Feeling lost in our galaxy ? Take the Milky Way transit authority map and find the nearest exit to Sagittarius A !

Sweet ! I was about to install drivers in a Windows7 virtualbox for my el-cheapo Lexmark X1250 printer/scanner, when the Sane dialog popped up on my Linux desktop when I switched on the power. I decided to have a quick look if it was supported under Linux (without much hope, I must say), when I stumbled on this page with detailled instructions. I didn't had to copy the libsane shared lib, so eventually, the scanner was supported with the following instructions :

• Download and install z600cups and z600llpddk


• Copy dll.conf and lexmark.conf to /etc/sane.d/


• Restart Sane with

  /etc/init.d/saned restart

and voila ! Scanning time...

Redshift. Cause a monitor at night is no fun.

Is your knowledge of science getting a bit rusty ? Having troubles following your kids with their matrix multiplications ? Head over to the Khan Academy and brush things up, ranging from chemistry over biology to linear algebra.

I've allways had a knack for wrist watches. They are cheap little devices packed with technology. Just as our mobile phones are, albeit in a less cheaper form. Unfortunately, lots of the watch functionality has been taken over by our mobile phones, cause the watch has a screen that can hardly be expanded, and having limited input functionalities. Which left the watch with basic hour-telling functionalities.


Watch makers have responded to this trend by creating watches in specific designs, giving the watch some sort of exclusivity, targeting specific end user groups. Tokyo Flash is a Japanese shop which creates wrist watches with the purpose of making hour-reading seemingly as daunting as possible. This resulted in handless wrist watches, including LED based watches which tell the time in binary form, having a form factor raising from a metallic plate with drilled holes in it, to metallic cylinders with moving LEDs.


I bought myself the Pimp Star Performer, a 44LED based watch with 4 columns each indicating a portion of the time. The watch lights up one number in each column in a Matrix like animation to tell the time. For example: 1-2-5-3 would be 12:53. Some fun stuff is present like a PM indicator in the shape of a martini glass, as PM stands for drinking time.

As Apple moved to Intel for the base of their computers, this means that any Intel machine can be installed with OSX. Several people worked out installation procedures for this, which resulted in installable DVD image distributions. I should probably tell you that it is illegal to search for torrents like iPC, iDeneb or Kalyway, and that if you're interested to run OSX on your machine, you should buy a 30$ (!) retail OSX DVD.


Do not expect, however, that all your hardware will be supported : Apple still works with a limited hardware set, which means that lots of hardware in the PC world isn't supported by OSX. If your hardware isn't supported by a OSX vanilla kernel, the problem begins : you need to look for drivers for your unsupported hardware parts (kernel extensions or kexts) and they will probably not survive a OSX upgrade. Which means that if you do want to follow security updates for your OSX installation, you will need to reinstall your kexts after every update.


Deciding on the large number of OSX-based laptop presence in geek conventions like FOSDEM, I got curious in what appeals people to use OSX. I had an empty 15GB partition on my Acer Aspire 5610 laptop, originally destined for OpenSolaris, but I decided to give it away for the OSX installation. It's a good idea to backup your MBR, so it won't be overwritten by an alien OS installation. The MBR is located on the first 512 bytes of your boot disk; dd is your friend here. I needed several installation rounds to get to a working driver combination, which takes quite some time, and can get quite frustrating. Luckily, a default install takes about 30-40 minutes, depending on the speed of your hardware. In the end I got everything working, except the wifi card : this is a Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG, which isn't supported. There are preliminary drivers available, but installing this kext caused a coredump of the Mach kernel. Many people experience problems in wifi, and most choose a 50$ workaround with a usb wifi stick.


The installed OSX was version 10.5.6, which I tried to upgrade to 10.5.8, which is the last Leopard security level. I did not back up any kernel extension, which I should have done, cause after a reboot, I only got the blue background of the login screen. Apparently, this was caused by the installation of a new framebuffer driver that didn't supported my hardware. Finding a safe way of upgrading still is daunting.


The desktop experience is quite excellent, of course, even if my native screen resolution wasn't supported. The Finder file manager bears striking similarities with Nautilus in Linux, which explains where the Gnome folks had their inspiration. Which also says alot about the usability of Nautilus, by the way. I did not have the time yet to accustom the new OS - I still want to find a solution first for the upgrades. Unfortunately, the pricing of Apple hardware still keeps me from switching to Apple. The cheapest Macbook goes for ~1000€, which is revoltingly expensive, even for Apple stuff. Besides, after years of working with Linux, the idea of paying for an OS-stack still feels weird.

In his book, Raw Spirit, Ian Banks writes , "If you can't find a Bowmore to fall in love with, you may have to consider very seriously the possibility that you're wasting your money drinking whisky at all." True words that any whisky apprentice should remember.


I've tasted the Bowmore 12 yo, and I immediately fell in love with it. It was my first Islay whisky I tasted, and it opened the wonderfull world of peat for me. So it has earned a firm place in my favorite top 3 of all whiskies. Time to find out more about Bowmore, so I took the 15yo with me.


Color : deep amber brown.
Smell : like a strong caramel desert with hints of raisins and dark chocolate. Smell indicates an oily taste.
Taste : quite different from the smell, I must say. No oily but quite watery texture. Lovely taste of peat, not too brute but quite gentle. Black berries and after that, the caramel toffee taste pops up again.


Verdict : impressive as usual with Bowmore. However, quite a strong caramel taste - a bit too much for me.

Create your own paper model of the ISS, Space shuttle or Soyuz capsule today ! (Warning : instructions in Italian)

It's nearly Christmas, so it's time for the Perl Advent Calendar.
And this year, there's some competition around the corner, targeted at the Perl 6 adepts.

The 'Goatse Operator' isn't a nurse with slight sadomasochistic inclinations, but one of the secret Perl operators.