Being the thoughts and writings of one Gustaf Erikson; father, homeowner, technologist.
- Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics — Mechanics and Scheme — dream date?. Tags: book mechanics reference scheme science.
- Andrew Ridgeley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia — whatever became of him? Wikipedia knows. Tags: celebrity music popular-culture where-are-they-now.
- Wired 14.01: How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet Tags: online-marketing read-later work.
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DaveW:
The biggest difficulty has been importing OPML subscription lists because there’s been some “drift” from the initial format.
Fancy that…
James nails it on the head. ¶
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- Cool Tool: TerraLUX LED Replacement Bulb — wow. Tags: gadgets led tools.
- LG DR7500 - Pricerunner — recordable, divx-support. Tags: dvd-r gadgets reference.
- Maintainable Programmers [@lesscode.org] — good post. Tags: devel java perl php programming.
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I recently had to edit a bunch of mp3s. I found the following Perl modules helpful.
- mp3cut. Contains a script
mp3cat that concatenates mp3 files. Very simple to use.
- MP3::Tag. For all your mp3 tagging needs. Contains a script
mp3info2 that can read and update tags.
These modules work fine under Cygwin running in Windows.
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Engadget
reports
that Sony may be launching an e-ink reader like the infamous
Librie (known primarily for its
disastrous ebook selling
scheme).
An e-book reader needs to have the following characteristics:
- light weight
- great battery life
- good screen
- access to many different file formats
Even though I suspect lots of publishers and authors are quaking in
their boots at the prospect of an iPod for books, I still think that
it would be a win. Sure, some people would make it a point to download
scanned copies of books, but the legitimate usages outweigh them. Need
to read a big document from work? Put it in the e-book reader. Same
goes for long emails and web articles. How about books that are legal
and open, like
Baen’s? They sure are
easier to read in an e-book reader than on a screen.
If you combine the reader with a UMTS chip and a web browser, that’s
even better (but it would cut into battery life).
The point is, if the platform is open, markets will arise to address user’s needs. Cripple the product with DRM, and the only thing people will remember about you is your stupidity. (Yes Sony, I’m talking about you…)
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- Boing Boing: Mr Jalopy’s love/hate relationship with the Complete New Yorker — good rant about the st00pid copy protection stuff. Tags: drm new-yorker.
- mp3cat - concatenate MP3 files - search.cpan.org — some Perl utils for cutting and merging mp3 files. Tags: mp3 perl unix unix-tools.
- MP3::Tag - Module for reading tags of MP3 audio files — Perl module for handling id3 tags. Tags: id3 module mp3 perl tags.
- The Best Digital Cameras — Greenspun on digicams. Tags: camera comparison photo.
- Digital SLR cameras: Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D70s — A review. Tags: camera comparison photo review.
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Lately Engadget’s feed in Bloglines has had a lot of duplicates. I’m sure this is due to the feed ads they’re using, they seem to screw up the “modified” flag of the entry somehow.
I haven’t noticed anyone else complain, however. Is the problem with Bloglines or with Engadget?
Update 2005-12-30: The problem is that Engadget (or Weblogs, Inc) have started to publish the same entries under different URLs. The problem is not confined to Bloglines, either. Below is a screenshot from SharpReader:
I really hope that someone can fix this, the feed is almost unusable as it is.
Rui sees the same problem.
Updated on Friday, 2005-12-30.
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A re-read.
The first Reynolds novel I read, but not the best. The parts on the generation starship are well-written though, but the steampunk ambience in Chasm City isn’t as interesting.
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- Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers — via Jeff. Tags: devel software technology work.
- Wall Street Programmer � The Wall Street Programming Environment — this would be funny if it wasn’t true. Tags: humour programming work.
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I grabbed a bunch of audio books in mp3 format but was shocked, shocked I say! when the files weren’t bookmarkable (i.e. they didn’t remember where I stopped listening) and worse, the files were included in the shuffle. When you have 1,388 files, each a minute long, that kinda sucks.
I pecked around in iTunes a bit and saw that there was a setting in the Info->Options panel for a track that included the checkmarks
- Remember playback position
- Skip when shuffling
Perfectomento! BUT… you can only set these options one file at a time. Damn you Apple! Damn you to hell!!
(If you don’t use AppleScript. Which I don’t. Because I don’t have a Mac.)
I found 2 links on Google which offer some alternatives. The reason for this post is essentially that del.icio.us is down ATM and I need somewhere to post these:
- Shuffle, damn you! Shuffle!
- Turning MP3 audiobooks into iPod audiobooks
Update 2005-12-29: basically there are two ways of handling this.
- Convert to AAC format and rename
I tried this variant, but the resulting files were much larger than the files in mp3 format. I guess you can get around this by playing with the converting options, but I suspect they only apply to importing from CDs (see the second link above).
- Merge the mp3 files and set the appropriate settings manually.
I went with this variant. A quick search of CPAN resulted in a bunch of utilities I could use. I merged the tiny files into chapters, then added what ID3v2 tags I could. The rest were added in iTunes, along with the required playback and shuffle options.
I will try to find out more about ID3v2 tag handling later, so as to automate this even more.
Updated on Thursday, 2005-12-29.
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We went to see The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on Christmas
Day (big movie-going day in Sweden). I was impressed. The movie
captured the feel of the book very well (at least as far as I
remember, I haven’t read them for at least a decade), and the visual
style was very near the illustrations I remember.
A co-worker complained that the look was too plasticky, at least
compared to the Lord of the Rings movies, filmed near the same
location, but I felt it didn’t detract from the movie at all. The tone
of the novel is far from Tolkien’s darkness and — dare I say it? —
grittiness.
Tilda Swinton was brilliant as the White Witch, with just the right
combination of icy beauty and pure evil.
I know about the Christian content of course (and am fine with it),
but what I found impressive was that the allegory was very
“grown-up”. It wasn’t didactic at all. If you want to explain it to a
kid, you’d have to explicitly make the connection between Aslan and
Jesus Christ — it isn’t written in the movie (or the book). This
means that the whole point of allegories is exposed, which can’t be
bad at all. After all, if the Narnia books are allegories, can’t the
Bible be it too?
All in all a very entertaining movie. And props to the producers for
using British accents except for the evil wolves (and maybe Aslan — I
can’t recall where his accent was from. Not Alabama, in any case.)
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- epost-anmälan för utebliven sophämtning Tags: house service.
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I got the Complete New Yorker for Christmas from my parents. That’s eight DVDs filled with every issue ever published since 1925. Guess I won’t have to worry about getting books anytime soon.
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… and a happy New Year.
God jul och gott nytt år!
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The fourth book in the Malazan series.
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- Two straw men walk into the Foo Bar… — Java vs. Ruby. Tags: devel java read-later scripting.
- “The City ABC Blew Up” - 1983 — Lawrence, KS decimated by nuclear war. For Matt. Tags: cold-war culture movies.
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- Coding Horror: Headphone Snobbery — info about a light-weight DAC. Tags: audio gadgets.
- Client vs. Developer Wars — e-book about web development. Tags: devel ebook web.
- Devolution: Why intelligent design isn’t — NY article about ID. Tags: evolution read-later science.
- mymarkup.net: Koll på Lahaye : december 20, 2005 — to read later. Tags: fundamentalism left-behind read-later.
- adventurelounge.com - Early Aircraft Design Tags: read-later.
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DaveW:
Congratulations, you made it to the shortest day of the year. They all get longer from this point on.
Thank ghod. ¶
Schneier: The Security Threat of Unchecked Presidential Power. Scary. ¶
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- Anders F Rönnblom, Det är inte snön som faller
- Adolphson & Falk, Mer jul
- Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues, Fairytale of New York
- Weird Al Yankovic, The Night Santa Went Crazy
Note: I thought I had a list of five songs,
but it turned out I didn’t.
Posted at 13:04,
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- Users Overlook XP’s Non-Admin Security — what’s the point of using Windows fine-grained security model when the user is “root” anyway?. Tags: security windows.
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Finally some progress with the kitchen. Last weekend I put up the
wallpaper, and today I started on the last 2 cabinets. I’ve build the
plinth and will assemble the cabinets tomorrow.
Issues so far are with the wiring to the stove. I have no idea on how
the big thick 3-phase cable will be able to fit behind the cabinets. I
also don’t know how the stove top itself will be integrated in the
cabinets, which are 2 x 120 drawer cabinets.
Another thing will be the problematic corner. I’m afraid I will still
have a big unsightly hole in the join between the stainless steel
workbench/sink and the workbench with the stove.
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- Gmail Mobile — contains info on how to login and FAQ. Tags: email gmail mobile.
- jmIrc - Java mobile IRC-client (J2ME) Tags: irc java mobile software.
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I was fed up with mixing native ISO-8859-1 content (generated by me) with external content (from del.icio.us etc.) containing UTF-8. So I used this script to translate all the ISO characters into UTF-8.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the content in the future to see if anything slips through.
Also, this post is composed in vi. Because anything is better than nano.
Posted at 22:43,
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- Universal Time — all you ever wanted to know about Universal Time. Tags: standards time.
- Dupont’s Self-Charging Smoke Alarm - Engadget - www.engadget.com — hope to see this over here soon!. Tags: design safety smoke-alarm.
- Nokia N90 — AAS review. Will reply in my copious free blogging time. Tags: nokia phone photo review.
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The second part of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series.
Posted at 21:22,
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McD:
I hang on every morsel of humanity that is Dave Winer… both audio
and text. It’s a disease, I think… like getting addicted to
watching car wreaks or reading biographies of serial killers… you
just can’t quite figure out what God is up to with Dave Winer. All
that influence and such recklessness and generosity… A living
conundrum.
This is so like me it’s scary. ¶
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- Mobile Web Design ~ The Series ~ Authentic Boredom Tags: blogs css design howto mobile resource tutorial xhtml.
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- England
- Paraguay
- Trinidad and Tobago
- Sweden
Phew, this’ll be a tough one. Sweden’s first game is 10 June.
Posted at 22:37,
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I grabbed an assortment of seasonal ales at [Systemet] today. I’ll be
trying them out during the week, hoping that they’ll be around in two
weeks.
- Shepherd Neame Christmas Ale 11347 — in its own cardboard package, natch
- St. Peter’s Winter Ale 11306
- Gouden Carolus Christmas 11371— this was really tasty. Dark and strong
- Anchor Brewing Co’s Christmas Ale 11375 — this wasn’t so good, I’m skipping it
Update 2005-12-13: added links, opinion on the Gouden.
Updated on Tuesday, 2005-12-13.
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- Rory Blyth - Excel as a database — oldie but goldie. Tags: comics excel humor humour microsoft software work.
- AllAboutSymbian: PC Suite hits 6.7 — must download. Tags: nokia series60 software sync.
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Rui posts some tips on how to manage your email more effectively with Outlook.
We’ve been using some of those techniques with the support box. I use
“reply to all” for all mails, so we always get a copy of the reply in
the same conversation. As we are two working with this, it’s a godsend
to have a complete record of the conversation around the issue.
We use the nifty coloured flags to manage workflow. My issues are
orange, my coworker’s are blue, issues awaiting answers are purple,
escalated issues are green etc. This works pretty well, as you can
easily spot issues that haven’t been addressed yet.
We have 2 archives, one based on the year’s quarter, and one where we
put all escalated issues. Having mails sorted by conversation makes it
easy to archive.
However, Rui’s tip about using a smart mailbox to combine your inbox
and Sent items makes a lot of sense. It addresses the shortcomings of
having to do a reply to yourself all the time.
We’ve worked around the limitations of Outlook’s default filtering by writing a little perl skript that counts the number of issues and alerts us if they are too old.
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This book rests on a central premise, that an alternate 1959 Earth has
been preserved like a fly in amber by some all-powerful aliens. In the
far future, two warring factions of humanity stumble upon it and use
the artifacts there to complement the forgotten history of the
Nanocaust.
Reynolds skilfully weaves together “hard” S-F with a Simenon-like
detective story. But if you ignore the technical mastery and the
skillful plotting, the story is basically absurd. But it’s an
enjoyable read nonetheless. I stayed up until one in the morning yesterday to finish it.
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- e-Upplysning när du behöver göra en kreditupplysning. — cheap credit check for companies and persons in Sweden. Tags: credit-check.
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- The Bynk Zone: Why I hate haxies — Via Guber. Tags: rant read-later support.
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- decodeunicode.org . Unicode Blocks . Miscellaneous Technical — awesome. Via Matt. Tags: brower reference unicode.
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This is a re-read.
It’s hard to describe what’s so good with Erikson’s writing and
universe. Perhaps it’s the gnarly texture of the world,the
pervasiveness of magic accessible to most people, the sweat, the
blood, the many-layered mythologies…
I was lucky to get Deadhouse Gates and House of Chains at the
library, I’ll be re-reading them as soon as I finish with Century
Rain.
Update 2006-06-12: re-read it again.
Updated on Monday, 2006-06-12.
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- Tim Tom — French animated short. Via Ned . Tags: animation film french.
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He thought he was the King of America
But it was just a boulevard of broken dreams
A trick they do with mirrors and with chemicals
The words of love in whispers
And the axe of love in screams
I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this lovin’ feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
I was a fine idea at the time
Now I’m a brilliant mistake
— Elvis Costello
This article says that the album King of America made the top 50 list of 2005. WTF ? I have that album as an LP.
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- Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia — Via Jeff. Tags: doctorow essay metadata programming rant semantic syndication web.
- 0xDECAFBAD: Feedrolls in XOXO from OPML via XSLT and URL-line Magic — Must remake my fugly regexp script. XSLT is the way to go!. Tags: blogroll feedroll hacks opml xml xoxo xslt.
- Ewan: Whatâs In My Gadget Bag, 2005 edition — Interesting. Ewan is the only person now alive still using MiniDiscs.. Tags: gadgets mobile mobitopians stuff.
- TEI: Yesterday’s information tomorrow — serious stuff. Tags: encoding languages linguistics metadata standard tei text xml.
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The folköl version of Bishops Finger isn’t half bad. ¶
Thanks to “knaverlisa” over at TBP for posting Maritza Horn’s Morgon i Georgia. ¶
I really need a light by the bed. ¶
Kada Jansen, hot babe. ¶
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The Guardian lists the top 20 geek novels. I’ve read all four:
- Watchmen — Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
- Stranger in a Strange Land — Robert Heinlein
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy — Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
- Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham
Can’t say I’ve read all of Brave New World either.
Of the rest, I find it nice to see Bank’s Consider Phlebas on the
list, although of course Use of Weapons is much better.
Posted at 21:34,
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I’ve long wanted to automatically add a <acronym
title="explanation">TLA</acronym> to all the TLA ’s and FLA ’s in my
posts. And I don’t want to do it by hand, not when I use Markdown for
everything else.
I asked around on the Blosxom list and got pointers to two existing
plugins, Autolink
by Fletcher T. Penney, and Automatic
LuckyGoogle
by Todd Larason. I found
Fletcher’s code easier to grok, being more or less what I started
hacking myself before I got bogged down in the plugin internals of
blosxom… So I copy-pasted some stuff and now I can type XSLT and get a cool dotted underline and a tooltip.
One small step for me, an even tinier step for the semantic web.
Update 2006-03-02: you can get the plugin here.
Updated on Thursday, 2006-03-02.
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- IHT: Online community takes Sweden by storm Tags: community lunarstorm read-later social sweden.
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