod touch thing though, and it has injected itself into many aspects of my life, I decided to try to take advantage of its 32GB storage capacity. I have several DVDs sitting around waiting to be watched. Why not watch them on the plane on my iPod tomorrow? But how can I rip the DVDs (something I’ve never done before) to a format my iPod touch can handle?
I downloaded a few trial versions of payware DVD rippers, and they didn’t work so hot (wrinkly distortions in the final product, plus the watermarked logo until you cough up for the software registration). My favorite geek reference site — ISCABBS, a place so geeky you have to use telnet to get in there — came to the rescue with a recommendation to use Handbrake together with VLC. At least on Mac OS X and Linux, having these together on your computer will allow you to rip right from a DVD into an iPod/iPhone compatible format — for free. Handbrake also nicely converts other video formats — apparently pretty much all of them — into a few of the more modern ones, like MP4 via the H.264 codec. I ripped the DVDs (and converted a few other video files I had lying around) in Handbrake and then dragged the converted files from the Finder windown onto my iPod in iTunes.
Works like a champ — love that.
Nerdin’ out with Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”
Monday, May 3rd, 2010My venerable old vprMatrix (I think it was a Best Buy house brand) computer has gone through a power supply and video card and I’ve beefed up the hard drives on it a couple times. Now I think it might be time for its second video card. I upgraded it from Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) with the intention of going straight to Kubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” LTS, but alas, the 8.04 “Hardy Heron” release of Kubuntu was not deemed an “LTS” release, so I have to hop, skip and jump my way around here a bit to fully modernize the OS on that box. If I even get all the way there.
The upgrade seemed to go OK to 9.10, but once I rebooted into Kubuntu 9.10, I noticed one thing immediately: the snazzy new (to me) KDE4 environment was not drawing the windows properly – parts of most (but not all windows) were displaying ostensibly correctly, but the title bar of every window was garbled with a repeating pattern of lines — some vertical, some horizontal. So much so, that I couldn’t read the titles of any of the windows I clicked on. I had to rely on my old friends, the keyboard shortcuts, to call up a console session and turn the machine off via command line. I googled around a bit and found this: Window corruption with older ATI graphics cards
The tips there fixed my window display problems, but I wonder if I should just upgrade the video card anyway. Scrolling seems clunky; 32MB of RAM on the graphics card just might not cut it anymore. We’ll see how it looks when I get to 10.04 (another 1500 files have to be downloaded and configured and installed and …).
Not Eating Out in New York » Win the How To Cook Everything iPhone App (and a conversation with Mark Bittman)
Saturday, April 24th, 2010
I read this blog (linked above) mostly for a little inspiration — a lot of the stuff is hard for us to get/make, or involves ingredients I don’t particularly like (think squash). But today I saw an entry from the author referencing another foodie dude I read — Mark Bittman — and a new iPhone/iPod Touch app he’s published in the store.
This app, entitled (like his book) “How to Cook Everything,” is awesome. For an app from a “minimalist,” it sure is feature- and content-rich. You get the entire contents of the book, which has been on my Wish List for a long time (but no more), plus swell search options, built in timers (when you hit that part of the recipe instructions to let something sit for x minutes, there’s a built-in timer right there for you to use and modify if necessary), and a really nifty grocery shopping list.
All this for a measly €1,59 — so I snapped it up immediately.
Microblogging Meets Regensblogging
Sunday, February 14th, 2010Sarah got me a swell iPod Touch for Valentine’s Day. So, what must-have apps will complete the experience for me? I already tried the WordPress app, but for some reason, it’s not playing nicely with this blog. Also have Skype installed, which works great.
Fall’s about to fall
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009
We walked around a bit today taking in probably one of the last “nice weather” days of the season. There were some nice leaf scenes over the past few weeks, but I always managed to miss the sunlight, being trapped in the office, or not happen to have my camera with me when the sun was actually out. You can click any of these to embiggen ‘em if you like.
In geeky news, I finally got fed up with the crummy Xandros Linux OS and ongoing lack of updates to the software repository on our Asus Eee PC 701 (the 4GB SSD model), so I downloaded the Jaunty Jackalope version of Ubuntu, remixed for netbooks. I was impressed that it was so easy to install using a USB flash drive (or USB-attached HDD, or an SD card, which is what I did). Perhaps the days of burning ISO images to CD (or DVD) are over for anyone with a 1GB or more flash memory device (or external HDD). Stuff seems to work pretty well, right after the install (including improved WLAN connectivity to hotspots and stuff — so far, so good), but here’s one thing that (surprisingly) didn’t: Skype.
The video didn’t work because the onboard webcam was disabled in the BIOS (bwah? But then how did it work under Xandros?). I read about that online somewhere. The secret is to press Esc during the boot sequence to go into the BIOS and turn on the onboard camera. The onboard microphone is not working at all — neither with the included Sound Recorder-esque app in Ubuntu, nor with Skype. So that may be a project to make it work. I have yet to try it with a headset or external mic, so maybe there’s still hope. Sort of annoying though, since it worked just fine under crappy the Xandros distribution. One suggestion I saw on a Skype discussion forum post was to buy an external (USB) sound card for a few Euros and make it work that way, which bodes ill for my theory of simply using an external mic instead of the onboard one. But I’m surprised there not some army of cheap geeks out there who reverse-engineered the drivers for that hardware from the Xandros distribution for use with Ubuntu.
If this proves a viable alternative to the Xandros stuff that came with it, then we might have prolonged the life of this netbook by quite a bit. It was getting kind of frustrating not being able to (easily) run Firefox ≥v.3.
gotta go back to Flanders or explore the Netherlands
Monday, November 16th, 2009I got this email after purchasing some WiFi bandwidth on our downtime at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport today and it reminds me that we need to explore some low countries some more, if only to take in the neato language.
If you can read German and English, you can read Dutch. Right? I’m struggling to find a word here that I can’t derive from German or English.
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