Getting ready for a few days off...
This coming week I’ve got a few days off from my dayjob. That’s rather special, since I work part-time there and somehow I hardly have a week off, this is the third full week in three years. Of course, normally I got at least one day off a week and sometimes a little more but still… This week I’m planning on doing lots of stuff, one of them being a total restyle of this very site. Next to that I’m going to see how far I can get on some projects. That’ll be the balance somehow, working on projects and working on this site (and I’ve got work to do for Bright which still continues…)...
Anyways, I started off by overhauling my desktop. One of my CRTs lost its focus lately and I needed to adjust that… You can read all about it on the projectpage:
adjusting an IIyama CRT (part 2)
click to go to the projectpage
Then, this afternoon I visited some shops, somehow it has to do with the mindset I’m trying to get in for this coming week (does this even make sense?), anyways, I visited some second-hand shops, the next best thing to dumpster-diving and this is what I got…
click to enlarge
I just couldn’t resist this calculator, especially since it looks brand-new!
click to enlarge
Then I got this Apple Keyboard. Why, you may wonder… Well, take a look at one I already had (that’s one which came with the two SE/30s from last week) and spot the difference… This one is bright white! and I like this model better, it’s not as massive… (I’m a sucker for details, I know…)
click to enlarge
The calculator again… I thought I already bought the right batteries for it, AA, but on a closer inspection, I need AAA-batteries for it, four of them. But the shops are closed now for easter, so I have to wait until after easter to be able to buy them… (but then I have a green led calculator! weeeeeeee! *^_^* )
click to enlarge
...and the catch of the day, an Atari 1040 STf ... I’m not sure what I’m gonna do with it though… I never had one before and I simply couldn’t resist it (how can I resist yet another Motorola 68K?...) ... at 1 EURO!!! ... Geez… It’s got a strange monitor-connector, but it seems there’s a composite-signal in there somewhere so I’ll see if I can hook it up to something…
Well, and if I can’t find a proper use for it, I can still make a lamp out of it *^_^*
click to enlarge
...oh, there’s still a Cubase-floppy in the Atari… well, that figures. On the righthand picture you can see the total score of this saturday-afternoon… The only thing I didn’t mention here is a copy of National Geographic, with a lot of 3D-pics in it… (3D is some sort of obsession somehow…)
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Well, that’s a lot of scrap and I’ve got my doubts I will use any of it… but take a look at what I had to pay for all this, 3.50 euro (1.50 for the calculator, 1 euro for the Atari, 0.50 cents for both the keyboard and the copy of National Geographic)... Even though chances are it all ends up some heap or another, for this kind of money, I’ll take my chances *^_^*
HDRI in photography
I blogged about the use of High-Dynamic Range Imaging(HDRI) in games before (here and here) but now it seems the use of HDRI in photography is the next trend after tilt-shifting.
Wikipedia has an excellent entry on High-Dynamic Range Imaging and PingMag has an excellent feature on the use of HDRI in photograpy.
click to enlarge or click here to go to the PingMag-article
click to enlarge or click here to go to the PingMag-article
my energybill and a free hat
...that sums up my day… :-)
I got my end-of-year energybill and believe me, normally that is heart-attack material overhere (at one time I got a four figure end-of-year balance and that wasn’t a figure they still needed to pay to me…)
click to enlarge
And then… I also got an envelope from Doom and Dickson, with a free hat! And quite a nice one if I may say so…
click to go to this image in my flickr-album
There’s even a Flickr CREATE and CONQUER … and CAPTURED on film – pool ... weee!
with pics in it, like this one…
click to go to this picture (not mine btw) on flickr
Anyways, somehow I can’t seem to find a link on their page right now to get you all such a free hat…
...but I dug up the link I’ve been using and here it is... My guess is, act quick! order yours today! while it lasts! *^_^*
unrelated…
my webserver got past 200 days uptime! (but I’m gonna reboot it any of the coming days anyway…)
shamal ~ # uptime
09:46:34 up 200 days, 16:34, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.02, 0.00
geektechnique 3.0 is on it's way! yay!
About three weeks ago, I stumbled upon the fact that I’ve been using this site in it’s current format for over a year already. So, I did a quick poll about what you would think how we should continue and here are the results…
It had me thinking… I really like to spend time on a new site, but I need time for that and lot’s of it too… Yesterday I updated this very webserver, so it’s current again with the latest packages and such (I had a few glitches here and there during the day but I think I fixed them all).
Anyways, I managed to get a few days off next week from my day-job, so if there’s gonna be a time to shift this whole thing in yet another gear, I guess this is it… *^_^*
I totally have no clue what I’m gonna do, but I’m gonna start from scratch and see where I end up…
If there’s anything you’d like to see or you want gone, this is the accepted time and you can use the comments for that… *^_^*
Oh, before I forget, I’ve been experimenting with the RSS-feed (human readable! click it! ;-)) lately and been plugging my flickr and del.icio.us feeds into it… If any of the readers (200+!) has something to say about that, please do… (This is one of the reasons I started using del.icio.us again)
cheers
-mark
uptimes, updates & utterly brilliant hardware
The sunday-afternoon for me is the best time to do all kinds of things I don’t have the time or state of mind for during the week. Most of the time I find myself doing ten things at once in a chaotic fashion…
This sunday I’m updating this very webserver. Since it runs Gentoo, the packages can simply be updated by the means of emerge but since it’s been a long time I did that, I found myself with 149 config-files which needed checking upon. Previously, totally believing in the utter brilliance of Gentoo and Portage, I thought “sure! merge them all automagically!”... But that’s something you do only once (and that was my workstation… no way I’m going to automagically merge this on a remote machine…) *^_^*
It runs like a dream though…
shamal ~ # etc-update
Scanning Configuration files…
Exiting: Nothing left to do; exiting. :)
shamal ~ # uptime
16:57:12 up 196 days, 23:44, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.10, 0.06
shamal ~ # uname -a
Linux shamal 2.6.12-gentoo-r10 #1 SMP Sat Sep 24 17:04:45 CEST 2005 i686 Intel® Xeon™ CPU 2.40GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
shamal ~ #
It’s been running since the last kernel-compile.. (hence the uptime of 196 days) *^_^*
When I’m finished doing all kinds of updates I’ll give it a reboot…
Next to this, I’ve been busy with some old Mac-hardware I bought last february. I’ve got some plans with it and for now, I just checked if the machines need some work. In the first pic, if you look very carefully, you can see, one of the CRTs is a little loose… It seemed that one has made a drop or such at one point in it’s life, but I took it apart and repaired it. (Luckily I’ve got this modded torx-screwdriver, which I made a couple of years ago, when I modded this SE... When you look careful, you can even spot the Amiga motherboard in the background!)
Anyways, the SE/30 is pretty straight now. The general idea is to paint both of them, in plain white, to make them more iconic then they already are. This smokey beige really isn’t that great. When I’m finished making them whiter than white, I want to build them into some sort of installation. I’ve got some ideas for that, but nothing definitive right now… It’s gonna be a little arty party if you like… Cause even I wouldn’t be able to come up with a proper use for these brilliant little machines nowadays… So let’s make some *coughcough* art!... *^_^*
Oh, and then some… every now and then people keep telling me, in comments and when they link to me, that I’ve got too much time on my hands…
...like these comments, made by a certain Bubba
well, sir, i think u are to crazy smart… maybe u should go outside more often…
— bubba 9 April 2006, 02:11 #
Once again, this is bubba… the outside world is calling for you… LISTEN TO IT!
— bubba 9 April 2006, 02:16 #
hello! im sure by now u hate me! but a guy like you has way to much time on his hands to figure something like that out! yes.. it may be awesome.. but thats not the point.. u are surley an all time nerd.
— bubba 9 April 2006, 02:19 #
Well Bubba, I don’t hate you. But it’s not like I got too much time on my hands, it’s just what I decide to do with my time. I’ve got two jobs, totalling in somewhere around 50+ hours a week, then I’ve got this site and when everything runs smooth, I’ve got time for some projects… And really, this is how I like to spend my time, for now and for as long as I keep having fun at it… (and my guess is, that’ll be a while… either if you like it or not *^_^* )
$1500 for an eMate? hahaha! *^_^*
click to go to the comment
Yesterday, there was a comment on my “making a $100 laptop for $75! ...sort of…”-project...
— saminash 3 April 2006, 11:49
Quite a strange comment, but whatever, I did get back to him and this is the mailthread:
Mark Hoekstra to saminash
Apr 3 (1 day ago)
Hi Saminash,
Well, it’s not like I put it online for selling it or such, it’s been a proof-of-concept to show it could be done. But what are you looking for? an Apple eMate in general? I’ve got two of those, but aren’t planning on selling anyone of those, but it of course depends on what you’re offering.
Greetings,
-mark hoekstra
jimmy mike to Mark
Apr 3 (1 day ago)
I am fully okay and satisfied with the condition of the item and requiring the payment all i need from you is your full name and address where you want the payment(Your Money) to be posted to because i will be paying you via USPS and after i have forwaded our payment address to USPS then the payment will commence fast and immediately the payment has been approved by USPS a confirmation will be sent to you via email and after the confirmation has been sent to you then the shippment will be arranged via my fedex account by sending you a fedex prepaid slips which i have paid for and there will be no shipping cost for you to pay.So get back to me on time with your full payment address so i can order USPS to arrange payment immediately.I am offering you $1500
Mark Hoekstra to jimmy
12:19 am (21 hours ago)
Hi Jimmy,
Well, I have not mentioned the condition, still you’re satisfied with it, next to that you don’t answer the question if you’re interested in the eMate or the eMate with hand-crank. Next to that, the article you replied to is called “making a $100 laptop for $75! ...sort of…” just to ring a bell what an eMate is worth nowadays…
But okay, it’s your call, but I’m not going into all kinds of payment-address things with forwarding and such, I’m not sending anything before there’s money in my account, if you’re into some scam don’t even bother contacting me again, If you’re serious, you can transfer money to my PayPal if you wish, you can find the button on my frontpage ( http://geektechnique.org , just scroll a little down, on your right hand) or I can send you an invoice through PayPal. I will even give you a $500 discount (that’s 33.3%!). So for a $1000 payed up front, it’s yours.
Sincerely,
-mark hoekstra
...now I’ve got a feeling he won’t contact me again… ;-)
I mean, what’s up with these people? Probably googlin’ all day long for laptops… what if his scam would’ve been succesful and I did send him an eMate (with hand-crank!), what would he do with it? Start cranking? Pose around with it? What a bummer we won’t find out…
*^_^*
How-to turn an Amiga 500 into a lamp
click to go to the projectpage
On the pic you can see an Amiga 500 motherboard, which I use as a lamp in my bedroom… Check the projectpage for details…
(I actually planned on putting another how-to online, but I’m not finished with that one quite yet… *^-^* )
commenting can be done there too
Wow! it’s already featured on MAKE:blog :-)
and on Engadget Japanese as well… *^_^*
The Andy Face (part 2)
Well, I blogged about The Andy Face before, but this evening I ran into Andy again (just like a while ago but then I forgot all about it (I met Andy last Barcamp...)) and this time I didn’t forget to mention theandyface... So here it is…
click to go to this theandyface-pic on my Flickr-album
click this to view all pictures tagged theandyface on Flickr (and then you maybe get an idea what it’s all about… (if you don’t get it, don’t think to hard about it, it’s about Andy and his face… ;-))
How to prepare for Hanami
Well, with all the tech how-tos doing well on sites like del.icio.us/popular and digg I guess it’s time for a refreshing how-to… How about this one?
click to go to the pingmag how-to
And when you think “But I’m not located in Japan?”... me neither, but I also have a hard time believing people are actually gonna practice a how-to like How To Set Up A Load-Balanced MySQL Cluster (Don’t get me wrong here, this is absolutely no offence to that how-to or anything, it just puzzles me why it is so popular on del.icio.us and such… (it was on del.icio.us/popular yesterday))
...and to be honest, it has also puzzled me why some of my own how-tos have done so well in the past… Anyways, expect a new one coming up this weekend! (and I’m not gonna tell you what it is, but it ain’t about load-balancing a cluster or Hanami).
burn that feed!
Well, after I revealed how much bandwidth I burn, it’s also time to burn some feeds ;-)
I’ve got the usual RSS and Atom-feeds for a while now, but somehow I’ve got no clue on what this feed looks like and if there are any annoyances in it and such. Since a while I’ve been keeping track with my Google Personalized Home to see what it looks like and I tried to optimize the feed by that. But… I guess there’s a smarter solution to all this and that’s feedburner. I now made the feed of this page accessible through feedburner.
totally unrelated, but this thing is called a feed burner also…
They also have a Smart Feed feature which optimizes the feed for any given reader.
So, what changes? Not much, the rss and atom feed-links are redirected to the new geektechnique feedburner-link, so no adjustments needed on the reader-side.
If everything works out, this number should go up… ;-)
(it takes a day or two before the first results are in… I do have a little more than 0 readers…)
Well, if there’s anything that doesn’t work, or whatever, please leave a comment and I’ll have a look at it…
for people using textpattern, I used this wonderful HOW-TO
