Know your Unix system administrator.
Old joke, but still worth a chuckle.

I just had a first view on comet Holmes under medium circumstances (a bit of fog, and the moon low in the east) : the object is easily visible with the naked eye, and is very easily recognizable as a non-stellar object through plain binoculars : just aim at Perseus in the north.
There is very few detail to see in the comet; Holmes just looks like a giant snowball with a gray-greenish tint. Very large and beautiful object that will get better in the next few weeks, as the moon decreases in size and brightness.

The following error makes me frown : default value in power.sh potentially kills laptop disks. When switching to battery power, /etc/acpi/power.sh issues the command hdparm -B 1 to all block devices. This leads to extremely frequent load cycles, thereby drastically limiting the life cycle of a laptop disk.
It seems this was a month ago on Digg, but I still haven't found out if this is valid or not. The bug thread ends on Oct 13th, so maybe this is solved in Gutsy ?

Ik moet toegeven dat de visie van Peter Suetens, former content manager voor digitale TV, anno 2002 omtrent digitalisatie van TV beelden, werkelijkheid is geworden. Punt is dat een TV kijker op een gegeven ogenblik niet meer weet (of erom geeft) dat de beelden die hij via het scherm ziet, online of op de harde schijf terug te vinden zijn. Klinkt u dat bekend ? Kan kloppen, ik vermoed dat ene Bill Gates dezelfde mening toegedeeld was, maar dan iets meer strikt rond PC data. In elk geval wijzigt onze manier van TV kijken fundamenteel, al is dat misschien niet op zo'n revolutionaire manier dat het onmiddellijk opvalt. Maar zie eens wat er met onze muziek gebeurd is : alles gedigitaliseerd op de iPod. Waarom dan niet hetzelfde voor films & video's ?


HTPC's (Home Theather PC's) zijn de implementaties van deze omwenteling : een PC met harde schijf, een gebruiksvriendelijke interface die ons toelaat om films & TV te bekijken, op te nemen. Idem voor onze MP3's en digitale foto's. Internet access maakt alles compleet : naast de film bekijken, kan je nu ook met één druk op de remote control de plot, cast, en reviews van de film lezen. Online trailers bekijken van nieuwe films ? Klik. RSS reader ? Klik. Gaming ? Klik. En dat allemaal op de breedbeeld TV vanuit de luie zetel.


We wants it, preciousss.


Daarom : eens kijken voor mijn eigen HTPC. En dan de vraag stellen : waarom niet zelf bouwen ? Dat geeft me de vrijheid om een eigen case te kiezen, zodat die wat meer integreert met de rest van de HiFi. Maar eerst de customer requirements opstellen :


Ik wil dus een HTPC die volgende zaken ondersteunt :


- HDTV ready
- DVB-T ontvangst & opname
- Videos bekijken (diverse codecs)
- Wireless networking
- MP3 support
- Geen of weinig gaming
- Niet uitziend als een PC
- en een maximum budget van 500 à 600 Euro (uiteindelijk gaat het hier over een gesofistikeerde HDD recorder)


En dan nu de oefening om hierop een hardware config op te plakken. Met bovenstaande gegevens kom ik min of meer op volgende hardware :


- Asus M2A-VM Hdmi Socket M2 (HDMI support met onboard ATI video card)
- 1 of 2 GB RAM, nog te bekijken afhankelijk van het gebruikte OS.
- 320 GB harde schijf
- AMD BE-2350 X2 64BIT Dual-core Processor (MPEG2 codering laten we de CPU doen ipv de video kaart. Dat kan discusieerbaar zijn, maar de box moet in zijn geheel stil en koelbaar zijn; elke fan is er dus één teveel)
- DVD writer
- Hauppauge Wintv-HVR-3000 Retail FM + DVB-s + DVB-t + teletekst
- Antec NSK2480 Black & Silver case
Er zijn nog enkele openstaande vragen, maar die hoop ik de komende dagen uit te klaren. Suggesties zijn uiteraard welkom.

Deel 2 : gekozen hardware

A small and very faint comet has surprised observers around the world by overnight becoming bright enough to see with the unaided eye.


Comet Holmes, which was discovered in November 1892 by Edwin Holmes, in London England, was no brighter than magnitude 17 in mid-October - that's about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical aid. In order to view an object this faint, one would need a moderately large telescope.


But the comet's brightness has suddenly rocketed all the way up to 3rd-magnitude, brightening nearly 400,000-times in less than 24-hours! On this astronomers scale, smaller numbers mean brighter objects. From urban locations, a 3rd-magnitude object might be hidden by light pollution, but under rural skies it would be clearly visible.

I've been playing with Media Center software lately. Currently, I'm using a DBV-T setup box in combination with a HDD/DVD recorder, which behaves basically like a media center, as it also supports images and music. However, one big drawback is that it doesn't have any networking or USB support, which is kinda awkward if you want to transfer data from PC. Also, the Matroska format (not really a codec, but some sort of container with audio, video and subtitles) is gaining lots of popularity lately. You can't play such files on a regular closed box DVD player, because mostly you just can't upgrade its codecs.
Who can point me out how I can extract and convert a mkv video to DIVX ? I know the solution consists of mkvextract and mencoder, but all I could produce till now was some multicolored mosaic.


That's why computer based media centers are much more attractive. Running XBMC on a modded XBOX adds many points to your geek factor, but you can't upgrade the thing with extra PCI cards, eg like a DBV-T video card.


Using a second hand PC as media center is more convenient. You can choose to install Ubuntu/MediUbuntu with MythTV if you want to stick with Linux (and if your DBV-T card is supported by it). On the Windows side, I was impressed with MediaPortal, which seems a modded MythTV. If you want eye candy, there's still no match against Windows Media Center : very clean & slick interface.
Does anyone know if there are remote control USB solutions, and where I can get them in Belgium ?

Here's a nice graphs showing who owns who in automobile land.

Fun in the IT department : this little Perl program changes the display messages on your HP printers. All the printers on my work floor now display "INSERT COIN" ;)
I wonder if "BBQ SAUCE LOW" would fit on the display. Well, there's only one way to find out, isn't it ? :)
I gladly accept other suggestions.

The Release Candidate of Gutsy was released recently. As I had some free hours, I decided to upgrade to this RC release. After an official release, all Ubuntu servers are overloaded anyway, so this was the right moment. I uninstalled Compiz Fusion first, and then I initiated the upgrade with the

update-manager -d

command, which downloaded and installed the upgrade without a glitch. Compiz Fusion is now the default window manager, so that means eye candy for the masses.


Seems that Ubuntu choose to use the Xgl server as default for use with Compiz Fusion. This runs without any problems on my NVidia card, so I decided to stick with it. In the past, I had my share of troubles with Beryl/Compiz and the buggy NVidia drivers.


Overall, a great upgrade experience ! Gutsy runs in all its glory, without any upgrade problem. Nice work, Canonical !

Lagavulin (Lagga-Voolin) means "hollow where the mill is" and has been there since 1816. Since James Logan Mackie & Co of Glasgow bought the distillery in 1867, Lagavulin is one of the three Kildalton distilleries (with Ardbeg and Laphoraig) on the south-east shore of Islay. Since the 16yo was introduced as a part of a Classic Malts range as the representative of Islay it has been impressing drinkers everywhere. It is pretty incredible that 3 neighbouring distilleries can vary in character so much.


Lagavulin came to my attention as my collegue Robartes kept announcing it as his favourite whisky. Priced at 40 Euro, and being classified as a Classic Malt, this is certainly not something you want to mix in your cola or coffee.


The nose : peat, lots of smoke, orange zest. I smell cheese, Grommit. Very weird indeed, very complex.


The taste : Holy crap ! Complex, even more than the smell. The taste equivalent of a 5 minute video clip compressed into 10 seconds. More peat, more smoke, dark chocolate. The most difficult malt I ever tried.