BenV's notes

These guys are so stupid, they never stop to amuse me.
Look what they’re coming up with now…. A new digital format.
What is it with these guys and being completely out of whack? Why on earth would people want yet another format? (probably crippled too).
MP3 files work fine for most, put them in a nice little directory structure, add a picture file and a lyrics file, and you have what they propose. Only better since it doesn’t need a special decoder/player.

Record companies: please die. Now.

So while messing around with some perl/curses stuff I got fancy with colors and soon found out about the limited support of colors in terminals and therefore also Curses.
Anyway, I made this little “fractal plasma” thingy with it, see if you can get it running 😉
It’s not really a fractal plasma, so don’t get technical on that, but it describes it best I think.

To get it running, open up your favorite terminal that supports 256 colors and allows palette changing – I found both xterm and urxvt to work.
Make sure your TERM variable is set to something that allows this, for instance in urxvt:

$ export TERM=rxvt-256color
$ ./fractplasm.pl

or this worked for me with xterm:

$ export TERM=xterm-256color
$ ./fractplasm.pl


Something like this is the result:

Enjoy!

Somewhere in my mailbox I found a link to Impulse. I’ve messed around with pulseaudio and have it running on my server together with mpd which allows for some network audio fun, but that’s not the story now. Back then I wondered if it would be possible to have a VU meter and stuff like that, but couldn’t find it. So when I ran into this I was curious (how implemented, is it any good, etc).

So what the fuck are screenlets? Looks cute, feels cute, and once you think about it for a bit you immediately realize that it’s cute for 10 minutes after which you’ll kill the thing because it slows down your PC and you never really look at it anyway, but regardless I feel like checking it out. (continue reading…)

Since I quit playing World of Warcraft again a while ago (seriously Blizzard, what are you doing to that game?) I find myself enjoyed playing tons of other things. Funny thing is, most of the games I play are ancient. Games from the DOS era (which means DOSBOX, I love that product) like Master of Orion (and it’s sequel), Master of Magic, Paratrooper, One Must Fall: 2097 (which is freeware these days! Download it here), X-Com, System Shock, and the list goes on and on. Yeah, come to think of it…. the games they made back then were pretty brilliant, and it’s not just nostalgia. (continue reading…)

So what do you do when you’re looking for something to do while eating your bread in front of your computer?
(or coffee in case of early days). You read the daily news (slashdot, local garbage, kernel.org, happypenguin, you know the drill).
Anyway, I ran into another time wasting online game with properties that I like (RPG like, leveling, items, upgrades) called Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN.

Give it a shot if you’re bored 🙂

Oh, and they have a nice list of why to play, including “It’s free!” and “This list goes to eleven” 😉

Also, don’t blame me if you find yourself still clicking around while your coffee mug is empty again. I won’t refill it for you.

Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN

Oh yeah, here’s my char:

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

So I was messing around with some new domain registrations, and just because I’m curious I tailed my tinydns logfile.
…. WHAT THE !@(#*!#%(* is THAT?!…. I think, as my eye catches a glimp of this:


[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.73.***.** port:64500 id:383b * PTR db._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:11328 id:300b * PTR r._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:45174 id:0255 * PTR dr._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl
[Wed Jul 29 16:20:46 2009] 213.132.***.*** port:48779 id:9e01 * PTR lb._dns-sd._udp.winnipeg.nl


Now, these things immediately reminded me of the ZeroConf/Bonjour/Avahi garbage. However: first of all, I don’t run that on my machine since it’s a relatively new install that doesn’t have it yet.
Second, those IPs…. they’re not mine. Whois tells me it’s Quicknet/multikabel/ziggo… which some of our friends and relatives have.
That’s the weird part here, I can’t stop wondering why they’re requesting my domain while they’re back at home, so they should have a new dhcp entry and ditched their “search” line in resolv.conf. (ignoring windows as an option for now).

Google tells me it’s indeed Bonjour DNS based “service discovery” related, great, looks interesting, but I’m not in the mood to mess with DNS now… at least not until I have a machine that can actually use it. I wonder who it was though…. 🙂

Lotjuh was messing around with grub2 and its config…. fun!

Anyway, a nice tool to figure out uuids of block devices: blkid. (gives a nice overview per block device… you probably need to be root for it to work though)
Alternative: findfs, so you can search for a label or uuid.

Let is be known that grub2 is a kutproduct as far as documentation is concerned… but that’s no surprise given it’s infancy status 🙂
Works pretty good so far though, once you get the grub.cfg etc right. Also works with my ext4 partition these days (required a svn up and recompile/reinstall though)