useful

Someone, somewhere may find this handy.

Yes, I'm still alive (and dancing)

Posted by

Ok, so I haven’t really been using this thing much and I know no one really reads it anyway, regardless I’m going to write a bit.

What have I been up to? Well, the run down is something like this:

  • Left Finland at the end of September
  • Loved Tallinn (Estonia) as soon as I arrived
  • Visited Riga (Latvia) with some kids I met in the hostel
  • Came back to Tallinn and started working in the same hostel
  • Visited London for 15 hours a month later on a stopover for Amsterdam
  • Complete inability to recall my time in Amsterdam apart from knowing it was fun
  • Visited Vilnius (Lithuania) to take a photo of the Frank Zappa statue
  • Bussed back to Tallinn for another few weeks
  • Went back to London for 5 nights to visit palmy and Dilly and some other buddies
  • Came back to Tallinn and kept working

Of course, there’s plenty more to it than that, but they’re the kind of stories where you really had to be there to appreciate them anyway, so bugger that.

One thing I should mention is how cool the hostel is. Well, I think so. Unfortunately the website doesn’t seem to display properly in Firefox but it’s fine in IE, Tallinn Backpackers.

I never want to leave Estonia! It’s scary. I really dig it here.

Another thing I dig is listening to music off the Internet because I’m too lazy to keep pulling out my iPod. I started out on BlogMusik but I prefer Radio Blog Club. Enjoy it.

XMPlay

Posted by

Just a quick pimp. XMPlay is a much nicer portable audio player than VLC Media Player. It’s fast, slick (although I use the Windows Classic skin) and even has a media library function which sorts artists, album and track number! Finally. Now, if only it supported disc numbers, too.

So hot it's worth carrying

Posted by

It’s taken me much longer than it should have (being the self-confessed geek I am, of course), but I’ve finally started playing with portable software.

Normally I’d have no use for portable software as the only computer I’d spend serious time on would be my own desktop. This hasn’t been the case ever since I started travelling so I’ve typically been at the mercy of net cafes and their (usually shoddy) installations.

I’ve cranked up portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, OpenOffice and a few others onto my iPod along with VLC Media Player, just in case there’s no decent music player. Now I have practically my own computer housed on my 60 gigabyte iPod with my software, settings and music!

The best part is that none of my details or settings ever (well, shouldn’t) get saved on the actual PC I’m using. Of course, I run the risk of bloating up the poor little guy in the future. For the mean time, I’m enjoying it.

Hopefully I’ll be able to find even more fun things to run off him.

LAME.

Posted by

7

The encoder, I mean.

I’m re-ripping and re-encoding my CDs today, rather than doing anything useful. Audiograbber is now freeware (and sans-spyware), so you may as well go nuts, I say.

I wish I knew where my freebie, collectable TISM CD giveaway is that I received from one of their concerts a few years ago is. It’s a decent piece of memorabilia. Damn it. Oh well.

Life’s a piece of shit (wo-wo-wo)
Open your vein and slit (wo-wo-wo).Words to live by.

My computer still smokes it re: some weird video function called upon by certain games. Thanks, GPU.

I’m going to save up and buy a digital camera, new (good) headphones and perhaps a suckPod. 60 gigs is too tempting. Why can’t the other brands have decent sized drives in them? I hate them all. Rar.

Poo.

Posted by

15

I’ve been trying to work out a nifty way to export all of my 223 previous LJ entries in to a nice RSS format in order to have them all catalogued on my site. I could reformat the XML I’ve exported, but I’d still lose the URLs to the entries themselves. It’s a shame there’s no “historical RSS feeds” to flick back to and use.

In order to attempt this, I tried out ljArchive, a nice little application that can connect to LiveJournal’s servers and download your entire posting history and the comments that were made with it. Very handy if you just want to skim through your history. It even has some mathematical models and graphs that it can draw up if you’re in to those sorts of things. I certainly find it entertaining. For a program that didn’t do what I wanted it to do, I quite like it. I just discovered that it can export your journal in to a MIDI file, too! Now I can hear my journal played as notes. Useless, but sexy.

I just got back from Newcastle and saw Grant, my mystical elf cousin/uncle. I arrived at Lake Macquarie around 3pm and we went up around Civic to check out the developments around the waterfront. Very impressive. He’s just bought a terrace house a short walk from there in Cooks Hill. It’s a cute little place. We ended up watching the NRL final back at the shack with some Italian takeaway and had a few quiet drinks. We retired at around 10pm and I failed to get more than 1 hour of solid sleep at any one time, leading to my decision to sleep in until 9am instead of getting up at 6am like I’d originally intended.

This morning, at 9am, I got up and sat outside for a while after drinking the short black Grant made me at around 8am. I guess it took a while to hit me. It’s always pleasant just sitting out on the bench at the shack and doing nothing but enjoying the view of the lake. There’s something innately peaceful about the whole experience. How wannabe-artistic do I sound? Geez.

I zipped over to Caves Beach before heading off and had a dip. There was no surf at all and I was a little cold just standing around in the water so it wasn’t long until I showered off some of the salt and sand and got back in the car and made my way back down the highway and freeway to Hornsby. I wanted to beat the holiday traffic and left Swansea at 10am. I hit the Pacific Highway at Hornsby at 11am. Quite a good run.

On the way home I stopped in at Lou’s to give her a birthday card. I thought it was a rather appropriate one and felt impressed with myself for finding it. Self-congratulation is fun. It was nice being able to see her again and things seemed to go pretty well. The whole thing was reassuring, to say the least. Hopefully, if we manage to keep getting along like that I think things should be fine. I believe she’s drinking punch at the moment with her girlfriends. I could go for a fruity mix myself. I don’t believe I shall, though.

I’m spending the rest of the day preparing myself psychologically to sit down and completely dominate the work I have left for my project – tomorrow. I’ve always been a crammer and rather than fight against my nature I’m just going to ride with it then capitalise on my skills when the time is right. I feel so insightful.

Speaking of insight, it’s only been this last week that I’ve noticed a whole new side of music. I suppose I can now relate to a lot more themes in songs these days. Honestly, it feels kinda good. I’ve always been an experience junkie like that.

DNS.

Posted by

9

I’ve been researching virtual private servers for hosting the team.dot website. Some of the deals out there look pretty sweet. Unfortunately, CoreVPS doesn’t allow IRC services. The bastards. PowerVPS might, but I’m going to have to email them and see.

Anyway, on a whim I decided to fork out AUS$57.07 to own the domain “redknob.net” for the next 5 years. I was tempted to go for 10 but I didn’t want to blow all that money on something that I wouldn’t have any real use for yet. Namecheap are just that, if anyone is interested. Some stupid farm has registered redknob.com. What an embarrassment. Maybe I can get the domain in 2007. I’ll have to keep checking.

Ohh, I’m the hypertext guru tonight!

Shame I still need to do more study tomorrow. Brett was pissed when I said I wouldn’t be coming in to work tonight. Oh well.