Home on Psy-Q's Braindump

I recently started reading Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.

This is just a short article to let you know that life without Google’s mapping and navigation systems is possible.

If you’re one of those people who only now discover GNU/Linux for gaming (with Steam and all), you might find this useful: http://www.ryochan7.com/projects/antimicro/ I’ve tried several tools that map controller input to keyboard keys, but AntiMicro is the

I was very surprised to see that Bumblebee (a way to use Nvidia’s Optimus technology on GNU/Linux) now works flawlessly on GNU/Linux.

I’ve written about getting rid of Google before, and that was before the whole NSA/PRISM shitstorm.

I recently bought a book through Amazon because their price was ridiculously cheaper than the competition’s.

Update: Just like XMPP is slowly dying, Swissjabber has also kicked the bucket.

One of my customers is in a very unhappy situation: He bought a piece of proprietary software that runs on RedHat’s Enterprise Linux 3, and now the company he bought it from is no longer available.

Here’s a use case: You want to run an application server that only speaks HTTP, but securely, over HTTPS.

With Google’s questionable treatment of privacy, you might want to gain some distance from that company.

I was quite annoyed that the Steam Cloud seems to misread file timestamps some of the time, resulting in game saves being overwritten with older versions.

I recently discovered Sublime Text and bought a license even though I rarely use proprietary software for work.

I’m struggling with those crazy Chinese fonts in Mingti and Kaiti style and couldn’t find a goot Heiti font, but now this page: http://wiki.debian.org.hk/w/Where_can_I_find_fonts_for_GNU/Linux Mentions that there is a perfectly fine Heiti-style font avail…

If you’re running into a ton of problems reading e.g. an ISO-8859-1 encoded CSV file into your (probably UTF-8) Ruby or Rails application, and if the error you get is “Invalid byte sequence in UTF-8” even though you’re giving CSV.open the correct encoding…

Roman Haefeli strikes again: Watchteleboy makes it possible to watch dozens of live TV channels using mplayer in your very own machine, without the need for Flash, a web browser or any other such nonsense.

Give this a look: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/05/12/vegan-black-metal-ch.html Thanks, lix!

In my quest for more freedom from companies that don’t take privacy too seriously (such as Facebook or Google), I found a fantastic FOSS replacement for Google Reader: Tiny Tiny RSS.

This is a great Google Suggest Venn diagram generator: http://www.technomancy.org/google-suggest-venn.

Most PCs come with onboard audio circuits that, at best, sound OK.

Since I’m switching many machines from Ubuntu to Debian, I was wondering if I could just keep my home partition intact and simply install Debian “over” Ubuntu, or if that would cause major problems with application configuration files etc.

I used to have a mirror of all sorts of decryption tools here, but the legal situation has improved over the last few years so that this is no longer necessary.

I’m using Windows 7 a bit more regularly for gaming purposes now, so I thought I’d start on a series of articles about Win 7 vs.

I’ve been using the new KDE 4.3 for a week now, and I think I’ll stick with it.

If you have Ubuntu, give KDE 4.3 a try or check out some information first.

Remember the 90s, when Microsoft had illegally established a dominant position in the browser market and the dominant browser was MSIE?

After the Norwegian ISO standards body, Standard Norge, accepted Microsoft’s MSOOXML file format even though only two of 23 members voted in favor, it became clear that some manipulation had been going on behind the scenes.

I like simple editors and use Kate a lot.

I’ve tried the Xbox Media Center, I’ve tried hooking up a full PC to my TV, but nothing beats the tiny little Popcorn Hour A-100 I just received.

This is the third time that a French court had to force a PC dealer to return the money for an unwanted copy of Windows.

The chairman of the Norwegian standard body’s SC34 (K185) group has resigned after 13 years, in protest of the recent acceptance of MS-OOXML by Standard Norway.

While Switzerland’s people can see nothing wrong with the scandalous acceptance of MSOOXML as an ISO standard, Norway sees it differently.

The whole voting process for fast tracking DIS 29500 (i.e.

I was going mad fixing a bug in a very convoluted barcode printing feature in the equipment management system we’re developing.

We are currently finalizing the server consolidation in our department.

We’re currently evaluating solutions for virtualizing GNU/Linux servers at the HGKZ in order to replace seriously aging hardware (700 MHz P3’s!).

Hurrah!

Serge Wroclawski tells us how to get the Windows tax back that you pay with almost any laptop on the market, whether you want Windows or not.

I love rsnapshot, for the most part.