Wallpaper
Looking for some great wallpaper to decorate your desktop? Check out MintChaos's collection. There are some stunning images there.
Sep 1, 2003 @ 16:32 » no comments » General
Search terms
Some people land on my site via a search engine with very interesting search terms.
demonic
Why, thank you! You look very diabolical yourself today.
happy three friends
As Dame Edna would say, I can feel a song coming on!
Fragment tv
Not yet, but my pals Branson and Berlusconi think it's a great idea.
warehouse in order to make quicker response time
I'm pretty sure that switching from Ford to Ferrari will give you the critical advantage here, never mind the warehouses.
Don't fragment!
It's entropy, it's inevitable.
what women really want
*shouting* Dr. Phil! This one's for you...
what means PhD
It's agony, I tell ya, agony! Don't do it son!
Sep 2, 2003 @ 08:57 » no comments » General
Terabyte
Some reports trickle in about Sony's new 500 Gigabyte digital video recorder. 500 Gigabyte (two 250 GB harddrives the Dutch report says, not one 500 GB drive as Gizmodo says) is half a Terabyte. It's not that I didn't know there were 250 GB drives out there and that if I would put four of them in my computer, I would have a full Terabyte of storage. It's just that I never thought about the possibility. Half a Terabyte of memory just sitting in a box under your TV makes me suddenly realize how incredibly quickly technology scales and what we may see in another 10 years or so. Vertigo.
Sep 2, 2003 @ 22:30 » no comments » Tech
Webcam
I got a free webcam. The cord isn't long enough, so it's not yet peeking out the window. This is a capture of the windowsill and the curtain. The low light creates a lot of noise in the image, which is an interesting effect and texture in itself.
Sep 9, 2003 @ 00:49 » no comments » Photo
Firebird losing its tabs
I mentioned before that Firebird occasionally manages to lose all open tabs. It happens consistently in the two following instances, so be warned:
- If Firebird is launched by any other application (including e-mail companion Thunderbird), it will promptly forget it had any open tabs and launch with only the URL it was passed on by the other application. This does not happen when Firebird is already active; in that case a new tab is opened or the last tab is re-used, depending on your preferences.
- If you use Firebird in multiple browser mode, make sure that the last browser window you close is the one with all the tabs you want to keep for next time. Firebird only remembers the tabs of the last browser window you close. Occasionally I had the impression even this is not a fool proof method, but I haven't been able to actively reproduce it.
Sep 9, 2003 @ 14:02 » no comments » Software
Faking dead pixels
Last week I got a replacement for the defective Acer AL732 LCD screen that I had ordered, but that I actually never bought. It's a LG Flatron L1710B and as I have been informed by LG themselves when I called them on the phone, it's also a 16ms display. Apparently LG/Philips are making their own 16ms TFT panels and this monitor is one of the few available with this screen. There is, however, precious little information about that on the web, not even on LG's own website. It's a pretty good looking monitor with both a digital (DVI) and an analog input, plus some USB connectors in the base. The display is crisp and bright, and with Microsoft's ClearType rendering activated, text just looks sumptuous.
I had thoroughly checked the screen for dead (sub)pixels before bringing it home last week, so I was a bit shocked that a dead pixel appeared to have turned up this morning. I was looking at the WebWereld website (see partial screengrab in this post) and I thought I quite clearly saw a dead pixel in the empty space just left and under the site's main header. Luckily for me, the 'dead pixel' is just the remnant of some invisible text or maybe a supposedly invisible spacer image used for the layout of the site (you can select the surrounding area when you drag over it with the mouse). I was quite relieved to see the 'dead pixel' disappear when switching to another window. Yea for LG, boo for WebWereld :-)
Sep 10, 2003 @ 10:07 » no comments » General
ACRONYM
Found floating in cyberspace:
ACRONYM - A Capitalized Representation Of Names You Memorize
Sep 10, 2003 @ 11:22 » no comments » General
Webcam
Well, for as long as I don't get bored with it myself, you will find a webcam link in the navigation bar. Click the webcam image for a popup window that refreshes every 10 seconds.
Q: What am I looking at?
A: The parking lot outside my apartment building, featuring some trees, some cars, some passer-bys, and three street lights.
Q: What's that reflection in the bottom part of the image?
A: It's the OS/2 Warp V.3 box the cam is sitting on.
Q: Err?!?
A: My thoughts exactly.
Sep 10, 2003 @ 19:30 » 2 comments » General
Silly
About five years ago, when working for a publishing company that was upgrading to laser printers, I rescued an already ancient HP DeskJet 520 from being thrown out. The printer still works just fine and I don't print a whole lot at home anyway. Once a year or so the ink runs out and so it did yesterday. I paid €25.95 for an ink cartridge from Pelikan, because it was cheaper than the €42.99 that HP is asking for a plain black ink cartridge. Actually, if they wouldn't have sold those cheaper cartridges, it would have been cheaper to buy a new HP 3520 printer for €39. That's just silly...
Sep 10, 2003 @ 22:56 » no comments » General
Sun's shining
Sep 11, 2003 @ 08:39 » no comments » Photo
Schaap
Google sent someone to this site who was asking for the
meaning of the Dutch name "Schaap"
"Schaap" means "sheep" (singular) in English.
As for pronunciation, the "sch" sound is very difficult to pronounce for most foreigners, as a fairly hard G (as in "grok") immediately follows a sharp S (as in "sharp"), while the double "aa" is long ("aah"), concluded with a shortish P (as in the English "chap").
Sep 11, 2003 @ 10:21 » 5 comments » General
Cayce
Google sent someone this way, looking for:
"pattern recognition" cayce pronounce
This one's simple to answer actually: "Cayce" is pronounced as "Case." That's right, Case was the protagonist of Neuromancer and Cayce is the protagonist of Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition; one is a man, the other a woman. How do we know for sure? As is noted in this thread on the official William Gibson forum, in the novel a character misspells Cayce's name as "Case," making it clear it's not pronounced as "Kayseeh."
Sep 11, 2003 @ 16:54 » no comments » Reading
Interesting URL
http://www.six-thousand-chicken-fa-ji-tas.org/
Seeing that title made me wonder whether we're supposed to write "URL" (Uniform Resource Locator) or "URI" (Uniform Resource Identifier)? W3 has an informative little graphic. As I read it, you can use URL when referring to most stuff on the web, while URI (or indeed URN) is a kind of 'politically correct' term to indicate that this specific URI will always point to its associated content, regardless of the actual location of that content. So it is an interesting URL.
Sep 13, 2003 @ 16:51 » 2 comments » General
Routing weirdness
[Note: the traceroutes, contained in a PRE block, provided in this post have been edited out, because Internet Explorer fails do deal properly with the CSS overflow directive. This is the umpteenth really nasty flaw in IE that makes life rather complicated for webdesigners. Please switch to Mozilla Firebird or Opera that do support the most elementary web standards and generally present less of a security hazard than Microsoft products. Thank you so much.]
There's something rather odd going on with the university's routing (or rather, surf.net's routing). For some reason, many of the transatlantic sites are unreachable. For instance, I cannot reach www.userfriendly.org or www.bloglines.com and these sites do not even resolve when I do a DNS lookup. Strangely, sites like for instance philringnalda.com or zeldman.com do resolve and I can reach them with my browser, but I cannot do a traceroute to their location.
[traceroute to philringnalda.com snipped because of IE rendering problems]
Doing a traceroute from another provider's shell server, however, doesn't show the same problems:
[second traceroute to philringnalda.com snipped because of IE rendering problems]
So, my best guess is that there's something odd happening in the Dutch universities' backbone service provider Surfnet. Hopefully they fix it soon. Luckily Dutch sites and other European sites such as jill/txt and Anders Jacobsen are still available.
Sep 14, 2003 @ 14:01 » 3 comments » General
Stealth disco
Here's a meme worth propagating: stealth disco. Boing Boing links to it and Owen too. Enough talk... let's boogie!
Sep 16, 2003 @ 09:33 » no comments » General
New folder for sale
Ebay continues to be a strange place. One, still running, auction offers a brand new Windows XP folder for sale. You'll have to top bids in excess of $15,000 to get your paws on this though.
Sep 17, 2003 @ 10:13 » 2 comments » General
Reading websites
I have a question for the readers of this weblog. For my research I'm looking at all kinds of aspects of personal home pages and it's obvious that everybody who spends some time on the web has developed a working set of cues and expectations that help him or her interpret the page at hand. At this point I'm looking in particular at the socially meaningful cues embedded in web pages and I've hit upon a very difficult issue:
What cues do we understand to indicate "technical ability" or maybe "technical prowess" in personal home pages and why/how are these cues an indication of technical ability to you?
Related to "technical ability" you may want to consider the "professionality" of personal home pages.
I don't want to influence your thinking at this point, so I'm not going to say what kind of cues I've been looking at myself so far. I will expand on this question later though, or maybe add my 2 cents to the comments, I'm just hoping something new and useful will spring up.
As a corollary to the above question, how would you set up (a very loosely defined) scale or continuum of "technical ability" as related to making personal home pages?
My working definition of a "personal home page" is a non-commercial (not necessarily non-profit) website that is primarily crafted by one person and contains a section or page where s/he presents him/herself.
I appreciate all feedback, either in comments or by mail, and do feel free to link to this post to generate some more traffic :-)
Sep 18, 2003 @ 09:49 » 9 comments » Research
Your bottom is public property
According to the district attorney in Troms and Finnmark, your bottom is public property. He has not intention to appeal the acquittal of a chef who pinched the behinds of two 14-year-old girls while they were working in his kitchen. [...] "Touching or stroking the breasts without touching the nipple and touching the pelvis near the pubic hairs of the aggrieved party can not be regarded as an act of obscenity", the sentence reads.
That's what the Norwegian TV2 news site reports. One hopes that this is either a very bad joke, which it doesn't appear to be, or that the verdict will be recalled the moment a sensible person gets to take a look at it. Sheesh... if Norwegian judges and district attorneys act like they still live in the Middle Ages, they shouldn't be too suprised if someone were "to get medieval on their asses," to quote Pulp Fiction.
Sep 22, 2003 @ 16:21 » no comments » General
Pictures of my friends
I love these Pictures of my friends.
Sep 23, 2003 @ 16:19 » no comments » General
Affection
Unattributed quote found floating in cyberspace:
Computer games don't affect kids. I mean if Pac Man had affected us as kids, now we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, bumping into people, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.
Sep 24, 2003 @ 09:39 » no comments » Games
A new super hero
This is the Web-Site of Angle-Grinder Man, the U.K.'s first wheel-clamp and speed camera vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type personage. A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots.
This was just too good not to blog... don't we all need a super hero like that? Too bad he wasn't around the one time our car got towed to the tune of €300. That's right... in Amsterdam you have to pay €300 or more to get your car back when it gets towed, for instance, because they are doing major road construction and not all the road signs have been put back in their original places, so when you find a parking spot around ten in the evening, there is no indication that it's actually a parking spot for the disabled.
Sep 25, 2003 @ 15:57 » no comments » General
Would you hire
someone who lands on your website, searching for
emglish language job in netherlands
?
Sep 27, 2003 @ 15:25 » no comments » General
Background tweak
Taking a directions from Inflight Correction and taking the next right at Fawny, I ended up at Wow Web Designs. I've been looking at the web through a LCD screen since a couple of weeks and I've noticed that really high contrasts, especially white backgrounds, have become much more noticeable, and much more of a strain on the eye. My old CRT screen renders high contrasts in a more toned down way. Of course, I could just turn down the contrast on the LCD screen, but I love the crisp, vibrant display too much to do that.
So, what I've done is start with my own website and introduce a slightly off-white background color. This decreases the contrast between the black text and the background it's sitting on, without decreasing the readability of the text itself. What do you think? Does it make the site more or less readable for you?
Update: Added screenshot of the website with a white background for comparison.
Sep 27, 2003 @ 18:18 » 2 comments » Webdesign
Video game length
There's an interesting thread on Slashdot Games about whether the length of video games differs between US/European games or releases and Asian/Japanese ones. There's some fluff in the thread (what else you'd expect?), but there are also some interesting observations about possible cultural differences or differing expectations of games. An interesting question for instance is, whether Japanese games commonly expect the player to play through the game several times to unlock more features, or if this form of play is tied to the type/genre of game.
Sep 29, 2003 @ 09:54 » no comments » Games
Oh yeah!
Fresh release candidates for Mozilla Firebird (0.7) and Thunderbird (0.3).
Update: Firebird finally has a whitelist system for blocking cookies! Unfortunately, the new release appears to break the Tabbrowser extension.
Update 2: Not a whole lot appears to have changed in Thunderbird, but both releases (well, release candidates) still lack the release notes, so any number of 'invisible' things may have changed.
Sep 29, 2003 @ 10:01 » no comments » Software
OSI layers
For reference purposes: links to explanations of the OSI network layer model.
• howstuffworks.com (easy to read, different aspects in different chapters)
• freesoft.org (bare bones)
• netc.org (for K-12 schools)
• passwall.com (very elaborate, very technical)
• lex-con.com (handy guide which protocol stacks go in what layer)
Sep 30, 2003 @ 10:15 » 2 comments » Research
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