Pages. I missed them!

So Blogger wasn’t good enough. Fortunately images were saved on Google’s Picasa service, so I won’y have to re-upload them. I doubt I would have moved again had I needed to do that.

Anyway, WordPress it is.

KDE and Fedora

Let me start of by saying no, I did not enjoy either.

Of the two however, KDE was the better. I decided to give Kubuntu a spin again. It lasted for a bit over a week this time, and it wasn’t bad. A bit of a resource hog, but nothing out of proportions. It just wasn’t home Gnome. If you haven’t got a favorite, or even tried Linux then give KDE a try.

Fedora then. Might be good, but not my cup of tea. At least not yesterday. I was not in the mood for struggling with audio and video drivers as well as every codec imaginable with a remotely proprietary smell to it. I respect the Fedora Project’s wish to stay clear of non-GPL software, but could you please aim for somewhere in between free and usable?

So back to Ubuntu and Gnome. I need to learn to not fix what isn’t broken…

Gojira

When you hear the words “supporting band” you would never think one of them would completely steal the whole show. That was, however, the case with Gojira. They supported In Flames in Oslo on October 31. and gave them a good run for their money. Out-ran even.

Gojira play a heavy kind of progressive metal. (The term progressive metal comes a bit short these days I feel. There is little in common between Dream Theater, Pain of Salvation, Opeth and Gojira other than the core progressive elements of odd time signatures and such.) They have a heavy and drum/rhythm-centered sound with a scream-like vocal style that, when mixed with the occasional beautiful melody, creates a very aggressive, but still very enjoyable sound-scape.

The band has released four albums, two of which I’ve listened thoroughly to. The albums From Mars to Sirius and The Way of All Flesh are good candidates to Album of the Year in my book.

The first song in the YouTube playlist is from the latter of the mentioned albums and is called Vacuity. It is one of the least melodic of their songs, but the in-your-face riffs makes it one of my favorites from the album.

The next is To Sirius from From Mars to Sirius. An edit, so give the original a listen. It is very heavy as well, but with some more melodic sections.

After To Sirius comes The Heaviest Matter of the Universe. Need I say more?

Following is Remembrance from the album The Link. It is more fast-paced and straight-forward than the others, but still a listen-worthy song.

The last song is one of my favorites from the band. There isn’t a video for it, but I found it as a listen-rather-than-watch “video”. The final section is beyond words. Be sure to give it a listen no matter how unimpressed you might be (Can you even be unimpressed?).

Photo by Jarkko Iso-Heiko, licensed under Creative Commons by-sa License

A Change of Scenery

Now this is change.

With the death of Verbalt Oppkast (a small forum I hosted) I lost the only reason to keep the one.com domain (sidenmin.net). Instead of keeping it alive I migrated from WordPress to Blogger, this mainly because I’m a Googleholic.

It wasn’t easy! I searched for yonks for a simple way of getting all my posts and images with me. I ended up using this tool here. It succeeded in getting the posts across, but the images in the posts were still missing (or rather the links still pointed to the images on my previous server). This was a problem I was prepared for. There is only one out. Upload the images to Blogger, one by one, and then fix all the posts. I didn’t bother fixing every post, so some lack images that were there before, and some posts are gone entirely.

Anyway, I’m blogging free, and so could you be!

As a side-note: I would have faced the same problems with WordPress.com

Tragic Fail

It’s not always failblog.org manages to get me laughing, but this one was just wonderfully tragic:

see more pwn and owned pictures

Bury yourself in the archives for a laugh or ten.

Asus Eee and a File Server

So yeah, I ordered an Asus Eee 900 today. It was dirt cheap and I still miss my laptop (R.I.P.). I’m going to use it for school as well as just a little toy, but storage will be an issue since it only has 16GB of SSD-space.

So I turned my desktop computer into a password protected file-server. You know, because I can. Now my music, documents, pictures and videos are available to me anywhere in the world (Not any sensitive stuff, obviously. That would be stupid.)

If you have Ubuntu/Linux as if you do! you can follow these tutorials and get going as well. It might take a while, but if you follow the steps it shouldn’t be too difficult.

1. Install the server software
Just follow the instructions in order and you should be OK.

2. Now you have installed Apache 2 and some other things. In order to access your folders (Music and such) you need to place a shortcut to the folder in /var/www. Remember to make sure that the files can be accessed by all users. NEEDLESS TO SAY, YOU MOST DEFFINITELY SHOULD NOT PLACE ANYTHING REMOTELY PRIVATE AND/OR SENSITIVE IN ANY FOLDER YOU MAKE PUBLIC! You want to password protect the file-server. In order to do that you need to do a few things:

• Edit /etc/apache2/sites-available/default. Specifically, change the line(s) AllowOverride None to AllowOverride AuthConfig
• Create two files called .htaccess and .htpasswd respectively, and put .htaccess in /var/www and .htpasswd in /etc/apache2.
• Go to this site and enter your desired username and a password. This should be something unique and something that’s hard to guess. In the second box ( 2) ) you write /etc/apache2/.htpasswd. Leave the third box empty.
• Paste the result in the repective files. Make sure that both files can be read by anyone, but written only by you (root/user)!

3. Now you need to make the Apache 2 server available from the internet. Follow this tutorial.

And that should be just about it.

A Historic Moment

So it’s official. The US has made history and the whole world breathes a sigh of relief as McCain and, more importantly, Palin were denied the Oval Office. John McCain gained my full respect with his speech where he accepted defeat though. He shows that he is a man of honor.

The man in the spotlight, however, is without doubt Barack Obama. His speech in Chicago (Pt. 1 Pt. 2) was inspiring and touching, even for a non-American. You can’t help being mesmerized by his words, standing there saying “yes we can”.

Let us hope he can.

Eighteen, drivers license and snow

I turned eighteen on the 24th. Yay for me! I also got my drivers license this week. More yay for me! But alas: no car and no money for one either. I guess I’ll just grab the family car whenever it’s available.

Anyway, the first snowfall of the autumn hit this morning. It will most definitely not stay for long. Thank you, Global-Warming-man! It still managed to get me half frozen though. I miss summer already.

And again we make the news

Call me a digital hippie, but I am all for open standards and open source. It seems that at least thirteen Norwegians feel the same way.

We made the news in Ars again. This time over the ongoing OOXML-debate. In short; OOXML is a proprietary Microsoft file format up for standardization in ISO (International Organization for Standardization). Many, including these thirteen and myself, feel that a proprietary file format is unworthy as an international standard. There is an open, free (as in freedom) and technologically better alternative (ODF), yet the committee representing Norway (Standard Norge) came to the conclusion that OOXML would win our vote, against the recommendations from the techs.

One can only wonder why. It r€a££y mak€$ you think, do€$n’t it?

Further reading:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/01/ISO-adopts-OOXML-format-as-international-standard_1.html

Them Apples

It’s not often Norway makes the headlines, even less often technology headlines, but Ars Technica published an article about how the Norwegian Consumers Council is giving Apple a much deserved headache.

The thing is DRM. Always DRM. Music bought from the Itunes Store can only be played either via Itunes or via the Ipod, something that isn’t really fair play. This gave the Norwegian government a taste of sour apples in their mouth and it is now threatening Apple with large fines (by Norwegian standards) if they do not ripen straighten themselves up.

Who would have thought? Norway, of all countries.

The viking blood is not all spent I reckon!