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.
Tags: tvtracker
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:
Tags: Music
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!
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.
New features:
-Day field for remembering when a new episode is released
-Highlighting episodes on release day
I removed the button for change max episode number in a season, but you can still modify it in the settings. Sadly, there is still no Mac OS support. I will look into building TVTracker with Java 1.5.x, which is available for Mac OS.
Tags: tvtracker
When I’m watching TV series and such, I tend to forget where I am. This problem can be solved by the primitive method, as illustrated below.
This worked for a while, but I kept forgetting to pull out a pen everytime I had to update it. Also the method failed when I ran out of (or didn’t find) Post-It notes. The perfect soution for the computer age is of course to use an application. I’m sure there are similar applications out there, but I wanted to make my own. I called it TVTracker.
You add series with the text fields, the long one for name and the short one for the max number of episodes in the season. As we know this varies from show to show, and season to season, so you can change this later in the settings. The data is stored as XML, so you can easily view and edit it, or use it for some other purpose.
TVTracker is written in Java, and is available for any platform Java support. This means if works for Windows, GNU/Linux, Mac OS and others. I have only tested it in Windows, but there should not be any trouble with other platforms.
Plans for further development:
-style it to make it more attractive
-make the “add fields” hideable, and make a File->Add option in the menu
-selection for if the app should promt for saving and loading, or just do it
Download TVTracker here: http://ogrim.no/files/TVTracker.jar
It can be smart to save TVTracker to its own folder, because the XML file will be created where the application is saved.
Update!
Camilla from the comments have had some trouble getting TVTracker to run on a Mac. This was hard for me to test, as I don’t have access to one. However, it now seems like the problem was due to a Java version mismatch. TVTracker is build with Java version 1.6.0_13, so you need at least version 1.6.x.x. To check this, you need to open a command line or terminal window and type “java -version”. If you have 1.4.x.x or 1.5.x.x you need to upgrade. Please head over here to do so: http://www.java.com/en/download/
Tags: tvtracker
Music made in the style of old video games is something I enjoy, along with several styles of music, something my Last.fm profile can prove. Scatman is an artist I enjoyed when I was much younger. I still think he is awesome. Or was, as he passed away in 1999. Anyhow, can there be something better than the sound of old video games performing the best Scatman song ever? I think not.
The Norwegian postal service is a state owned limited company (Wikipedia tells me) and our state is the main shareholder in the largest company in the oil and gass industry, Statoil. Or StatoilHydro as it now is called after the merge with Norsk Hydro. No worries, they will change their name back to Statoil again by 2010.
Anyhow, does anyone know how these companies come to be such copycats?
Posten
Posten changed their logo from this good, old fashioned post horn
to this new, trendy, thingamablob
that totally looks like a Pokéball
and the Death Star somehow combined
Statoil
Statoil on the other hand have gone from a modern and iconic design
to a rather boring, and simple font during the merge
and now they are going to use this
which totally looks like the mobile phone plan, djuice
and even more like the old fashioned Norwegian domestic crafts guild
Summary
A noteworthy observation is that Posten goes from old fashioned to modern, while Statoil seems to go from modern to old fashined. What gives?
The idea for this post came from this tweet from Rygh
Matilde asks me all the time how large the internet is. I keep telling her it’s not about the size, rather about traffic and people connected. Anyone with a connection to the internet, can easily expand the size by hosting their own webserver, or any other service. I am personally responsible for several gigabytes of the internets size. But that is not important. It is the amount of traffic my content is generating, and the number of people downloading it, that is interesting.
In order to put some internet sense in her, I am going to give her this book when I meet her later today. It is called “Hva er Internett?” and is written in Norwegian by internet guru Gisle Hannemyr. I read it myself, and it is very informative about the more technical parts of the internet, without being very technical at all. The book is for those who use the internet on a daily basis, but don’t know much about the finer details. It’s not going to teach you how to use email, it’s not that basic.
Another fun-fact is that speed also is irrelevant on the internet. Electrons move the same speed trough copper cables today, as they did back in 1995. There is difference in speed with different technologies, such as fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, but even that is not the most important stuff. Bandwith is the measurement used for how much data you can move trough a network, often measured in kilobits per second (kbps). We perceive this as speed, since higher bandwith allows you to download files faster. Still, it is not speed.
Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a lake. They both know morse code, and one of them has a flashlight. He is communicating with the other person, sending morse code with his flashlight. The other person is standing on the opposite side of the lake, looking at the flashlight in the middle of the night. Depending on his skills, he might be able to understand only a certain amount of morse code per second. This is not the speed of the communication, it is the bandwith. The morse is transmitted with light, which moves at a constant speed. What we might think of as speed, is realy bandwith, and is how much morse code that can be understood per second.
The next time someone brag about their fast internet connection, you can tell them that your own connection is just as fast. What may differ, is the bandwith.
Some friends at the university and I had this discussion the other day, regarding the proper means of opening a banana. As the internet somehow seemed to disagree with me, I had to make some disagreeing on the internets for myself. This is the video I made to prove my point:
The song is a work in progress, and everything is filmed by a crappy compact camera. I’ll post the song I used later, if there is demand. Now it is time to sleep.
Tags: instructions, Music, video
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