Ole Bakstad

Take that you apple fanboys out there who says every god damn cellphone or whatever is a ripoff of the iPhone or the Macintosh!

I got a tip from my friend Pål about the podcast The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe some time ago, but I haven’t had the time to listen to it before the last week. I really like how they discuss things like pseudo science and why things like creationism is bad. The discussions are kept very relevant, serious and contains lots of very good arguments for their opinions.

I currently at their 5th podcast (June 15, 2005), but I hope to getting up to date by august.

Before I started using Linux as my default OS I used Mac OS for 5 years. In Mac OS the TAB key behaves different in Firefox than Ubuntu (my preferred distro). When using the TAB key in Mac OS it focuses on input fields only rather than every object (images, links, whatever) in a web page .

Today I finally took the time to find out what the difference between the Firefox in Mac OS and Ubuntu. I opened the about:config and searched for “tab”, and what do you know. I found an option called “accessibility.tabfocus” which was set to the value “7″.

A quick google search brought me to this site which tells you everything you want to know about accessibility.tabfocus.

If you want TAB behavior like the one in Mac OS you simply change the value of accessibility.tabfocus to “1″, et voilà, it works!

You can combine options. For example you can set the value “3″ to select any form element on a web page. Read more at http://kb.mozillazine.org/Accessibility.tabfocus.

edit:

For those who didn’t know; you can press Shift+TAB to focus the previous selected element.

This may be old news, but I didn’t notice this before today (thanks to Emil for the tip):
You can actually get the Spotify URI’s to work with wine!

To get this working for Firefox all you have to do is:

Make a runable bash script

echo '#!/bin/sh' > ~/.browser2spotify
echo 'exec wine "C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe" /uri "$@"' >> ~/.browser2spotify
chmod 755 ~/.browser2spotify

Add settings to Firefox

First open the config window (type about:config in the address field).

You now want to add the following options:

network.protocol-handler.external.spotify = True
network.protocol-handler.app.spotify = ~/.browser2spotify

The last option may vary depending on where you put your browser2spotify script.

You can find everything in this post at http://www.spotify.com/en/help/faq/wine/. They also have a howto for Opera.

Today I went to Omega Verksted at NTNU with the plan to check weather or not a TP cable is working. With some help from Espen Øyby, a friend, I got the design ready. After designing the circuit on the computer we printed it on a special paper, which we then laid on top of the circuit board. A couple of minutes in a powerful light it was ready for acid. When we took it out of the acid and washed of the photoresist I had my circuit board.

The entire thing is a quite simple circuit. It consists of 9 LEDs, 9 resistors, 2 AND port blocks and 2 female RJ45 inputs. After soldering everything  together it worked!

If your interested you can see the design layout here.

Today I decided that I’m going to give twitter another try, but the first thing that struck me was how cumbersome it was to actually post a tweet.

The way I did it:

1. Open your favourite browser
2. Go to twitter.com
3. Log in
4. Write a tweet

I’m a Linux user and I love the terminal. Wouldn’t it be better to write tweets from the terminal? - Yes it would!

I have written a quick and dirty python script that enables you to write tweets from the terminal.

You can download the script here.

Install guide for Debian:

Step 1: Download

$ wget http://dibon.net/tweet
$ chmod +x tweet
$ sudo mv tweet /usr/bin/

Step 2: Install curl

The script uses curl to send data to twitter, if you don’t have curl installed you have to install it:

$ sudo aptitude install curl

Step 3: Make the config

Make a file called “.tweet” in your home directory:

$ vim .tweet

And insert the following:

[login]
username = YOURUSERNAME
password = YOURPASSWORD

You may want to edit the permissions for the file

$ chmod 0700 .tweet

That’s about it. You may have you reopen your terminal window before you can use the tweet command.

Usage:

$ tweet "I'm writing a tweet in terminal!"

Unfortunately it is necessary to use single or double quotes before and after the message.

I’ve just started watching the documentary series “When We Left Earth” by Discovery and I must say: It is awesome!

It’s about NASA’s accomplishments; the space walk, the moon landing and more. Tons of awesome footage from space in HD (watch this in HD!).

Read more here, and here.

A while back i ordered computer components for a server. Since school has been quite busy lately I haven’t had time to actually do much with it, but the last couple of days I’ve finally got it running.

The specs:

• 2.7 GHz AMD Athlon X2 64 bit
• 4GB of DDR2 ram
• 2x 500GB
• 4x 1000GB

I’m running 2×500GB in RAID 1 as system disk and the 4×1000GB in RAID 5 for storage. The server will primarily used as a private file server, but  I’m also running Apache, MySQL etc. on it too. I have (with much help from Harald Nesland, thank you!) got a DNS server working, and I’m now hosting the domain logarit.me (”logaritme” is Norwegian for “logarithm“).

Did you know March 14th is the PI day? No? Well it is!

Hurray for π!

To celebrate this awesome day I just ordered a π-watch and the a π-mug.

More stuff at http://www.piday.org/.

Have you ever wondered how you could FAIL twice in one day? Sure you have!

Here are two tips to get you going:

Tip one: The ATI graphics driver install

When installing the ATI drivers for your graphic card in Ubuntu: Never ever check what graphic card you really have, take a guess and stick to it. Be sure to spent at least 2 hours trying everything from hacking with the aticonfig-tool to reinstalling the same driver. After two hours (or more) you’ll might find out that you have a X1600 card, instead of a X1300, then the solution becomes fairly obvious. Instead of using 2+ hours you could have done it in about 30 seconds with the correct drivers. But hey, whats the fun in that?! :_((

Tip two: The famous 5-minute WP installation

When you’re about to update WordPress from the 2.6.x to the 2.7.x be sure that you don’t have any backup what so ever! This is a key step to get this guide to work. If you have backup of your wp-config.php, theme files etc. there is no fun in doing this. Delete them right away!

Now, download then newest wordpress version. Before you continue with the actual install you have to make sure that some of the folders have some strange permissions (Why? I don’t know). If you don’t do this your FTP-client (I assume do use FTP) will just overwrite the files and all the fun is gone. Instead you will have a mix of new and old files side by side! Now you have to upload everything from the newly downloaded version of WP and check that the FTP-client is set to overwrite all files.

When the upload is finished you try visiting your blog page, and what do you know, the update has fucked up! At this point it’s important to get frustrated and just delete the whole shebang and try the good old reinstall. The reinstall seems to work, all the files is installing in the right way and everything is great! Now you go to you blog page. What do you see? “There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file. [...]“. “wtf?!” might be your first response, but then you remember, you deleted all the WP-files a couple of minutes ago, including wp-config.php of course.

One should think that missing the wp-config.php isn’t that bad, basically it’s just information to log in to your MySQL database. Well, if you want to make things really interesting you have cleverly disguised your WP-database with a non-describing name. After some minutes looking through your databases you find the database with contains the WP data, and everything seems to go your way.

FINALLY! The blog is back, or wait, what the hell is this?! - The default wordpress theme?! Yes, that’s right. Don’t you remember? You deleted all your old theme files - and you don’t have any backup! Oh well, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to get a working theme up and  running again. Enjoy! :(

Summary

Yesterday sucked monkey balls :(