Aleksander Skjæveland Larsen » Blog

Make your own sun-dried tomatoes (in the oven)

ogrim — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:57:33 +0000

Slice cheap, tasteless tomatoes in half. Put them in the oven at 100° C for 5-7 hours, depending on the size. Leave the door slightly open so moisture can escape.

They now has a flavor!

Graffiti Markup Language

ogrim — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:10:02 +0000

Makup languages are fun.

GML = Graffiti Markup Language from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Via http://thepiratesdilemma.com/

Merry Christmas

ogrim — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:55:16 +0000

You can have it, please

Best commercial I have ever seen

ogrim — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:18:22 +0000

TVTracker: crazy idea

ogrim — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 09:54:59 +0000

Now I have the great idea that I should write TVTracker from scratch in C++, using some cross-platform framework for the user interface. When I first wrote the application, I never thought I would extend it to support different types of media. If I am going to add support for a DVD type, I pretty much have to rewrite everything, stupid me. Also, I could get support for Mac OS.

Internet dunces

ogrim — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:58:09 +0000

We all laugh in unison at the dunces of the internet. Usually they lack basic netiquette, and make themselves look terrible stupid. Like desperately trying to control a discussion by deleting fair comments on a blog or other websites, and disregard all reasonable critique. We can only facepalm when reading about musicians, artists and companies suing discussion forums, journalists and bloggers when they get bad press. Another kind of these dunces are those trying to use pictures they find when searching online.

If you find a picture you would like to use on another site, you are supposed to upload it to your own server or service. If you use the image directly you are hot-linking, which is bad practice. Every time someone browses your hot-linked site, you load the image directly from the source, hence stealing bandwidth. In many cases the source has to pay for the bandwidth used, so in some sense it is equal to stealing money. There are ways of protecting against this, but I have not bothered to set this up for two good reasons:

One: the bandwidth from my host is free
Two: it brings much joy and power

Joy and power? Yes, when people are hot-linking you can replace the original image with something horrible, giving you a direct impact on the thieving websites. Recently I discovered some sites hot-linking to the old Statoil logo featured in this post. I decided to replace the Statoil logo with a funny picture that would make no sense in the context. By doing this, I am having quite fun by slightly defacing another persons website. Also I am sending a signal that if I would, I could replace the image with something truly repulsive and disgusting.

Let us look at the bandits in question.

Bandit #1:

after my image replacement:

Bandit #2:

after my image replacement:

Bandit #3:

after my image replacement:

What are the facts?

Swedes are hot-linkers
Hot-linkers are bandits
Bandits are bad
Victims of hot-linking may receive great joy

What can we infer?

Swedes are bandits
Swedes cause great joy
Bandits cause great joy

Haha, contradictions.

TVTracker: note to self

ogrim — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:35:39 +0000

I get lost when I watch my MacGyver DVDs. I should add a DVD type to TVTracker, so I can count episodes on a disk (usually 5) and reset the count when I increment the disk number.

Dr. Zilog – Chip ‘Em All

ogrim — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:01:41 +0000

Some days ago, this excellent 8-bit cover album popped up over at 8bitcollective.com. Dr. Zilog is the man behind it. His handle, Dr. Zilog, is also one of the coolest ones ever, referring to the influential microprocessor Zilog Z80. It started out as a microprocessor for business-computers of the time. Later versions where used in handheld devices as the Nintendo Gameboy, and it is still being used for embedded systems. I really like that name, Zilog. It has that perfect sting to it.

Chip ‘Em All is a rich album. Several, as some would put it, conflicting genres are visited: pop, funk, heavy metal, death metal and more. It is also a lengthy affair, lasting 1 hour, 3 minutes and 38 seconds. Not bad for a free 8-bit release! You should give it a listen. If even just to check out the cover versions of the songs you know. They are very well done.

Grab it here
or use bittorrent

Most impressive track listing:

01. MST3K
02. Curse Of The Castle Dragon – Paul Gilbert
03. Blister In The Sun – Violent Femmes
04. If You Think Im Sexy – Rod Stewart
05. Unleashing The Bloodthirsty – Cannibal Corpse
06. The Duelists – Iron Maiden
07. Retrovertigo – Mr. Bungle
08. Kids – MGMT
09. Sex Machine – James Brown
10. Praise The Lord (Opium Of The Masses) – Dying Fetus
11. Heart of Glass – Blondie
12. Whiplash – Metallica
13. Boogie Nights – Heatwave
14. My Girls – Animal Collective
15. Merry Go Bye Bye – Mr. Bungle

Laptop overheating and fan noise

ogrim — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:00:41 +0000

My laptop have been somewhat dodgy the past 6 months. On occasions, it has overheated and died. The dying is caused by the CPU protecting itself from meltdown. In the old days there would be a burnt smell, and then you would swear. Even though I’m grateful the laptop doesn’t get bricked when overheated, I don’t really appreciate it dying on me. Sometimes it could die in a hot room, if it the CPU utilization was high enough. Not very handy.

Another problem have been the noise level it have produced, even by just browsing the web. It was making louder noise than my desktop PC, which got something like 8 fans in it. My laptop have 1. I had opened it earlier too look for dust, however it seemed perfectly clean. Yesterday, I figured I should try replacing the thermal paste. So I went ahead and opened it up again.

I stared dismantling the fan, with the easiest parts first: a piece of tape. Under the tape, I found this:

A thick layer of dust I had not noticed and blown out the first time I cleaned it. After removing the dust, I simply replaced the tape, closed the laptop and booted it up. No more loud noise, even under heavy load! The reason for the noise, was this compact layer of dust. The fan forced air trough the dust, resulting in a high pitched noise, and the fan working harder than it should. Now the air is flowing freely, and the bad sounds are gone. Happy times!

Major change, but you can’t see it

ogrim — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:54:49 +0000

I have upgraded to a regular install of Wordpress 2.8.5 from an old, useless version of Wordpress MU. The MU stands for multi-user, which I thought would save me a lot of time for hosting several blogs. Instead it led to frustration. Releases are lagging behind the official Wordpress project, so I could not benefit from new features when a new version got released. There was also no tool to export the database, as I could import it in the first place. This was later solved by exporting the Wordpress database in XML format.

Wordpress MU had stored all the files and pictures I had uploaded in a special folder, nested deep within the directory tree. URL rewriting made this show up as /files, although it was much deeper than that. By simply extracting the folder and putting it in the root directory, I matched the previous URL rewriting, thus retaining all functionality for images and files. I had put off this upgrade for a long time, in fear of breaking something. After some testing on a local web server, I was confident everything would work out. I’m glad it did!

The minor change, you can see. It is the sidebar featuring tags, latest comments and soon hyperlinks.