Oct 16 2004

Redshirt

Why did they even name themselves Argonaut in the first place? Don’t name yourself after the cannon fodder, that’s like saying you know your company is doomed from the start. Name your company Captain Kirk, don’t name it Security Officer Redshirt. Kotaku


Oct 16 2004

Song of the Week: Neuroticfish

Song of the Week is back, after being more like Song of the Past Six Months.

Neuroticfish - Bomb cover

This month week, damnit: Suffocating Right (Raw) by Neuroticfish, from the Bomb single. Download here (7.5Mb).

Neuroticfish is a strange bird fish. Quoth the site: “This project is not an usual electronic band. It is the brainchild, the alter ego and the artistic expression of Sascha Mario Klein.”

EBM Is Dead.com points to his site (and is even mentioned in a few songs), so I can’t really call it EBM, can I? Sascha himself doesn’t like to place his music in a genre, and neither do I. The only two genres that I really care for are “good music” and “everything else.” Neuroticfish gets placed in the former.

Most of Sascha’s music works great on the dance floor but still has very prominent song and lyrics, who are always about emotions, and easy to identify with.

Suffocating Right (Raw) is calmer than the typical Neuroticfish song, and is one of my personal favorites now.

Since it’s been a while, here are the SotW rules:

  • A new song every weekend.
  • Songs get deleted after about two weeks.
  • If you like it, support the artist and buy an album!

Speaking of music… soon it’s time for the Tinitus festival. This year they’ll feature, among others, VNV Nation, Alphaville and A Split Second.

I’m not quite sure I’ll go yet, though. Not long after that it’s said (no official word yet) that Assemblage 23, Rotersand and Run Level Zero will be playing the last gig of A23s European tour for his latest album, Storm. I’ve already seen VNV live once, and they’re the only ones I would want to see at Tinitus.

On the other hand, I could go to both, if my wallet allows it. The Tinitus tickets aren’t exactly cheap.

Late info: Run Level Zero will be the only ones to play — no A23 or Rotersand. Too bad, I really wanted to see them.


Oct 15 2004

Join the fold

Welcome to the blogosphere: my friend and neighbor, Kajsa!


Oct 13 2004

Gravedancing

Even paperback books have a far longer lifespan than computers. It’s a humble thing, a book, but the interface doesn’t change and they don’t need software upgrades and new operating systems. A five dollar paperback book will dance on the grave of a five thousand dollar computer. Bruce Sterling

Via Ben via Anne.


Oct 7 2004

Living wireless

I bought myself a wireless Netgear PC Card the other day. I’ve barely used the stationary computer since then, except for playing some EVE.

Freedom! I can move my laptop wherever I want! No trailing network cable! At least for 90 minutes or so, then I need to recharge the battery. Not exactly a stellar battery time, but I’m not really intending to use the laptop “on the go” anyway.

I also spotted three other networks in the vicinity, all of them without protection, and one who has enough sense to both use WEP and not announce his network. (Not that this stops me from finding it.)

Right now I’m in bed, and the only wire connected to my laptop is the one from my headphones.

One slight problem, now solved, was how to organize my music on the laptop. When my stationary computer is running, I can play all my music via the shared playlists in iTunes.

Copying my music to the laptop to play when I’m not at home isn’t a problem, but keeping it organized was. So I had a look at rsync.

rsync isn’t new to people who have some Unix experience. It’s an application to copy stuff from location A to location B, where A or B doesn’t necessarily have to be the computer you’re running rsync on.

I’ve used it quite a lot in Linux environments, but now I had to run it in Windows. Cygwin to the rescue!

Cygwin is essentially a Unix environment in Windows, with all the familiar shells and command line applications ported to Windows.

I only need to sync from the file server, running Linux, to my laptop, so there’s no need for an rsync service on the laptop. If you’re interested in that, here’s a good guide.

I have a batch file with the following command in it:

rsync -rtv -e ssh –stats –modify-window=1 –delete –progress echo@192.168.0.3:/mnt/data/Music/Albums/ /cygdrive/d/Albums

This will recursively copy everything in /mnt/data/Music/Albums/ on the file server to D:Albums on the laptop. Cygwin uses a pseudo-directory for different drives in Windows: /cygdrive/d/ equals D:.

The --delete flag removes any file on the destination that doesn’t exist on the source; so if I remove something from the file server, it gets deleted on the laptop as well the next time I run rsync.

Update: I had some problems with rsync checking every single file, despite them matching on the file server and the laptop. After reading the rsync man page, I found that Windows doesn’t store file dates with the same precision as Linux, so rsync saw them as possibly different due to the time difference and had to check them. Adding --modify-window=1 as an option to the rsync command solved this.

The command above has been updated to reflect my new settings.