There we are, I went to Riksdata and bought myself this case, but in white. Very nice case for such a low price. All the hard drives go into a removable rack; the floppy rack can also take a hard drive under the floppy. This means I can cram a total of six drives into this case.

Now I just need a new CPU fan, then my computer will be very quiet indeed. After that, it will have to be enough of hardware purchases for a while.

I really need to buy a new power supply unit for my computer. The fan in my current one is about to break down. It’s already stopped completely once, and if I hadn’t been at home and felt the smell of overheated electronics, it would probably have burned out. I don’t leave my computer on when leaving the apartment anymore.

I could just replace the PSU, but I could use a completely new case. I’m thinking about this one. Good ratio between looks and price. I’m tired of all boring “computer brown” cases.

Could use a new CPU fan too, this one makes a rattling noise. But that can wait a little longer.

Other stuff I could use: DDR memory. For some reason I can’t use my CPU at top speed (XP 2100+) when using SDR memory, I have to clock it down to 1500+. Very weird indeed. I borrowed some DDR memory from Magnus just to test it, and it ran just fine at top speed with it. Ah well, memory is not a high priority. It’s not like I need the speed anyway.

• Lomo effect in Photoshop via Jason Kottke. A very nice effect on photos that the media whore in me likes.

• Caring for your introvert, also from Jason. The first paragraph of the article fits me to a T (strange expression, that). Introverts, unite!

• Daypop Top Word Bursts spots commonly used words in watched blogs. I really like all these nifty social technologies that are evolving from the blog culture.

• Nethack 3.4.1 is out. Good game, but I dropped it the instant I found Ancient Domains of Mystery.

• Audioscrobbler is a nifty plugin for Winamp, iTunes and XMMS. What it does is to make a list of the music you listen to, and will later be able to recommend new artists based on other people who listen to similar music. Sort of like the “People who bought this also bought…” on Amazon. Here are my stats.

I now own a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen. And I love it! Sure, I would have preferred an iPod with its smaller size and smoother interface and general sexyness, but it’s hard to argue against 20Gb for the same price of an iPod with 5Gb.

And while we’re speaking of music, two new groups will be playing at Sonic Havoc: Interlace and Funker Vogt. Very nice indeed. I’m not a big fan of Funker Vogt, but they have some good tunes. Interlace is very good overall. It’s a Swedish group, too.

Sorry for the lack of writings in the past days. My head exploded and it took a while to find all the pieces.

The annual book sale begins next Tuesday. I’ve skimmed through Akademibokhandelns catalog and found lots of interesting stuff. Especially among the computer and tech books — books normally costing some 7-800 SEK now go for 89 SEK.

Four books ordered:

• Homepage Usability: 55 Websites Deconstructed by Jakob Nielsen
• Java, XHTML, HTML and XML (author unknown)
• A book on C++ by Stroustrup (English title unknown), ordered for Martin
• “Världens dåligaste språk” by Fredrik Lindström

Total 306,50 SEK. That’s half of what the first book costs normally.

Mark Pilgrim is fuming again. This time over NewsMonster’s method of aggregating feeds. Here’s his gripe:

[...] it has one particularly disturbing feature: extracting full HTML content from linked RSS items. The feature is off by default, but once turned on (one checkbox during installation), every time it finds a new RSS item in your feed, it will automatically download the linked HTML page (as specified in the RSS item’s link element), along with all relevant stylesheets, Javascript files, and images.

I fail to see the horror in this. It would indeed be annoying to the site owners when enabled, if it downloads new content automagically at even intervals, more so if the intervals are extremely short. Like that guy who hammered my Audrey RSS every two minutes before I denied him with a .htaccess.

I find his arguments on robots.txt compliance to be spot on, though. It it’s an automated content crawler, it should honor robots.txt. Onward:

If I showed you a program that downloaded your home page (or any random page) and then followed all the links on that page, and downloaded all of those pages and all of the images on all of those pages, and then I told you that there was a simple standard way to control such programs but that this particular program didn’t support that standard, you’d scream bloody murder. (There are such programs, and they are considered the scourge of the industry, in the same league as spambots and image leechers.)

No, I wouldn’t scream bloody murder. Nor would I if someone used a downloading thingie to download my entire site for offline reading. Heck, your average RSS aggregator fits into the description of “downloading thingie for reading offline,” though it just grabs your RSS (well, unless it’s NewsMonster) instead of sucking down the entire site with all resources (images, style sheets, the whole nine yards). While the latter may be a bandwidth hit, I don’t see a problem with it. The only difference between this and reading the entire site with a browser is that the former is much quicker, but it uses exactly the same amount of your bandwidth.

Personally, I see this as a completely unnecessary feature in NewsMonster. When I read my daily dose of RSS items, I skip a large chunk of them after skimming though the headlines. Automatic caching of the permalink would be a complete waste if I never read it. And I like to read my stuff in Straw with just black text on white background without whatever layout the site owner decided I should look at.

MSN via Boing Boing:

‘Kalashnikov’ has long set the standard for powerful rifles, but if elderly Russian inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov gets his way the famous name will soon be linked to umbrellas, watches and even aftershave.

The inventor has formed an unlikely alliance with a small German company that wants to attach the Kalashnikov brand to a range of ordinary consumer goods that could also include snowboards, halogen lamps, pocket-knives and energy drinks.

I can already see the headlines in the US: “Suspected terrorists arrested after talking about buying Kalashnikovs and ‘doing town’”

Rich kids get free stuff: “Attendees at this year’s Grammy Awards will receive free 20GB iPods, courtesy of the Recording Academy.” (via Boing Boing)

Yeah, just give expensive toys away to the people who certainly couldn’t afford to buy them on their own. Bah.

Well, I do have enough money to buy myself a 5Gb iPod right now. But I’m saving for an iBook instead. With student prices I get about 1800 SEK off the retail price.

• Spaghetti
• Tomato purée — much better than ketchup for cooking
• Lots and lots of Coke
• White bread
• Sunflower bread
• Boiled ham
• Cheese
• Stuff to make a salad of — tomatoes, cucumber, red onion, lettuce and whatever else that’s a vegetable and looks like it could fit in a salad
• Feta cheese (for the salad)
• Cooking margarine

I like cooking. I’m a far cry from a master chef, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying some gastronomical warfare. While we’re at it, Cooking for losers looks useful for those who lack gastronomical inspiration or are just lazy. Or losers.

I’ll be making a Greek salad for lunch. Or breakfast, rather. No black olives, though. Don’t like them. No salad is complete without olive oil or black balsam vinegar. Mmm.

For tonight, I’ll make a curry Stroganoff with rice, and a light salad to that.

Do I sound like a professional chef or what?

Page By Page Books is a site that contains a whole bunch of classic books you can read for free. The way I understand it, the copyrights on the books have expired and they’re now public domain. Very nice indeed.

How about The insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer? Or a whole bunch of stuff by Arthur Conan Doyle? Or Call of the Wild by Jack London, very classic indeed? And even some stuff by Jules Verne, much to my delight. Yup, instant bookmark.