There are, out there (here), evenings that simply don’t look like they’ll ever end.
They just keep going on and on again, without bringing you anything if not bad news (from home in this case…) and a general sense of uneasiness and frustration.
You start thinking about going to bed very early for your standards, especially counting you’ve a day off tomorrow and so no real reason not to enjoy the night you so much love, but the hot weather and/or the noisy neighbors still going on with their barbecue dissuade you from the idea of crashing on your pillow, and so…
…and so you end up living this awkward evening, helping yourself with loud music in your ears (Tool in this case) and you try to lose yourself in the vast and placid sea that can be the Internet.
Then, exactly when you were thinking again of switching everything off, you stumble upon a piece of great art, in the form of a video, and you end up grinning like a fool exactly like the title of the post you got the link from was suggesting.
I’ve finally decided to publish my irssi IRC client theme. It’s kind of a coming out, I’ve been tuning this theme to my liking for the past 5-6 years, bits by bits, slowly adjusting to what I prefer.
I really hope someone would find this interesting and appealing as his/her own theme. I’ve sent an email to the irssi team in order for it to be added on the main gallery of the irssi.org website, which would be quite c00l for an irssi lover as I am.
Any eventual feedback is of course very welcome.
The file is here: aka.theme. Just put it in .irssi/ and load it by issuing the command /set theme aka in Irssi.
Enjoy! ;)
Ok, I’m a magazine addicted, we all know that.
Basically I’m able to jump a full meal if I’m out, starving but with just 5£ left and a magazine I like out with the new monthly issue still to be bought: consider it incredible, but I’ll avoid buying a sandwich and I’ll enter WHSmith instead :p
I read a lot of things in various formats: blogs, websites, books, magazines, webzines, fanzines, newsgroups, forums… whatever there’s around with words on/in it, it’s something I like to take a peak at, but while half of the things listed before come free as in beer, books and magazines are expenses that actually have an impact on my daily life. Not a huge one, but I actually restrain myself from visiting amazon too often (at my looking too long and never shortening wishlist makes me sad :p) and I usually cross the street when I come across a Waterstone shop or a WHSmith one… but it’s not always something I can resist. And when this happens, my bank account is not happy!
Anyway, my magazine addiction has a new item to list now. In addition to Scientific American, NewScientist, Airliner World and Prospect Magazine I’ve (finally) given up and I started buying Wired. My geek side is in giggling and enjoying every single word, might as well become my favourite reading of all the time.
The problem is: will I ever be able to get more geekier that I am now? ;)
Let’s try it, and if it works, is pure geek-happiness!
I’m playing with this, and it appears to do what it is supposed to, definitely
something that’s going to change completly my way of blogging on Wordpress.
It’s a very simple & nice script to post to a Wordpress blog using VIM which happens to be my
favourite text editor.
So far so good… I’m leaving in less than 2 hours for a 8 days trip to Japan and India (work, of course!) so I will test (and eventually post something more about this) when I’ll be back next Monday.
While an awulf lot of things are changing all around me, and in my life (most of them in a nice way, indeed) a lot of the good old habits are just as true and real as they used to be.
Having moved to London, all I have with me right now is the strictly necessary to survive, so even if in my mind the equation wasn’t exactly like that, at the time I packed my bags apparently the final decision was to give priority to clothes against books ad DVDs. Of course, that doesn’t mean at all my reader (or watcher) side is sleeping or dead, quite the contrary. Understanding the inevitable fact that a monthly rent is a fixed expense that can definitely be quite heavy on someone’s bank account, doesn’t mean that you’ll stop yourself buying books&DVDs neither, especially when you have new empty shelves in your room ;)
This to say, buy me books!
Anyway, being 5:40 in the night I quite lost myself, but all the point of this was to introduce a useful customization for all you Opera users out there.
Adding something like this:
[Search Engine 47]
Name=Amazon.co.uk ISBN
Verbtext=0
URL=http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/%s
Query=
Key=ai
Is post=0
Has endseparator=0
Encoding=iso-8859-1
Search Type=0
Position=-1
Nameid=0
Deleted=0
to your search.ini (for me located in /home/curson/.opera/search.ini) or by editing directly the new search from your Tools > Preference > Search Opera menu, you’ll be able to search for a book on Amazon.co.uk (I’m quite sure it works in a pretty similar way for any other International Amazon website) using it’s ISBN number. Quite useful if you want to be sure you’re looking at a particular edition, or if you don’t want to end up buying something with a similar name but completly different from what you’re looking for.
A very similar search can be created to just look for a title or author (or just about everything…) by using http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/&keywords=%s&index=blended this code as the URL/address field. Note that there %s is the search variable you’re going to type in Opera address bar after the relative Search Key (for the ISBN example above, that Search Key was ai, but you can decide whatever you like as long as unique among your other customized searches).
That’s it, I’m still sleepless, but with a more efficient Opera browser at my disposal to spend my sleepless nights looking for effective way to spend my money :)
I’ve been struggling quite a lot lately with my beloved Opera browser and flash video (read: YouTube and so on).
Even if the configuration of the flash player/plugin on my Gentoo looked perfectly working (Firefox was playing flash video flawlessly…), I was unable to enjoy them with Opera, which is my main browser.
Well, looking at the fact that I am in Tokyo enjoying all the pressure of my JAL training, I didn’t actually looked deeply into the problem trying to find a solution, until this afternoon, when straight back from the training center I don’t know why, but I found unbearably annoying to have to open another browser just to watch a video… my geek side took the command and a quick jump into Gentoo’s Forum gave me all I needed to solve the problem (refer here for the relevant post!).
Apparently, was just a matter of re-linking the plugin:
plus changing the /opt/netscape plugin path in Opera Preferences Downloads to the /opt/opera path (2 Mime types) works. In a new setup Opera takes the right path automatically, when the symlinks are made first. So only putting these 2 symlinks in the ebuild would be an (ugly) temporary fix…
Needless to say, now everything is working!
I’m missing following the OpenSource community (I really don’t have time even to keep the pace with all the news around…), but it’s good to see it’s still helpful as ever! ;)
Finally, they got me!
Who? The Finnish guy up there at Nokia.
Yes, probably you remember not so long ago I bought a Samsung SGH-Z560, so what’s up I already got a new mobile phone? Actually, that has been one of my worts buy ever.
Not for the product in itself, it’s a fantastic mobile, technically perfect and outstanding fast and clean, but the main problem was: the software.
Do you ever find yourself simply not able to adapt to a software way of thinking? Just like using a GNU/Linux distribution and being unable to fit to it, to find yourself finally comfortable enough to say: “I’m ok!”. That was what happened to me and the Samsung.
I needed to find a way to switch to another product, something that fitted me more than that.
Looking at the fact I’ve been able to test a Nokia N70 before, I decided to go (finally) for a Nokia product, and in particular I decided to buy a N73. Well, let me say: oh my gosh!. Outstanding.
I’m playing with it since Friday evening, and I must say I’m really impressed and already finding myself very comfortable with it. Of course I still need to experiment with all its incredible number of functions, and above all I need to acquaint myself with the Symbian S60 operative system which seems to have quite a lot of possibilities (most of them hidden and to be discovered ^-^).
Right now, I’m an happy mobile-user again… the Nokia side has finally caught me :)
I love manga, as everyone already knows.
I am a geek, as everyone already knows.
I love to name things I own, as probably almost everyone already knows.
That’s why Killy is born!
Killy (name derived from the amazing character of the more than just fantastic BLAME! manga series by Tsutomu Nihei) is nothing less than my new cell-phone, a shiny new HSDPA clamshell phone by Samsung: the SGH-Z560.
By now, after playing around with it since about 6-7 days I’m quite satisfied by it, with two only remarks: one about the (well-known) not-so-long battery life (could have definitely been longer…) and the second one with the low styling options it has for themes and character display (way too bigger for my tastes). Both issues are anyway quite bearable without any huge problem, and while using 3G and HSDPA network service is really fast.
And I mean FAST. That’s what is made for… after all.
Well, my first toughts were about trying the 2.0MP camera, one of the main feature I bought it for, to see how pictures would have looked on it. For what I’ve seen so far, it deals perfectly with outside scenery (see above, another here) while it suffers bad from low light scenery (like interiors) compensating with quite a lot of blurring noise.
In all those three cases, the 1600×1200 version (higher resolution possible, even if it seems that Flickr is resizing them to 1024×768, probably because I have a free account) shows huge disturbing sings of low quality, while when seeing the pictures at lower resolution everything seems more than just “lookable” and the results are pretty what I was expecting.
Perfect from my needs for my point-and-shot behaviour.
Soon (time permitting) will follow a brief HOW-TO about how to connect a SGH-Z560 with a Gentoo driven computer (belial in my case, my Thinkpad x60s) via Bluetooth. It’s easy, but even for future personal reference, I’d like to sum things up! :)
Don’t know how many of you out there are webcomics readers like me, but since I’m used to follow quite a large number of them, I desperately love a thing like dailystrip, that strips for me a list of links to favourites comics on a local HTML page I point my browser to each day (the command for downloading/creating the page runs from cron).
Since the project seems to be quite unmaintained, the .def list of all strips and webcomics is starting to get outdated, and it’s starting to miss some new comics that are spawning out there.
Today I found myself lacking a proper strip entry for Cyanide and Happiness, that since today I happened to be reading by RSS feed.
I opened a terminal, I wrote down a couple of lines, and here it comes working and ready to be shared with the world (but I’m sure the world is actually quite un-interested in it… anyway) an addition to my .def file for this particular comic:
strip explosm
name Cyanide and Happyness
homepage http://www.explosm.net/comics
type search
searchpattern <img .+?src=”(http://www.explosm.net/db/files/Comics/.+?/.+?png)”
provides latest
end
It seems to work flawlessly, any feedback on it is well accepted :)
I find myself quite comfortable using fluxbox, my one and only WM since I started messing around with GNU/Linux almost 5 years ago, but I recently stuble upon some comments about this very minimal (yet apparently incredibly powerful) (d)WM (where “d” stands for dynamic). It’s wmii.
I am curious and geek enough for being always looking for new things to experiment with, and I haven’t lost the occasion! It’s actually (right now) running on my Belial, and I must confess I’m quite impressed by its flexibility and it’s power. Seems like it’s 100% customizable, and only the status bar scriptable in bash is something that could conquer me forever.
I configured it in a very simple way from now (I’m just playing with it since yesterday evening…), but the possibilities seem quite huge, and I’ll be sure to explore it in the proper way.
But still, I think I won’t leave Fluxbox. Not now.
Why?
Essentially for two great reason:
wmii lacks something that’s actually quite essential for me under fluxbox: the ability to recognize a window and remember its workspace (tag in wmii) and main settings (dimensions, position, whatever…),
fluxbox has been my friend for a long time, while wmii needs to be studied more, I need to do an usability study on it.
Right now I will use Belial as a test bed for getting acquainted with wmii and I will see what is going to come out of my use of it. It seems my kind of cake, but I really need to get past the “new-toy” thing to see if it can suite me.
[In the meanwhile, here are the two scripts I’m using in my wmii-3/status to monitor the battery status and to fetch some WiFi infomation. The first is not from me, the second indeed is.]
Gentoo 2006.1 installed on Haldir. - stop -
Two hours and half to emerge x11-base/xorg-x11. - stop -
After a day of emerging, configuring and messing around: Haldir is 1/2 up & running and booting in only 15 seconds. - stop -
Outstanding!- stop -
More news will follow.- stop -
