A while back I had a neat idea. It was one of those brainfarts that I occasionally get, and while the majority of them are quite stupid this one actually seemed kind of neat.

See, I own a cheap no-name generic bluetooth dongle. It works quite well and I like being able to connect my phone to my computer using it. Transfer files, sync phonebooks and all that jazz.

Anyhoo, this particular dongle has a tiny green LED indicating activity. When it’s idle it blinks at a rate of about 1 blink per second. When connected to a device it lights up stronger and also flashes intensely if there’s data-transfer. Demonstrated in the video below.

It was the 1 blink per second that got me thinking.

Why not put simulated aircraft lights on a casemod? I’ve always liked the blinks of airplanes and helictopters, and if you’re building an aircraft-themed case why not add a few aircraft LED’s to the mix. Much more stylish than the old-ass windows and cold-cathode tubes everyone has. Additionally it adds some neat bling to it, and also makes the case seem more hardcore. It would even work on a spaceship-themed mod as for example the good old NCC-1701 has aircraft lights on it.

I think that would be kind of neat, some nice pseudo-aircraft lights on a sweet hightech/military type looking case.

However, if you decide to go this route, you shouldn’t use particularly bright LEDs, rather you should go for the subtle approach. In this case (har har) I would say that less is definitely more.

I’ve built countless computers in my days. I’ve built them for myself, for friends and professionally. There is very little I don’t know about building computers, and while I don’t really have the time to keep up with every single new invention I adjust quickly when it’s crunchtime. I started building my own custom computers long before it was common to own a computer, much less assemble it yourself.

While hardware has come and gone there is one axiom that still remains when it comes to building your own computer, and that is the undeniable fact that any included cooler will always suck ass. This is still true, despite the years rolling on and despite technology getting better. Any CPU-cooler that’s included with a retail purchase of a CPU will pretty much blow chunks.

Sure, I admit that it’s money that’s the primary reason. CPU manufacturers simply throw together the cheapest thing that will do the job and ship it, and that’s why the damn things are loud, awfully engineered and keep the CPU at a temperature that is adequate but not in the least impressive.

I recently built a new computer. At first glance the included box-cooler looked pretty decent. It had heatpipes. It had lots and lots of thin aluminium-fins. It had a copper-core.

And when I started the computer it still sounded like a helicopter with severe case of swineflu. In addition, I think that had I put a slice of cold grapefruit on the CPU instead it would’ve been better at cooling the processor.

Why is this?

I think Intel and AMD need to realize they suck at doing this, and tell whatever chinese sweatshop that are assembling these turds to drop dead. Wouldn’t it simply be easier to ask for example Arctic Cooling to build coolers for them to include with a new CPU? Arctic Cooling manages to make coolers that are not only quite efficient, but aren’t ludicrously priced and also fairly quiet.

It seems like eons ago that I started this thing. Back in 2003 I installed what would become this server, and after a while this started to grow. The name (darklands) was inherited from that machines previous owner, and it still felt right. Admittedly I have none of the original hardware left, having replaced everything including the chassis, but the name still sticks.

Debian was the operating system of choice, made as far as I can remember on an impulse and a mild suggestion from a friend. Debian Woody to be precise, since back then I didn’t really know much about Debian and went for the “stable” release.

This installation served well for the next seven or so years. It got upgraded twice (from Woody to Sarge, then from Sarge to Etch) and survived my occasionally wild exploits. It hosted websites, and helped teach me a lot about the finer qualities of maintaining a 24/7 server.

But as time went by it became more and more unstable. Or rather, not unstable as such (uptime when I pulled it offline was 270+ days) but it had developed a lot of personality. Since I didn’t quite know what I was doing in the beginning, back in 2003, I took a lot of -in hindsight- very poor decisions. Decisions which I later regretted and had to endure working around for the next seven years, always being a nagging irritation at the back of my mind.

No more of this now.

I spent a week reinstalling the machine from scratch. After giving a lot of thought to it all I decided to go with Ubuntu Server instead of the previous choice, Debian. Admittedly, since Ubuntu is based on Debian the differences are very subtle, and all in all I’m quite happy with Ubuntu even as a server OS. It’s got the good things about Debian, and very few of the annoying ones.

The reinstallation was surprisingly smooth. I transferred the original machine into a virtualized environment running on my workstation to minimize the downtime while working on the actual machine. This proved to be a good idea, and I’m happy I took the time to do it. It also cemented that VirtualBox is a perfectly decent environment for virtualized computing.

Reinstallation went smooth. Minor hiccups always occur, but with seven years of experience I sorted them fairly quickly. Getting the external services running proved a challenge, but after some tweaking I managed it just fine. Apache, MySQL, all that stuff went up fairly quickly, and with minor modifications and tweaks the original content and configurations could be transferred to the new environment.

Internal services also went up smoothly. In about two days I had gotten approximately 90% of the external and internal services up and running. Quite nice. It’s been running for about a week now, basically just a shakedown to make sure things don’t go haywire for no reason.

Work remains, but now I can do it in the background or at night while the machine hums along and provides the same services it has always done. I’m happy, and proud of myself.

I’ve been avoiding upgrading Firefox from 3.5 since up until just recently I hadn’t found a good way to do it under Ubuntu. The only real option I’d found (apart from installing it manually) was using the mozilla-daily PPA, and that has some negative effects since you’re essentially installing a nightly developer-build of the browser that isn’t adapted to Ubuntu. It’s just a little too bleeding-edge for my taste; having your browsers behavior change on a virtually daily basis because you’re running nightlies of developer-versions is not something I recommend. Additionally it doesn’t install the Firefox-branded version but rather the generic Iceweasel-version instead, which is a minor annoyance.

Until I found this little article detailing a different PPA to use, and it worked flawlessly. A quick tour in aptitude and presto, new version of Firefox.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for many years now, and I see almost no incentive to change that habit. I’ve used it since back before it was Firefox, back when it was Firebird, and it’s still the best browser in most ways. 3.6 has made it better by removing some of the annoyances I had with 3.5, most notably how the browser would often simply “pause” for a second or two. Admittedly a lot of these annoyances could stem from me using about 56954 different extensions but whatever.

It’s a nice improvement, and if you’re using Ubuntu then the abovementioned PPA will be a nice and easy way to upgrade. It won’t blow your socks off, but it’s a nice improvement. Slightly faster and more of the same Firefox-goodness we’ve all come to love over the years.

I just found this completely awesome video of some norwegian dude doing pixel-art when re-tiling his shower. This is so cool! Lots of work but deeply impressive results!

Maybe some day when I redo my kitchen I’ll steal this idea and do a pixelart tile motif in it somewhere…

Either click the link up there to go to Vimeo and watch the video in much better quality, or enjoy the embedded (lesser-quality) version down below.

Yeah, weird topic. However, I discovered MyPaint purely by chance earlier today. It looks like a neat Painter-style application geared towards people with a preference for Free and Open Source software. It runs on Windows and Linux, and there’s a nice .deb ready for Ubuntu from GetDeb so installation was a breeze.

I dug out my ancient Wacom tablet (not my tablet pictured, mine is a lot more dirty and worn, and I lost the silly mouse thing years ago) which I’ve had for almost a decade (it turns ten this summer) and got a little curious as to how painless it would be to get it running under Ubuntu. Turns out it was completely painless – plug it into an available USB-port and presto, everything works just as expected. Especially important was the pressure-sensitivity, and when I gave it a quick go in MyPaint it worked just fine.

So, maybe soon I’ll be doing some virtual painting again? Was a long time since last I did this, might be fun!

My moms computer was dying, so she had me find a new one for her. After some comparison and weighing in the wishes she had (fairly portable, not costing a bloody fortune) I settled on recommending her buying an Asus eeePC 1101.

I helped her set it up this weekend, and it’s quite a neat little machine. Here’s some random impressions I got of it.

* Her unit was delivered with Windows 7 Home Premium and had twice the memory (2 gig instead of 1) and a bigger harddrive (250 gig versus 160) compared to what Asus lists on the website. I don’t see this listed on Asus website, but it appeared to be factoryinstalled.

* I found it rather ironic that Asus puts a really great, vibrant colorful HD-resolution capable display on a computer that simply doesn’t have enough oomph to play HD-content. The display is LED-lit and has a 1366×768 screen that would happily play 720p content. However, like I said – the machine just isn’t beefy enough to do that. Maybe I missed some setting, but I doubt it. Asus also makes a big deal out of this HD-capable display, but like I said – HD video on this thing, I don’t really see it happening. However, it’s absolutely gorgeous on a large-ish netbook. Bright, vibrant colors.

* The graphics adapter is a built-in Intel. This is probably the bottleneck for HD-video, and when Asus starts shipping the Nvidia Ion-equipped eeePC’s this problem with HD-video is probably a thing of the past. However, I found that the Intel-chipset barely has enough oomph to make Windows 7 with Aero run not too annoyingly slow. Things like Google Earth jerked around worse than Kathryn Hepburn on bad acid, albeit somewhat usable. If you buy one of these things expecting AMAZING 3D-performance you’re going to be badly disappointed.

* What the hell is wrong with Microsoft? While I think Windows 7 is an upgrade over Vista I still think it’s a laughably tired operating-system, and I question the wisdom of Asus putting it on a frickin’ netbook. Plug a USB thumbdrive in the computer and then wait 10-15 minutes while Windows 7 find and installs the driver? What the hell? Ubuntu does the same thing in less than five seconds.

* Also, despite Microsofts happy propaganda claiming Windows 7 is excellent for netbooks, my experience with this is quite the opposite. Windows 7 is probably a decent desktop-OS (if you can stand it being Windows) but on this netbook it feels slightly overwhelming – and this is a fairly beefy netbook!

* In fact, most of my complaints with this computer boil down to Windows. I didn’t feel like installing something lighter since it already came with W7, and the problem with a lack of native driver for the Intel-graphics on this particular model makes a decent alternative such as Ubuntu a no-go. This sucks, since Ubuntu would’ve been perfekt for this machine, but Intel refuses to release and kind of driver for this particular chipset and as such I figured, just leave W7 on it.

* The keyboard while somewhat cramped is actually quite nice. Good response, good feel, decent-sized keys for a somewhat large netbook.

* The touchpad has multitouch, which is kind of sweet. I always liked the two-finger scroll on Macs and you can do the same thing on this touchpad. Asus also mentions in the manual various tricky moves you can perform to zoom, but this is made impossible by two things. First, the small size of the touchpad prevents any finger-acrobatics unless you have fingers the size of toothpicks. Secondly, W7 has no nice zoom-function, so at least when I tried to do it nothing happened. It would’ve been sweet with Compiz, but alas, no such thing.

* Battery-time is listed at 9+ hours with the included 6-cell battery. I have absolutely no doubts that this is possible, if you turn the screen brightness way way way down and strangle anything that uses power. Essentially just sit there, stare at the desktop and occasionally move the mouse cursor to prevent the computer from going to sleep. In more real-world environments, with the brightness at a low-ish but tolerable level doing normal things the battery reported about 7 hours of useful capacity.

* The amount of crapware included with this machine was painful. Admittedly, it wasn’t a complete clusterf**k but it was quite annoying having to uninstall all the trial-versions of Microsoft Office (if memory serves me three different versions were available), frickin Microsoft SQL Something-or-other, two trial-antiviruses and 2-3 other minor annoying applications. At least they didn’t include useless crapola such as dvd-recording software on a machine with no optical drive.

* My dear mother went for the blue color, depicted below. I’ve gotta say, it’s one of the prettier computers out there. First off, for a laptop it’s tiny which shoots the cute-factor way up high, but then it has this gorgeous blue paintjob on it. It’s quite dark, if the room is murky then it looks almost black but in lighter conditions it’s almost a lovely candy-blue.

This is the fanspeed reported by i8k on my recently inherited free second-hand laptop running Ubuntu. Notice anything?

The speed reported is… well… slightly exaggerated. 70k plus revs per minute? A jet engine powering a jumbojet doesn’t spin that fast. Methinks the speed is erroneously reported…

In a burst of caffeine-fueled energy, inspired by this article I wrote the below piece on how operating systems would be if they were cafés. I didn’t like the original article and here’s my take on the same concept. Of course it’s filled with my own opinions, caveat lector.

Microsoft Café: To enter you first have to agree to a EULA stating that Microsoft cannot be held responsible for anything that you do while inside café, nor can they in any way be expected to provide service or any kind of warranty. Also, simply to enter the café you have to pay various fees depending on where in the café you want to be seated. If you pay the most expensive price to be seated in the “Ultimate” room you’re promised to be pampered and receive free gifts, however none of these ever materialize, usually with some hollow excuses to the effect of claiming that shipping has been delayed. They recently redecorated and now heavily style the café with smoked and frosted glass, while previously it looked as if the interior was designed by Fisher-Price. When you ask what they serve the reply is “nothing” since you’re expected to purchase any beverages or snacks from other vendors and bring with you into the café. When you ask how the café is funded, or how it’s run you get the reply that the source of that information is only available to the management of the café. Every so often the chair randomly explodes under a customer for no apparent reason, and everyone simply accepts this as normal procedure.

Apple Café: The café is nice and shiny. Lots of metal and glass, and there’s neat little tricks that the chairs and tables can do. However, the entire café is run by one person, and is heavily decorated with pictures of him. The coffee and snacks are horribly expensive, even though the ingredients are virtually the same as any of the other cafés albeit a little prettier to look at. Most of the patrons are dressed in identical blue jeans and black turtlenecks, and will viciously attack any other newcomer who voices even the slightest criticism of the café. The chairs don’t explode quite as much as at the Microsoft Café but they will do so occasionally. A much more frequent occurrence is inexplicably being hit in the face by a vividly colored beach-ball. There’s also a very limited menu, and when you ask for something that isn’t on the menu the rude staff will look strangely at you and ask “why would you want that when we have everything you need right here”.

Linux Café: It isn’t so much one café as a bunch of different cafés working together with similar menus and similar furnishings but with many minor differences. Everything inside the café is free of charge, and you can bring the coffee with you home or give it to friends. The staff is regular people just like you who all take turns working at the various cafés, and you notice that many of them seem to work simultaneously at many of the different cafés within this franchise of sorts. You inquire as to how the café is run and without question you’re furnished with copies of every invoice, every order, every business deal the café (and others) has ever done. The interior of the cafés are easily re-arranged to your taste, and if you want to start your own café you are promptly provided with the necessary tools to do so. Also, the café is capable of not only traveling through time and space, but it can also convert into a church, a stable, a farmhouse or a dormitory if the need for such should arise. The menu in this café is incredibly vast and they serve approximately 20.000 different varieties of coffee, have about 30.000 types of biscuits, cookies and other delicacies as well as serving multiple types of food from all over the world. Everything free of charge, of course. You’re also encouraged to contribute your own type of coffee-drink or snack, either from scratch or adapting an already existing type of food.

Until the end and back again
Defiant to the last man
‘Til there’s nothing left
To fight against
No surrender