Wilgje.net » Nerdy/Geeky

Condolences to Apple

Willow — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 09:49:41 +0000

Dear Apple,

As I heard the news about the death of Steve Jobs this morning I shed a few tears. At that moment I was unable to explain to myself why I felt so sad, since I never met the man. But as I write this message I’m figuring it out.

When I got home, the first thing I did was open my MacBook, which is wirelessly connected to my Airport Extreme. I played songs that fit in with my sad mood on iTunes. In Safari, I watched several YouTube videos and a TED talk. I tweeted about the loss on Twitter for Mac, and checked out the trending topic #SteveJobs. I found a link there that took me to http://www.apple.com/stevejobs, and clicked on a “mailto:” link. This opened a screen in Mail, arguably the finest e-mail client I’ve ever seen. And here I am, typing.

And all of that worked not just well, but very well in a beautiful way. My experience with OS X made me switch away from Windows, where countless Linux and BSD distributions have failed. Where I used to need a lot of tweaking just to make something work, I’m now often quite confused at how intuitive hardware and software from Apple really is. I actually needed to think different. For instance, installing an app by simply dragging it was entirely new to me.

I can easily say my experience with technology was very much changed when I found the products Apple makes. And Steve Jobs made that happen. When my MacBook dies, I can buy a new one, but Steve Jobs cannot be replaced. My condolences to everyone and I wish much strength and fortune to the company and staff in the future.

Kind regards,

Marjolein Tamis (The Netherlands)

Arjan also blogged about this, sharing Apple’s view.
Jochem commemorates Steve in his own way.

VVVVVV and the Humble Bundle

Willow — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:14:49 +0000

A while ago my friend Wouter posted something about the Humble Bundle (part 3). For those who don’t like clicking links: the Humble Bundle is a bundle of games you can play, and you can define your own price for them. So if you feel like the amount of games you get are worth $20, that’s what you pay and if you only wish to pay $1, that’s alright too. You can even get them for free (but I’d feel awfully bad about that). When you pay for the bundle, you can decide how much of this money should go to the developers and how much to a number of charities. For all the games you get, you also get a Steam + Desura code, so you can play them from there as well. Plus, if you spend more than the average, which is now at $5.68, you also get all games from the 2nd bundle.

I decided to get it and immediately got hooked on the first game I started: VVVVVV. This one is as oldskool as it gets.

You play the captain of a space ship which has crashed and left all crew members lost in space. It’s up to you to get them and teleport them back. Here comes the awesome part: there is no jumping. Left is left and right is right, but the space bar makes you float up and stick to the ceiling, or go down again. This concept makes for some really unexpected and difficult moves you can make. The learning curve, therefore, is particularly big, easily reaching the levels of any Megaman game. The graphics look like they’re from the eighties, and the music fits that style perfectly. In that sense it’s pure nostalgia in a can. I’ve played three levels so far and I can highly recommend it!

Also, that Humble Bundle is just too good to miss :)

Effectively getting rid of nick colours

Willow — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 16:09:35 +0000

Nothing to see here: this is a post for my own reference.

I’ve been trying to rid my irssi of the script nickcolor.pl for literally years now. It’s a handy script in theory, but very often it’ll display nicks with equal length in the same colour, or it’ll display a lot of (non-bold) yellow nicks, thus making it difficult for me to read hilights (this is particularly irritating when scrolling back in a days worth of conversations).

Unloading the script would end up with me seeing all the nicks in the colour of the last person who said something. If red, all nicks turn red, if pink, all of them turn pink, etc.

My friend BenV handed me a simple solution for this. In irssi, type:

/format -reset pubmsg

This will reset the colour and make everything white again (exluding hilights of course). It has one side-effect which won’t go for most users but does happen for me. I have right-aligned nicks (all in 9 spaces), but the reset messes this up for anyone who talks except for higlights and stuff I say myself. This line fixes that:

/format pubmsg {pubmsgnick $2 {pubnick $[-9]0}}$1

So if I ever get it into my head to use this script again, because you know, I’m an idiot, this is how I fix it :)

Review: Zelda – Ocarina of Time 3D

Willow — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:28:20 +0000

I’ve never bought a console for one particular game. There were always several reasons for me to buy them. Until now.

Long ago, in 1998, I owned a Nintendo 64. At that point I was a geek at my school newspaper (we worked with Macs ^_^), and my friend the editor had this game for it, Ocarina of Time. Had I ever heard of Zelda? Nope, somehow it went completely by me on the NES and I never even owned a SNES. I borrowed it from him and was glued to the screen for a few weeks. I remember the awe at everything I saw in that game. Most of all, the world was so big! I was used to Mario 64 by then, which does have some big looking levels but the whole is still, for al intents and purposes, quite small. In Zelda I got my horse and found land as far as the Gerudos. I was thoroughly impressed. Later on in life, World of Warcraft would ruin that for me, by the way. No game world can ever look big to me now.

Not so long ago I decided to buy the game in the Wii shop, but the gameplay really sucks when you don’t have the original N64 controller. Then I found out that it was out, in 3D, for the Nintendo 3DS. I had to get it, and within about 4 days I had it.

The game is pretty awesome. They improved the graphics, for instance making bushes appear bushy instead of blocky. Tiny stuff like Link’s fairy and butterflies are incredibly detailed and it looks well-adjusted. In the story, nothing has changed. I was able to blindly find my way through the first 3 dungeons because I remembered them so well. All secrets and holes and heartpieces and fairy fountains are there, exactly where they used to be. The only addition to the game is a stone you can use to see into the future, giving you hints and tips on what to do next. The most awesome part is the addition of 3D mixed with the improved graphics. Just play a song on the ocarina and you see the most pretty effects, in 3D. And try walking through the twisted corridor in the Forest Temple, it’s brilliant.

I might be very much biased on this topic, but I can only recommend this game. If you loved it once and you’re longing for the same experience again, it’s great to be back. If you’re new to the game, it’s a must-have as well. But then I’m just a big Zelda fan ;)

WD TV Live + Airport Extreme + WD Elements 1TB + Windows 7

Willow — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:52:48 +0000

As the title probably suggests, I’m about to tell you a disaster story. When I just moved into my new place I had grand plans concerning the technology I wanted in my home. I’m a big fan of watching TV series, so I needed some system through which I could just stream all downloaded stuff to my TV (which I was planning to upgrade as well, I have done so by now). Obviously there are a lot of different solutions around for that, but I’d set my mind to a WD TV Live, which does not have any storage of itself but connects to any network easily and has some added features which I hardly ever use. I’d heard some good things about it, and it wasn’t too expensive, so I got one.

When I got the thing, I started thinking about the actual setup I would need. No, I’m not a big planner, I spend much time winging things as I go along. Now there were a few factors I needed to take into account:

For downloading, I use µTorrent under Windows. The only way I would ever deviate from that is if they make µTorrent for Mac just as awesome. I heard they’re working on that, I haven’t checked it out yet. There might be a solution there if they’ve added the features I want (rss downloading to specific folders, renaming torrents when adding them to the download list, etc). But for now let’s assume Windows 7 is the OS I need to use.
I want the downloaded data on a USB HD that is located somewhere that
- allows me to download data to it instantly (instead of needing to copy or some such thing)
- doesn’t require me to turn on anything other than my WD TV when I want to watch stuff on that disk

The WD TV Live supports a USB HD, but that would require my WD TV Live to be switched on during downloading. Right now the disk is attached to my PC, meaning the PC has to be switched on when I watch series. Ideally, my Airport Extreme would be a good place to attach the disk to.

Well I tried this in a number of ways, and it’s impossible I tell you. First I formatted the disk as Mac OS Journaled, which was fine with Airport but Windows doesn’t do anything with it if you don’t download extra software to support the filesystem. I did that, and it still failed because Windows 7 failed to write to the disk. The WD TV didn’t see the disk at all. Formatting as NTFS posed a big problem for Airport, which just refused to share the disk on the network, so of course there was no visibility in either Windows 7 or the WD TV. Then I tried FAT32, because I was on the slippery slope down to hell anyway. Airport said “Ok sure why not”. WD TV said “Hey your disk is empty but I do see it!”. Windows 7 went nuts over it.

First it found my disk and went “Oh wow a network share! Awesome! Let me open that for you. Yeah, let me first get some coffee. And then open it. Really.” I got to the point where I believed (one can never be sure with Windows) I was on the disk, and tried starting a download. “Wait, you want to *download* stuff there now? Oh hell, let me get more coffee.” µTorrent finally just gave up on trying to write to the disk. I tried a simple copy after that, which sent Windows 7 into calculating the time for the copy for about 10 minutes, after which I decided to stop it. Then there was an actual file, but opening it was out of the question.

I have no idea to this moment what the problem might be. I could be Airport messing with the disk so Windows can’t read it properly, it could be Windows 7 entirely. I’ve tried all the suggestions I found through Google, like turning off Windows Search and tweaking all kinds of stuff on my Airport. Fact is, it won’t work. If anyone could give me any suggestions, I’m very open to them, but to me it now looks like a lost cause. So I boot my PC when I want to watch something, which is quite a shame.

Still white and nerdy

Willow — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:38:38 +0000

Sometimes, in between slowly forgetting the finer Linux commands, working a lot and no longer tinkering that much with stuff anymore, I find myself wondering: am I still a geek? You see, I take pride in that part of me that likes to figure out how stuff works. Also it’s a lot of fun to do ^_^

Anyway, the other day I got quite annoyed since my internet wasn’t working. I’d checked everything: cabling, the AirPort, the connectors everywhere, the works. I found out there’s a problem with the type of modem I have (an Ubee) and kindly asked someone on irc to help me out. This only made it worse. Basically, if I attached my MacBook directly to the modem it was fine. With my AirPort it wouldn’t stay online for even a minute. After the fix on the modem I got quite desperate and two other friends of mine came over late at night to help me out on location. They tested more: on my other router, a Belkin, it still wouldn’t work, until they cloned its MAC address. Since my AirPort doesn’t do that, we would have never found this out if I hadn’t had the other router. After that it was a matter of asking the guy on irc (serial) about that and he found out there was an IP conflict with another customer. If I hadn’t had these connections I would have never found it, and helpdesk people would have been equally clueless. Likely I would have moved to another provider in the end.

So I can’t solve everything. I needed to tinker. And I did! After my interwebs were fixed, I pulled some cable through the wall, attached some connectors and fixed a UTP wall socket, so I will no longer stumble over cables in my hallway. So I haven’t lost my touch after all ^_^

UTP Wall Socket

I love being a geek ;)

Mobile phones, a history

Willow — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:04:02 +0000

Following a gajillion discussions on IRC over a long time, I started thinking about my history with mobile phones. This led to me googling for about 2 hours straight, because I couldn’t find my first phone ever. Until I did! It was the KPN Pocketline Wave 200, but almost none were sold in the Netherlands. Originally it was a Trium, and this took me ages to find out. On this picture the logo above the screen says Trium, on mine it said KPN. It was brilliant, it worked well and what I remember best were the sounds the buttons made (which I recall were impossible to turn off).

I also found all the other phones I ever owned. In a nutshell:
Number two: a KPN Pocketline Swing, which was my mom’s phone when I still had my first phone. I didn’t have this one for long, I only got it because my first phone broke and I handed it back when I bought the Siemens.
Number three: a Siemens A55. Dreadful thing, it unlocked in my pocket because unlocking only required holding one button, and it’d call people. Sorry everyone who ever received a phone call from me around 5 years ago! I took care of this one: I accidentally left it in my pants, which I then washed.
Number four: a Nokia 6230, which was easily the best phone I’ve ever had. It was easy to figure out, the buttons worked well and never broke, and it was a really sturdy phone overall. I bought a new frame for it once, and it was as new again. Drawback: the battery went dead in several hours at the end. Also, I was kinda bummed out about the fact that I didn’t have a 6230i, which had an extra button in the middle and more features/more storage etc.
Number five: an MDA Vario (HTC Wizard). I was tired of T9, and I’d decided that a phone with a keyboard was what I needed. I also found that Windows Mobile is quite versatile, even if it’s buggy and slow. Even if I had to reboot my phone every once in a while, I was happy.
Number six: an MDA Vario III (HTC TyTN II). So I figured, why not another one? This one was (a little) faster, had extra internet options, etc. Also, I got PocketScumm on it and I played Monkey Island ;)
Number seven: an iPhone 3G. This one pretty much speaks for itself. I went along with the big hype and got it too. Ny next phone won’t be an iPhone though; this one has WAY too little battery life and Apple is being an ass on certain things any other decent phone does offer these days, like tethering. But it’s cute none the less.

So there we go! I wonder which one my next phone will be ;)

Cubeecraft: Darth Vader

Willow — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 08:18:07 +0000

Darth Vader

I really liked how Sam & Max turned out in cubeecraft, so when I noticed this one I just had to make it too. Darth Vader, including helmet and light sabre!

Knitting: Cthulhu Dice Bag

Willow — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 18:56:05 +0000

cthulhu dice bag

I finished this quite a while ago but I thought I’d still post it here: my cute knitted dice bag. Thanks to Faragon I was able to start right away, since she gave me wool and the pattern for it. I think I knitted the pattern a bit tight but it’s not a disaster really. All part of the learning process :)

Cubeecraft: Sam & Max, Freelance Police

Willow — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:17:59 +0000

The other day I was clicking around on the interwebs, and found cubeecraft.com. You can download a pattern for a cubic version of your favourite character, print it out (on thicker paper), cut all the lines and then put it together, no glue or tape required. Yesterday I decided to try it out with two of my favourite characters: Sam & Max. It takes about half an hour to an hour per character and the directions for putting it together are quite self-explanatory.

Yes, I realise I have no life right now. This will change, as I’ve set up my own freelance business and my first job starts in June. Glee! ^_^