So Apple announces the iPad — http://www.apple.com/ipad/ — I suggest you look at the video (not the keynote). I mean, seriously, I’ve been thinking for the last 10 years that the computers of the future will be exactly what that is, a super-thin touch screen that is big enough to be useful (i.e. not the iPhone) and light enough to not be troublesome when you’re out and about.

So um, what new revolutionary stuff has Microsoft been doing recently? Is it just me, or have they been awfully quiet, lately?

With my previous praise for the iPhone, I must of course balance it with some flak. You know me, I’m big on the balance stuff. After all, I did play a Seeker*.

Anyway, the iPhone does not love linux. I knew this though. And this isn’t so much me complaining that the iPhone doesn’t love linux, as it is me marvelling at the grotesqueness of it all.

Look at what I am forced to do, in order to install “apps” from the Apple store onto my iPhone — and no, this is not about jailbreaking the phone, although you might think it is considering all the steps:

1. I have to get Windows or Mac OS. Yep. I read about iTunes in Wine (Windows emulation in linux) and heard it was “garbage”. I do this. I put Windows back on my lap top. For my iPhone. Because it is my master.

2. I have to install iTunes. I do this. Whilst asking myself “why must I…?” I do this. Obediently.

3. I have to confirm my Apple Account, FROM INTERNET EXPLORER. Hang on a minute here.
- I get an email to my gmail address,
- with a confirmation link,
- and clicking it in Firefox
- gives me the Apple “download iTunes for free!!!11111oneneone” page …
- and then when I open iTunes
- I get the “you have not validated your account — please check your email and follow the confirmation link” …
- so finally after many laps of chasing my own ass,
- I try the confirmation link in IE
- and voilá. Beau-fucking-tit-ful. Welcome to Apple Computing. We come in peace from the 1990’s. We mean you no harm.

Thus, finally, I can get on with installing apps on my iPhone. Great hardware, by the way, pity about its maker.

*) Only a select few understand that one and it has nothing to do with Harry Potter.

Yes indeed I am.

And I bought an iPhone. For anyone who speaks Japanese (or for that matter, Chinese or any other language which requires more than the average a-z), I can inform you that which I had wished somebody out there had informed me in a straightforward manner when I started digging into this over a year ago.

Yes, you can use Japanese and Swedish (or whatever combination) on the iPhone simultaneously. I can get my åäö’s which my Japanese cell couldn’t spit out for the life of it (me), and I can get 日本語 to slither out of it as well. You can send SMS’es within Sweden in Japanese, and in general, you can use them as you would in Japan, except that they also properly support Swedish.

In case you are confuzzled about how to do this, the Swedish (with presumed English translation in parentheses) menu alternatives for getting Japanese enabled is as follows:

Inställningar (Settings) > Allmänt (General) > Internationellt (International) > Tangentbord (Keyboard) > Japanska (Japanese) > QWERTY or Kana (whichever you prefer).

The 4th of October, as I was talking to my girlfriend on the phone while walking across the room I managed to get the far-too-short ethernet cable across my foot which resulted in me literally bashing the modem into the ground. It didn’t survive the trip.

Now, 21 days later, I have a new modem. My landlord didn’t break any new speed records on that one, that’s for sure, but at least he gave it to me for free (initially he said I had to pay money to get a replacement).

Ah well. I’m back. I’ve had a hundred different things I’ve wanted to blog about, but sitting down and writing the entries in a text file just sounded too ambitious for me. In any case, I’m back.

zwoc@zabre:~$ enrogue
Linux enrogue 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Tue Aug 16 13:22:48 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
n.
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
4. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
5. An organism, especially a plant, that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.

adj.

1. Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant.
2. Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado.
3. Operating outside normal or desirable How could a single rogue trader bring down an otherwise profitable and well-regarded (Saul Hansell).

v. rogued, rogu-ing, rogues
v. tr.

1. To defraud.
2. To remove (diseased or abnormal specimens) from a group of plants of the same variety.

v. intr.

To remove diseased or abnormal plants.

[Origin unknown.]

(dictionary.com)

Last login: Sun Jun 3 02:04:38 2007 from zabre
zwoc@enrogue:~$ sudo halt
Password:

Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sun Jun 3 02:05:04 2007):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
zwoc@enrogue:~$ who
zwoc pts/0 2007-06-03 02:04 (zabre)
zwoc@enrogue:~$ Connection to enrogue closed by remote host.
Connection to enrogue closed.
zwoc@zabre:~$

And thus my reign (heh) as sys admin ends after over 4 years of keeping enrogue running at my home. I’m hoping a lot of people benefited from it all, and it was all good fun. The reason I chose to stop is not because it got boring (although hardware needed replacing) but moreso because I won’t be able to maintain things once I move to another country.

Explosives: “the concept behind explosives revolves around the volume change which occurs when a component in solid or liquid form changes into gas form. Explosives of decent quality in solid form will change into gas form in a very short amount of time. In mines ammoniumnitrate mixed with diesel oil is used”*

*) Not using proper chemistry terms, no.

For example in mines they use ammoniumnitrate (NH4NO3). 25 kgs of NH4NO3 results in something like 70 m³ of “gas” (N2, O2, H2O), though this is a presumption based on the temperature of the resulting gasses reaching ~450 C. During a more powerful detonation the released gasses can reach several thousand degrees, at which point they generate a shock wave spreading faster than the speed of sound.

(This all is more or less copied and poorly translated from my chemistry book — I just thought it was kind of amusing that they went into such amount of detail over explosives. And noMrBushImNotOutToGetYou.)

Sysadmining has its downsides. But I’m back, and I’m bigger than a breadbox.

Two even.

Using IP-based telephony isn’t exactly new to me. I used my ISP-provided IP telephony for over a year before I moved to my new apartment.

And with my new apartment I switched ISP, and by switching ISP I couldn’t use that ISP’s phone service any longer. I first meant to use my new ISP’s phone, but they suddenly threw a $100 expense at me, expecting me to swallow which I didn’t. Instead I canceled my order to use their phone service, and bet all my cards on Skype.

Because see, I have an internal sound card on my computer’s motherboard, which Skype hates with a passion. Hiss snort. And then I have my old SB Live card from my old computer. To get Skype working, I had to use my old SB Live card, so I disabled the internal one. The fact I have two sound cards in my machine becomes important later on.
So, I got SkypeIn firstly. People need to be able to call me. I got a number in Sweden, in Stockholm. Yay and all that.

So then I got 100 SEK (Swedish crowns, ~$15 or something) worth of SkypeOut. So I can call regular phones using my Skype (and it’s actually really cheap).

That was a few weeks ago. All worked well, except for one little issue. Whenever someone calls me — or I decide to call someone — I have to tweak cables. Namely, I had to put my headset “in” into the logitech Z4 control’s “headphones”, and then move the control over to the computer, because the headset’s “mic” out was “tied” to the “in” cable, and then put the “mic” into the computer’s “mic in” port. And then I could finally “pick up the phone.” Shucks.

Then I realized what many others have already realized. Use one sound card for Skype and one for “everything else.” That effectively puts your Skype input/output in its own separate location. Which means I can sit and listen to music, and when someone calls, I just put the headset on, click “answer”, and start talking. The two sound cards worked together without any configuration aside from setting Skype to specifically use the SB Live card instead of the internal one. I can play music and talk on Skype without a single problem.

In celebration, I bought another SkypeIn number, this time a USA-based one (510 area code). If you wanna give me a call, lemme know and I’ll give you my number.

So, my CPU fan died on me today. Luckily I knew something was up as my computer sounded a little like a horny rhino and I’d been wondering why for quite awhile. So, I shut things down, consulted my knowledgeable buddy Brian about what could be the cause, and then went out and got a new one.

After I put the new fan in, I decided that it was about time I got a CPU temperature monitor applet set up in Gnome. I’ve always been concerned with the temperature inside my case, but I’ve never really gotten to the point where I’ve actually looked into it. I knew the sensors were there, because the BIOS has a hardware monitor page which displays all kinds of stuff. (And that is also where I noted that the CPU was reaching to and beyond 100 °F, which I considered a little high — and Bri agreed. And if Bri agrees, Truth hath been revealed.)

So I poked about a bit, and found lm-sensors. It was scary at first, and I thought I had to grok config files, but then I discovered the sensors-detect tool, which is kind of like a command-line guide that probes for various sensors and modifies the configuration file for you.

Joy and such. So I rebooted (due to modules being inserted and all that jazz) and then it all worked perfectly. The sensors-applet from apt showed my CPU temperature perfectly. It’s currently sitting at 29 °C which is miles better than the nearly 50 °C it was at before.