Paris — Don’t Stop The Movement
 by in General |
I just caught this on guerrillafunk.com:
So, it wasn’t the caffeine after all…
| by in Health, Interesting Links |
For most of my (working) life, I have been an avid coffee-drinker almost since the day I first forced that cup down my throat out of politeness and, after a few cups thought that, “Hey that actually tastes & feels good.“.
Until, a few of months ago, my stomach started acting up on me after drinking [...]
In-between-jobs…
| by in General |
“In between jobs“, I always have wanted to say that. I wish I could say it in another situation though…
Last month my employer went bankrupt and me and some colleagues haven’t been payed for a couple of months.
It sucks…. There’s the issue of some back-pay that I still have to get back which comes with [...]
MC Frontalot — Secrets From The Future
| by in Arts & Poetry, Conspiracies, Freedom & Repression, Interesting Links, Internet & Technology, Media, Religion & Politics, Music, Security & Privacy |
Hey again! Long time no post, I know…. busy, life, et cetera, but this I just needed to share.
I was just reading Bruce Schneier’s CRYPTO-GRAM and he linked to this suprisingly good track (direct link to MP3) by MC Frontalot, called Secrets From The Future (direct link to the lyrics).
To quote the chorus:
You can’t [...]
Everlast: Love War and The Ghost of Whitey Ford
| by in Arts & Poetry, Interesting Links, Music |
It’s been quiet for a long while … probably because I didn’t have anything to say or anything to vent… But I do so, now.
See, my girlfriend found the new site set up by Everlast (to spread the word about his new album, Love War and The Ghost of Whitey Ford, I assume) [...]
Woohoo!
| by in General |
Recently, my MythTV box started acting ‘weird’ … initially I thought I just got a flaky SVN checkout, even after I installed a more recent version.
It was only after the machine really crashed, and one of the two encoder cards didn’t want to initialise resulting in only static coming from the card. That sucked, so [...]
I’m a freak: I got calculi in my salivary glands
| by in Health, Interesting Links |
I have got calculi in my salivary glands and it sometimes acts up.
You know, if you had biology in school, there are 2 tiny little holes on the floor of your mouth, about where your tongue attaches, where your saliva comes into your mouth.
Basically, what happens is that sometimes — and this is [...]
New server!
| by in General |
One man’s trash is another man’s new server.
I love to recycle. I got a ‘new’ server from a buddy of mine, which performs better than the older one. So the web- and database- stuff have just been migrated to the other machine and things seem to work OK.
You may noticed if you have been here [...]
I’m chillin’….
With this Transformer movie coming out… it reminded me of this song I still have the vinyl to. I didn’t even know it had a video (check here, embedding is disabled for that video), then again, back then we didn’t even have cable..
I still cannot make out whether it is a sample from the actual [...]
I bought a new camera: Kodak Z710
| by in General |
Last week, me and the girlfriend were on the lookout for a relatively cheap Bluetooth headset to buy for my birthday; so while looking around the various stores that sell electronics, we both noticed some quite nice digital camera’s being on the shelves nowadays.
That was Tuesday last week … but the image of the [...]
Nice kit…
With the current iPhone hype it’s cool to see an open device like the Neo1973. There’s even an edition that includes a special screwdriver so you can really take that to the literal level.
“Know that it’s okay to call shit like it is and quit being cowards worrying about who we’ll offend”
| by in Interesting Links |
I just finished reading an article on guerrillafunk.com by Paris entitled “Are you a Hip-Hop apologist?”.
You screwed around as a teen, now why can’t your kids?
Couldn’t help but notice the ‘hype’ surrounding the article entitled ‘You Grew Up Playing Shoot’em-Up Games. Why Can’t Your Kids?…. Although the title of that article may sound grown-up and wise, personally, I think it’s a bullshit wise-crack because I seriously doubt it has anything to do at all with computer games at all.
You [...]
The Inuit and Christianity
I was watching a TV recording last night, in it they showed an old news-reel of Inuit celebrating Easter. I was immediately like “WTF” — Christian beliefs, way over there? I couldn’t believe it. Because I wouldn’t think Christians would’ve their balls frozen off trying to convert those folks. And second, because I would’ve thought [...]
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
A colleague and friend of mine whose name I won’t mention to protect the innocent, told me some stories about Sea Shepherd, an organisation whose mission statement it is to protect and conserve marine wild-life — and does this very actively by basically stalking and irritating the hell out of whale-hunters, et cetera.
A couple [...]
I hate cripple-ware!
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have now got an Apple MacBook Pro to work on, which obviously has its pros and cons. Sure, the machine supports X11 to a certain extent but I don’t want to basically run 2 different window managers that look and act a bit differently. I have been [...]
LMAO! Minister must explain how a guy, with Joker-style make-up job, got a passport an ID-card
My girlfriend just called me about this hilarious bit about a guy that had gotten a passport with his picture made while he looked like The Joker from the Batman series.
Apparently, after stating that ‘this was his way of life’, the municipal office didn’t see no problem with it, and issued a passport an ID-card.
This [...]
Yay I got a new Mac!
| by in Computers & Hardware, General |
First post from my new Mac!
Stranger things have happened: a proprietary operating system has entered my household once again. I didn’t pay for it, mind you, my boss did.
*sniff* It may be some weird fetish, but the smell of new hardware is just… well… there is just something about it..
So I’m all happy discovering [...]
myth_system(): Error, fork() failed because Cannot allocate memory
| by in Computers & Hardware, General |
Something tells me I need some more memory in my MythTV machine — it was happily transcoding earlier recorded programmes when suddenly all queued transcoding jobs seemed to fail. Checking the backend’s logfile I noticed a lot of these errors:
myth_system(): Error, fork() failed because Cannot allocate memory
There’s 512MB in it at the moment — and [...]
Linux distro timeline
I just discovered the linux distribution timeline.
Cool graph…
The ‘joys’ of computerisation…
Things can go wrong — about 800.000 times.
Forgive my sarcasm, but wasn’t making this type of stuff illegal supposed to cure all of this? *very deep sigh*
The ‘industry’ really should stop lobbying to criminalise crackers and direct their ammo at the ones that are really responsible: the companies that allow for these type of fraud [...]
Online treatment for alcoholism
I just caught this news (Dutch) about on-line treatment for alcohol-addiction by some Dutch clinic that specialises in that type of thing.
This ‘treatment’ consists of 7 online chat-sessions with a professional.
Now, I can’t get this image out of my head:
i have a drinking problem
Come, come, elucidate your thoughts.
i drink too much
I’m not sure I understand [...]
Cute…
Cute.. I quote:
Players and creators of video games could face imprisonment for acts of virtual violence under draft legislation being drawn up by two of Germany’s state governments.
It could’ve been an article on The Onion but sadly — it ain’t no joke. ‘Der’ Man wants to illegalise in-game violence thinking that it will prevent kids [...]
Picture of Blair is not offensive…
| by in General |
Well, the one with a barcode on his upper lip isn’t:
I just caught this article on the Register about an ASA complaint about a Guardian advertisement against the usage of ID cards. This one:
The Register article states that, apparently, the ..
NO2ID made clear they had worked hard to make Blair look like Hitler.
Worked hard [...]
To sit upright or to not sit upright…
| by in Health, Interesting Links |
In my profession, I have always sat behind a computer — I have never done any work that didn’t involve one.
People always noted my sitting position: I was either hanging backwards in my chair (hey the monitor is at eye-height then, too), or I’m sitting behind a desk at a slight angle (i.e. my [...]
I guess the truth really, really is inconvenient…
I have just caught this article here and it sickens me how, the ‘free world that the terrorist envy‘, is all run by money. I just hope some of the parents are wise enough to teach their kids, though… I mean, yeah, they’re American, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all morons, even a retard [...]
NG-BASIC 0.2.16, as Firefox-extension
| by in General |
Recently I was browsing through this sites’ statistics and noticed a link from this fellow who discovered my basic interpreter-project after reading the Salon article ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code‘. An article that, by the way, makes a very solid point.
So that, combined with realising that I haven’t done anything with my BASIC interpreter for almost [...]
Force feedback: did I see prior art in `The Incredible Hulk’?
I don’t know where exactly that I read it, but some time the previous year I read this bit about a boat that sunk, in the 1960’s or 70’s, and that it was recovered by transferring ping-pong balls into it. Yeah, it made me think of the Discovery programma MythBusters as well, but it seems [...]
Hot-linking not allowed..
| by in General, Random Rantings |
As I noticed a lot of the bandwidth of this website is going to ‘waste’ because some people like to use images stored on this server in their signatures or posts on other forums, I tinkered around a bit with PHP and Apache’s Rewrite Engine and cooked up a configuration that ought to reduce this [...]
So I just voted….
| by in General |
In the Netherlands it is ‘that’ time again to do our ‘duty’: we have to elect the lesser of all evils today.
As the comedian who commented on the so-called ‘debate’ that was televised last-night said, I made a tactical vote today: I went to the voting station between 10 and 11 am, so it wasn’t [...]
On the anti-smoking lobby and so-called ‘experts’
| by in Health, Interesting Links, Random Rantings |
I’m an person avidly against the anti-smoking lobby. It’s unfair.
I’ve always defended the position of the smoker, and have always doubted research into this field because, hell, cancer could just as well come from another source, not specifically second-hand smoke (it could be farts, or fuck, this is one of my latest gems: cancer could [...]
White-supremacist butt-fuckers messing wit’ MLK…
I just love this initiative to Googlebomb a white-supremacist website (found it while connecting*the*dots).
The content of the site really is sickening and vile. Of course, such a site should be taken down, but denial of service attacks are childish. And, everybody has a right to express themselves, even a white supremacist.
But… this isn’t expression… [...]
Oooooh a student got abused and tazed by police — so now what?
I just caught this sick shit through The Register…. Guy gets tazed by cops because he couldn’t show an ID card.
“Stand up or you will get tazed again?”
What the frigging fuck? Of course, everybody says it’s a bad thing. Sure, I’m not saying that it isn’t….
But, I don’t know what upsets me more here. The [...]
The dark nature of capitalism…
| by in Belegana, Random Rantings |
I couldn’t resist to use the same title for this post as the one I recently read on connecting*the*dots — because, hey, the following is also the dark nature of capitalism…
This morning, there was some news on TV (can’t help it — my girlfriend always turns the damn thing on in the morning), that earlier [...]
Forget the PS3 ! I want a Nedap voting machine
| by in Humour, Interesting Links |
It can play games too! I was just reading this relatively old dissection of these voting machines that coincidentally we will vote on in the upcoming elections.
It started with what we thought was a very obvious statement. We claimed on our website that
the Nedap was just another computer, and that as such it could just [...]
Hmmmmm — cookies!
| by in General |
As I mentioned last month — working from home has its pros and cons.
I recently discovered a new ‘pro‘: it allows me to experiment with making food. Of course, I got a sweet tooth, so at the moment I’m only making things like candy and pastry.
It all started with a couple of cookies that [...]
The lie detector and Wonder Woman…
| by in History, Interesting Links |
I learned some interesting facts this morning. Through this post on Slashdot I ended up on this page, on the release of the guys’ FBI files.
I didn’t know the creator of the first ‘lie detector’ and Wonder Woman were one and the same guy. And that, in 1938, William Moulton Marston once did some tests [...]
Recording an end-user’s movements on a website — copyright infringement?
This post on Slashdot got me thinking of something that I’ve been thinking about a couple of years ago.
Who says that websites aren’t already recording your movements?
I mean — earlier in this century I was thinking that, when you are a big corporation, and you have some ‘comments, complaints & suggestions‘ section on [...]
It’s 2006 and this world still stinks…
Last night I had a hard time getting asleep and couldn’t resist thinking about the sorry sick state our world is in, the way that it is getting spinned out of control caused mainly by the corruption-prone mechanics of politics and economics.
About how megalomanic people are put in powerful positions and how they, slowly and [...]
How hard can it be to get the frigging time correct?
| by in General |
Last night I was thinking how insane it is that Windows has to ask the user whether the new time-settings (due to daylight savings) are correct — knowing that I don’t have to worry about any of that on my machines at all…..
Today, I incidentally discovered this old news that I didn’t catch before. [...]
Oops, I did it again….
| by in General |
Hmm — two quotes of the week posts one after the other… One would think I’ve got better, or other, things to do lately, than to sit behind a computer and rant about whatever… Yeah: I’m sitting behind a computer, coding (for both work and my private stuff)..
I always have these, well ‘intense’ sessions [...]
And — it’s back…
| by in General |
The site was off-line just now (only for a few minutes though), due to some necessary software upgrades. The thing might even perform a little better now…
OM-MF-G
Just discovered this here (by following a link, by the way, in one of the comments below this other amazing story):
He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key [of the Diebold voting machine], and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in [...]
VoIP (SIP), XS4ALL and Asterisk
My ISP (XS4ALL) is currently providing its clients with 1 or 2 optional VoIP numbers. I would’ve never imagined I would be setting VoIP up at home, but the mythical convergence box in my living room has VoIP capabilities — so why the hell not? (Why does a dog lick its balls?)
As VoIP calls are [...]
Bettie Serveert 15 year anniversary
| by in Arts & Poetry, Interesting Links, Music |
I just received an email from Fabchannel that they’re webcasting the 15 year anniversary concert of Bettie Serveert (Dutch band). I’m a long fan of Bettie Serveert — `Brain-Tag‘ in fact being my and my gf’s ‘song‘ (that’s some excellent guitar-playing).
But damn, my browser does not support Flash (well not the latest version anyways) and [...]
MythTV + MythStreams + lastFMProxy = fun too :)
Yesterday, one of my new colleagues pointed my attention to last.FM, an internet radio station. Well, there are plenty internet radio stations, but what sets this one apart from the rest is the fact that you can specify what songs you like, so that some kind of profile is created. I had already heard of [...]
Quote Of The Week #25
| by in General, Quote Of The Week |
Aesopus (or Aesop / Æsop), the ancient Greek writer, famous for his fables, has said many wise things therein. One of these is this weeks’ quote, coming from the short Bundle of Sticks:
Union gives strength.
Quote Of The Week, QOTW
Ordered a new system for my MythTV set-up
| by in Computers & Hardware, General |
I recently ordered a new system to upgrade my MythTV setup. Currently, the back-end (i.e. the machine doing all the recording) is an IBM 300GL. Yeah it’s almost antique, I know, but it works. The drawback is that the hard-drive it records on, is actually an NFS mounted drive that physically resides in another system.
The [...]
T minus 7 days and counting…
| by in General, The Netherlands |
Yeh well, as I said earlier this month, a certain Monday would be an interesting one. Never gotten around to an actual update on that, but, well, now I am.
Anyways, that particular Monday on the 24th of July was the day I gave my current employer my notice.
I quit that job because, well, I [...]
Studying Latin..
| by in General, History, Interesting Links |
“Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur”
Over the recent years I’m having this increasing interest in history and the evolution of human knowledge, so to speak. The ancient Greek philosophers of course and stuff like etymology for instance quite interest me. It’s funny to see how words have evolved in different languages, coming from the same [...]
Analysis: Murder in the skies…
The Register runs a nice article analysis on the ‘foiled’ plane-bomb plan:
We’re told that the suspects were planning to use TATP, or triacetone triperoxide, a high explosive that supposedly can be made from common household chemicals unlikely to be caught by airport screeners. A little hair dye, drain cleaner, and paint thinner - all easily [...]
Sentiment…
| by in History, Interesting Links, Music |
When I was young I had this remix tape with Electro music on it. Lately, I tried searching for a couple of the songs on that tape. That once pointed me to this remix with a lot of old-school electro songs in it. (Incidentally, you might find the N.W.A. track Panic Zone quite funny to [...]
Firefox crop circle
| by in Interesting Links |
I just discovered this gallery of a Linux User Group creating crop-circles of the Firefox logo:
Pretty neat trick.
Firefox, Linux, Crop Circles
Quote Of The Week #22
For this 22nd Quote Of The Week, we’ll focus on Emiliano Zapata, who once said (or rather, wrote, in a letter to Pancho Villa):
Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for tyranny.
Quote Of The Week, QOTW
OMFG this is amazing
| by in Animals & Nature, Bunnies, Interesting Links |
Yesterday I discovered these two posts on CuteOverload: a real life Bambi and Thumper.
Amazing…
Animals, Bambi, Thumper, Rabbits, Deer
Criminal hackers…
| by in General |
Last week I was watching some quiz on Belgian TV and I noticed that, for once, they were actually using the correct term to describe a criminal hacker, i.e. a cracker:
If you use MythTV to filter out the crap, television might even be worth watching…
I thought that was cool, because many of us dislike the [...]
Dutch population-growth is slow this year
The Central Bureau of Statistics (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, CBS) reports that the Dutch population has barely grown: the last 6 months there was a mere increase of only 2.000 people, as opposed to 7.000 people in the same period, in the previous year.
Interestingly, the second quarter of 2006 only seen a decrease of [...]
Chomsky on Israel, Lebanon and Palestine…
After just reading a piece on morality, I incidentally discovered this Chomsky-interview published in the Middle East Online, in which he is asked whether the current actions by Israel are legally and morally justified…
The invasion itself is a serious breach of international law, and major war crimes are being committed as it proceeds. There is [...]