geeky

Anything technology related.

Fucktronics

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It’s been over 5 weeks and my iPod still hasn’t returned. I called for the third time yesterday and finally found out that Apple’s “repair policy” (the headphone jack is a bit faulty, but otherwise works fine) is to simply replace the entire iPod without transferring the data, as that’s “not under warranty”. Cunts. It’s not so bad, as I like starting fresh, but the main annoyance is that Apple still hasn’t sent the replacement one to the repair service.

To make it more annoying, I spilt beer on my keyboard a few days ago and thought I’d buggered it up completely. If I’d only waited longer before I pulled the machine apart I probably wouldn’t have damaged my E key, which now is a bit sticky and temperamental. Although, it was an informative lesson in laptop deconstruction.

Actually, I would have done the same with my iPod if I’d had a replacement headphone connector. There are videos online showing how to do it in under 5 minutes. :(

Some good news in the world of geek interests: I upgraded to WordPress 2.5. So far, so good. I also tried out the new Firefox 3 Beta 5. It didn’t seem to different to use, from a browsing sense, but I’m sure it’s juicy and fun in many other as-yet-unused-by-me aspects.

We have some new country-girl Estonians volunteering here now, from Raapina. Apparently it’s tiny. Awesome. There’s another young one starting on the weekend, too. It’s nice to get some more locals around.

More hostel news: we’re expanding into Müürivahe street for summer. Looks like Tim is going to be running it. It should be up and running by the end of the month. It’s exciting, but it also means we’re gonna have to build more fucking beds. It also means I’m going to have to set up more fucking PCs and wireless networks, I’m sure.

My cooking isn’t really progressing. I have been experimenting here and there, but not having my own kitchen and only usually having 1 person to cook for is holding me back, I think. The trouble is that I don’t want to cook for a big group, yet. I probably should just bite the bullet.

I did make a funny creamy chicken pasta with garlic sauce. Wasn’t bad. I tried baking bananas filled with chocolate but it didn’t work. I tried twice, anyway.

By the way, I’m trying to take a few weeks off playing foosball. I’ve lost my edge.

That is all.

P.S. Marika.

Sleepy but searching

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It’s 4:15 AM and I’ve been looking for new electronic (as always) music for the past four hours. It’s ok, though, because I had a 4 hour nap before I started. I think it was four hours.

Anyway. So far so… potentially good? I’ve only been hearing samples so far, but soon I should have some tracks to check out properly. Jolly good. I needed to add some stuff to my iPod, anyway.

Unfortunately I’m a real anal prick when it comes to organising my iPod. Really, really anal. I can’t help it. I can’t stand seeing lower case names and unformatted ID3 tags. There’s just something criminal about it. I think Media Monkey might make it a bit easier, but I’m yet to try it properly. I do like it, however, as a general media player. It’s like a more power-user-friendly version of iTunes (not that I like iTunes that much, it’s just convenient).

The last couple of weeks have been pretty standard. I made it back down to Tartu for the first time in months, then got rather sick for the whole time I was there. Jolly good. It wasn’t until I had to leave that I started feeling better. Perhaps it’s an omen. I hope not.

Lots of old time slaves and staff are leaving the hostel, or have already left. Fortunately we have two more who’ve just signed aboard recently. Tim the Englishman and Thomas the Belgian. Maris and Britt are leaving at the end of next month, so we’ll need some lovely, talented cleaners to replace them or all hell could break loose. Fingers crossed.

I still want to increase the Internet speed here. There’s quite a few laptops floating around and they all suck up the bandwidth rather effectively. Besides, it’s nice to have fast speeds, ain’t it?

My credit card expires next month. I have to get it replaced ASAP. Ahhhhhhh.

Oh yeah, I didn’t read anything about the Oscars. Maybe I should now. When is the Olympics, by the way?

Hairy times

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I’m coping pretty well looking after this place on my own. The delicate balance of the bed sheets system got toppled over when some uninitiated took charge for a day and a half, but I’m restoring equilibrium.

Yesterday I went out on a splurge and bought myself a little mini headset, cheap webcam (which uses 300 MB of disk space to install its drivers, thanks to Logitech), PC/PS2 compatible game pad and a mouse pad. I’m pretty decked out now, in a real backpacker sense… :/

The light bulb in my bedroom has gone on the blink. It’s either the light bulb or the little clicker that lights it. This building used to be an office before they converted it into a hostel so it’s full of those big bright lightsaber type bulbs. When they’re all turned on it’s like sitting in a 7-11. Anyway, my one’s on the fritz which is ironic since it’d be really good lighting for this webcam. Instead I’ve had to turn on a crappy little lamp in one corner of the room. This is the result:

redknob long hair

So there we have it. That image looks a great deal better because I touched up all the lighting in Picasa. It’s such a handy program for that kind of crap.

I need to take a shower, I smell like a sweaty man that hasn’t showered in too long. A sweaty man with wild hair. I should get a job in the circus.

Sleep's better than rampaging

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Another night in Levist Valjas and a good few beers on a nearly empty stomach sounded great last night. Too bad this little baby hadn’t had enough nap time over the last week as hitting the sack at 3:30am with the intention of arising at 6:45am was an utter failure. Fortunately I was forward-thinking enough to have people checked out or half-checked out before I slept in until 10am.

Feeling like a zombie wasn’t the greatest start to the day and neither was developing a grinding headache at my first conscious moment. I’ve missed this. Sort of.

I spent most of the morning and early afternoon in various MSN conversations with my plethora of friends. In fact I was so enraptured by their digital companionship I nearly forgot to put away my butter before it melted. Six slices of toast was basically the highlight of my day.

The lowlight was yet another blocked toilet. Well, nearly blocked. It took a bit of hoping, praying and flushing but it worked itself out in the end. Now I just have to hope I can successfully fix the other one. My handyman skills are sorely lacking. In fact they’re simply absent.

One of the kids who stayed here showed me a cool little gadget for your camera. Basically, Eye-Fi is a 1 gigabyte memory card with wireless capability that automagically uploads your photos for you whenever your camera is turned on and it can access a wireless Internet zone. Within a minute of two of taking a picture it appeared on his Flickr page. Neat! Can’t wait for more funky things like this to pop up in the market. Geek heaven, here we come.

Thursday roundup

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That’s right, another randomly timed summary of my world’s events. Are you ready to feel the rush?

Good. Let’s get to it then.

Firstly, hostel related: Viru’s looking rather spic and span, all the rooms are beautifully colour-coordinated, clean and inviting. The sun’s shining brightly through the windows all day long and keeping the place warmer than it should be thanks to the combination of solar radiation and central heating.

The king of the couch is back on his throne, everyone’s checked out for the day and that laundry’s hanging up to dry. Tomorrow we’re getting more guests and it should be a piece of pie.

Nightlife: I can’t recall if I mentioned going out on Monday night. Well, I did. In the manner of all true good nights out it started somewhat spontaneously. Some cheap beer and a half dozen foosball games in the hostel with John kept me occupied for an hour or so and then we went out with Val and Ben while poor old Emily slept on the couch for night shift.

Levist was on the agenda, as always. We stayed there until it closed at around 3am, meeting and greeting some drunk and blind drunk locals. I received the privilege of listening to a 30-something bitterly intoxicated Estonian regale me with his tales of learning kick boxing after being beaten up by Russians and having a tooth knocked out, at least that’s what I think he was saying, since I could barely understand him. He also tried to channel with me telepathically or something by sending out energy from his palm to mine. It reminded me of the guy that tried to hypnotise me then collapsed on the floor and passed out. I’ve gotta keep away from these hippies.

Some girl that lived in a monastery (seriously) also joined up with us for the night. We headed for The Old Club of course, as it was late and it was Monday and we had no other option. As expected, by that hour we were speaking nothing but bullshit. Money got wasted on pissy flaming B52 shots, twice, to no effect. I just couldn’t get decently inebriated. It could have been due to the quantity of food I’d eaten for dinner that dear Emily cooked for me. Probably.

Around 5:30am the slightly toothless Estonian arrived in the bar with, of all people, a recurring hostel guest: Portuguese Miguel. Things felt tense for a few moments as we’d told Toothless that we were going home and we’d had a slightly awkward relationship with Miguel of late so we weren’t sure what to do. We did the normal thing, a pleasant acknowledgment and a civil nod of the head. They were in a group with some others and sat somewhere else and we didn’t have to move. We were happy until 6:30am when we left and wandered home.

Plans: Em and I are going to Vilnius on Monday or Sunday. We’re going to be down there for a few days. Em’s adamant that we have to be somewhere else for our 1 year and I’m too scared to argue. Hopefully Simone will have some free time to show us around, local style. Em wants to check out some little forest cottage that Livijus told us about as well, so if time permits that’d be really nice, too.

Miscellaneous: I read this earlier today. It made me laugh.

Cracking Hollywood’s code.

The system designed to protect next-generation DVDs from pirates has been cracked. Even the hackers are surprised at how easy it was…

Animal testing is hilarious

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I mean, have a look at this fella:

The horror.

Poor guy. Actually he doesn’t look too bad. Won’t be long now until we can all be cyborgs or have behavioural implants! Read about it here.

Apart from that. Not a lot to report. Viru’s rooms just got a major clean out yesterday so now we’re feeling rather dominant over the whole building. Well, this part of it at least. We even got to design the colour schemes for each room so that they look pretty. Aw.

I’ve been feeling pretty tired lately. Not sure why. Maybe I’m just lazy. Not as lazy as palmy, but still. I can’t even be motivated to cut my fingernails, for example.

I think I’ll watch Labyrinth tonight.

Galleries and CSS

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I’ve spent the last 16 hours or so mucking around with my gallery‘s theme. I didn’t like the way the dev-testing theme looked which is fair enough since it’s designed for experimentation rather than aesthetics.

I think it looks rather spiffy at the moment. Nearly seamless, you might say. I’ve barely slept since I started hacking away at it last night. The individual picture pages haven’t been touched yet, so ignore their look for now.

On the hostel front, it looks like we’ll be living in the Viru rooms for at least the next 2 months. I had a feeling we’d end up in here for a while anyway so it came as no surprise when Hugo mentioned it. He’s going back to Holland on the 11th so then there’ll only be four of us looking after both these places now that Valerie’s back.  Well, Ben will be around too, I guess.

I haven’t been to the gym since Tuesday. We were meant to go today but it doesn’t look likely. Not with me feeling buggered from last night and Emily having been fast asleep on the bed for the last hour or two. Damn it, I really could use a shower and a good old scrub of the teeth. What a mess.

Today I caught up with Swedish Martin. He wanted me to see if there was any free WiFi signals that could be detected from his flat in the old town. The building is fantastic, a real Soviet style, scungy dump with dark, narrow hallways and toilets comparable to the one from Trainspotting. His room was freezing as well, I can only imagine how horrible it’d be inside during winter. He shares it with Tambet, an Estonian guy who works in Levist and plays in a relatively famous local rock band. Apparently Tambet has been living there for about seven years. Hardcore.

There were only secure wireless networks available so I was unable to help Martin out. Instead we had a beer and listened to some music while he told me some of his crazy stories. It would have been nice to kick back and relax for a few hours but I had to get back and clean the toilets.

Post calendar

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Another plugin-related post.

I installed the latest version of this Ajax Calendar but it seemed to crap itself when it came to linking to posts. Unfortunately it kept trying to attach my WordPress install directory as a prefix to all my permalinks when it didn’t have to. The default version of wp_calendar didn’t have this problem and worked fine, but it wasn’t sexy like Ajax!

The solution was fairly easy, I just removed two of the site prefix + segments from the livecalendar.js file and now it’s working perfectly. Isn’t it nice when things are simple?

Unfortunately, the Quoter plugin I installed isn’t compatible with the threaded comments plugin that Gus has made look so nice on his site. To be honest I don’t know if I even need both of them but I like each for their own reasons. Perhaps I’ll hack away at them some more and see if I can get quotes integrated with threaded comments. It could be cool. Maybe.

Is this experience?

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I’m currently meant to be working/assisting/developing three separate websites (apart from toying around with this one). All are related in some way but they’re also for completely different people.

Establishing and configuring servers, sorting out domains, setting up software, developing, managing and building websites all feels like a hobby to me. It’s when I think about it I wonder if technically this is actually some kind of contract work, albeit on a rather informal level. The only real problem or weakness I see with myself is that I’m not a very experienced web designer and by that I mean I’m not overly familiar with CSS. I’ve been teaching myself everything else along the way though so I guess that’s not beyond my reach.

So, yeah, I suppose I’m actually getting real-world IT experience and it’s happened by accident. I’m not really making any money out of it but it’s still a service that I’m providing to clients, even if they’re clients that I know personally. Based on that I figure I’m entitled to record this on my resumé, if I ever get around to updating it.

I’m not really interested in pursuing web-design as a career but it’s hopefully all a stepping stone to greater things. I’m more inspired to try and help “problem solve”, in a consultant sense, I guess you’d say. I like knowing a bit about everything so that I can help people with all sorts of problems and know what they need to do or who they need to speak to or what they need to look at. Perhaps it’s from my interest in trivia or general knowledge.

Anyway. We’ll see.