Visual heaven
Tuesday the 8th of January at 17:08After visiting Thomas and Tove at new years I discovered I had to buy myself a little Christmas present. So a few days later, back in Trondheim, I went online and bought myself a Samsung Syncmaster 305T. That's a lovely 30" of viewing pleasure. A whopping 2560x1600 of desktop surface. I only got my hands on it yesterday so I haven't had much time to play around with it yet, though I'm looking forward to try playing some games on it tonight. (Though I might have to spend the time moving the website database back to the webserver machine as the mythtv machine, which it is on now, is a bit too loud to have on all the time.)
I've made a start at trying to find out what home automation system to go for, however I'm starting to realize I have to get more structured about it. This is going to be... [more]
[166] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags: friends it
Back online!
Monday the 7th of January at 14:56As Rob noted in a comment in the previous post, we're back on-line!
Apparently we were switched on while we were away during Christmas (on the 24th apparently) and the linux box is now up and routing for our interwebbing pleasure. :) Cabling is still very jury-rigged with a network cable dangling through the living room (unused awaiting renovation) and bedroom (and bathroom (don't ask)) to get to our temporary living room in the attic. Apparently Lande feels like it's like having a missing limb reattached. I've surprisingly not been missing it all that much, more a frustration of not having my website available for some reason. Odd.
[108] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags: it
Moving
Wednesday the 21st of November at 16:09So we're moving to our new apartment on Friday. I'm dreading the move (carrying our shit up and down for hours) but looking forward to get settled in at the new place. The only hitch is that we'll be living in a building site.
I'm feeling constantly exhausted this week as the workdays are long and when I come home it's just time for dinner before we start packing. Every night. I suspect we've bought more crap to fill up the empty space seeing as the apartment we're currently living in is larger than the one in the UK. I'm again taking the opportunity to throw out as much crap as I can, however I suspect there will be another round of throwing away when we start unpacking at the new place.
A positive side of moving into a building site is that it's our building site and I'm finally going... [more]
[178] words in article. [1] comments.
Tags: building life
Touch typing
Wednesday the 31st of October at 17:14I was the pranked today by one of my colleagues, unfortunately the prank fizzled a bit as I didn't actually notice. Cleverly they swapped the M and N keys on my keyboard expecting hilarity and confusion to follow.
An hour later said colleague called to inquire about my inability to type properly, I confirmed that my finger were indeed working properly and no issues had been noticed. Querying him about his odd behavior on messenger he pointedly asked me if I was having any problems with typing at the moment and when I answered to the negative he pointed out that they had switched the keys. Oh!
At least I now know I can touch type. :D
[117] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags: it life
Good news
Tuesday the 16th of October at 11:38We're exchanging on the house today! Yay! And an hour after we've exchanged we'll have a designer in to give us a quote for the work needed. I'm getting a bit worried that we won't be able to afford doing as complete a renovation as I have been hoping for, which really sucks because there are a lot of details which I'll really miss if they're not there. I do believe, however, that we might be able to future proof it. Making sure we have laid down enough cat5 and large back-boxes everywhere.
Also, Ubuntu 7.10 is out in 2 day. Get ready to upgrade! I've been running the RC for a couple of days and though I'm not noticing any issues, there aren't a lot of visible changes either. Mostly it seems to be newer versions of software. There are a couple of new things I've noticed is gaim updated to... [more]
[192] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags: building it
Is Linux the upgrade path?
Saturday the 13th of October at 23:35I've just been reading yet another story about how Windows Vista sucks that included some talk about hardware and stupid limitations of the x86 architecture. A sudden brainwave struck me about how Microsoft might actually be in a lot of trouble in the future.
Lets say that Linux manages to build up a noticeable market share, nothing fancy, maybe 10%. Now also take into account that Linux runs on a significant number of architectures. What this means is that the hardware you run on is no longer as important since whichever type of hardware you're running on the user experience is pretty much the same.
A major problem for any new hardware that's come out has usually been that it's incredibly hard to break through the monopoly that is Windows, and any new architecture that has come out has... [more]
[238] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags: it
Updates
Saturday the 6th of October at 17:27So I guess it's time for another update.
House purchase is slowly moving forward. We've had some difficulties with the seller who didn't want to honour some of the clauses of the sales contract, but the prospect of a 10% penalty on the sales price has brought him back to earth. The issue was that as part of the sales contract we had a guarantee of the approval from the downstairs neighbour to place a door on the floor below us to block of the stairway so that it would be for our exclusive use. (We have the top 2 floors.) Unfortunately the downstairs flat was sold twice and the guarantee had not made it into their contract. So to ensure the cooperation of the downstairs neighbour the seller is paying for complete insulation of the floor of our apartment (as a drop in the purchase price).... [more]
[411] words in article. [2] comments.
Tags: netherlands building it life
Got me!
Friday the 31st of August at 08:46Lately a mail has been doing the rounds promoting Blackle, a version of Google with black background and gray text, which is supposed to reduce the power consumption of your screen. I must admit I completely bought into it. It seemed to make sense that a pixel that is bright should consume more power that a pixel that is dark. As it turns out, it may not be that clear cut.
This article tests the claim and finds that for CRT screens there is a bit of difference, but for LCD screens there is none. Actually if you want to save power you're better off just switching from a CRT to an LCD!
So how come? Well, with CRT, it does work like you expect it to, a bright pixel requires more energy to light up than a dark one. On an LCD however, the entire... [more]
[208] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags:
Short update
Monday the 27th of August at 20:09Had a visit from Mike this weekend. Great fun, a pity we're so far away. I do miss hanging out with my friends some times so it's really excellent when they do come for a visit. If you feel guilty for not having come to visit us yet then you're very welcome!
We've bought a new flat! Pretty scary actually. We've not actually secured a mortgage yet but we've signed the purchase contract. According to the banks we shouldn't have any problems getting the mortgage thought so it's pretty much a formality apparently. Lots of work that needs to be done to it to get it to the state we want it so that might lead to quite a few "Look what we're doing now!" posts.
Since I started hosting a tool for a facebook app my hit rate has exploded. One of the tools also runs a very heavy query so I've been... [more]
[200] words in article. [0] comments.
Tags:
Comments for itemset page
Saturday the 18th of August at 20:27Please put all your comments for the Item Set page here.
[12] words in article. [48] comments.
Tags: