We were fucking around in the corridor one day, and some friends of mine decided to have a quick lightsaber battle, sadly I only managed to catch about 12s of video, which really rather annoys me.

Oh and they look like midgets because I had my camera in portrait rather than landscape format, then had to rotate the video which was then in turn squashed by youtube, anyway enjoy:

After finally getting around to pushing my bike to the bike shop for it to be repaired yesterday, I picked up some enamel paint which matched my frame in order to touch up some scratches.

I then went into town because I needed to pick a few things up, and spotted some Enamel aerosol paint in Wilkinson’s which I also bought,with the intention of making touch up jobs a tad easier.

I was a bit bored this morning, and after looking at my old Zen Xtra on my bookshelf I decided I’d get around to painting it, because it would look a lot nicer in shiny metallic blue.

As you may imagine, being clumsy I now have blue fingers waiting for an IPA wash to remove the stains!

It’s currently drying in the kitchen, waiting for me to apply a few more coats, I’ll  post the results so everyone can see how I turned it into something prettier, no before pictures because it’s a normal Zen Xtra, of which I can just grab pictures off the net.

I also asked the guy in the bike shop, if I supply him with the parts he’ll build me some wheels, so I should be going fixed as soon as I have some spare cash, damn expensive hubs.

Some of you might be interested how I solve the issue of listening to music on my Laptop, I could transfer files over, but that takes a lot of time and I’d have to create a new music collection. I solved the issue in a slightly different way by using mt-daapd, which is now (and has been for a while) known as Firefly.

What Firefly does is stream music and playlists to compatible audio players using the proprietary DAAP protocol (Digital Audio Access Protocol) similar to Apple’s iTunes.

The cool thing about it is the fact that unlike other streams used by people I know, shoutcast and Tunez for example, I can directly influence what I want to listen to my only adding certain tracks to my playlist, I can play these songs as often as I like, add things on the fly and all the other functions I’m used to when listening to music on my Desktop (including keyword searches of the collection).

I really like the ability to stream my music over my LAN or the internet, and if I had one of these Soundbridge Radio Wi-Fi Media Player - Wireless Home Audio System I could easily hook my mp3 collection up to a HiFi system, and even listen to Pandora.

If anyone’s interested I can write a more in depth overview of Firefly, such as what formats it supports and a How-to guide on setting it up.

To my surprise when I received my copy of 2600 24:4 yesterday I found a fifth hope armband in it, at first I didn’t know it was an armband and thought I had come across as nice little wallet type thing to keep my lockpicks in. then it unraveled and my train of thought went from wristband to armband.

Supposedly there will be another Hope con this year, and potentially the final as the hotel they stage it in is under threat from being bought out and torn town.

The question remains whether they  meant to send it to me or if it was an accident, I’ll have to email them about it.

So I had everything working in Linux on my Laptop yesterday, including the SD card reader which had been described as buggy elsewhere.

Then I had the brilliant idea to get disk encryption to work, which now works but other crap, following a reinstall does not, like the SD card reader. Frustrating or what?

As a little sideline, X will randomly decide that a file in your home directory is its configuration if said file is named xorg.conf, I had not noticed this until today. Really annoying when you restart X, it errors out on you and disables itself, only for you to find out that it tried to use the config for a computer with completely different hardware.

From now on, I will be documenting everything I do when setting stuff up, I do it in labs, why not at home?

Thanks to amarok and daapd I do on the other hand have the ability to listen all of my music…

Now to get VNC to let me connect to an existing X session, or setting up IRSSI proxies, VNC would be preferred so I can log in one location.

At least there’s one positive side to all of this, I can be sent to prison for up to five years now thanks to crazy fascist laws!

This is assuming I don’t hand my encryption keys over, woo!

My last kind of touched on dumpster diving, and personally I think it’s a great hobby, because you just never know what you’re going to find.

Personally I would have to describe a set of blueprints for an off-shore oil platform which Esso threw away whilst vacating one of their offices as my greatest find, and the one I am most saddened to lose (my mother decided it was junk and made it disappear if I remember correctly).

Computers for their magnets, RAM and what ever else I may want are another find…I once found a stuffed server cabinet I couldn’t move due to me lacking a car, frustrated I left the lot alone (big mistake!).

What else?

I have found N64s, which again annoys me for not taking them Mostly because I lack one.

Corporate manuals, and phone directories? Yup!

It’s definitely something I want to do more of, just for the sheer satisfaction of finding the strange and slightly obscure, but I don’t drive which makes things slightly harder, as it limits the ground you can cover.

I think I’ll try it get back into it over the summer, when I’ll be back in London and cycling all over the place…possibly trying to shift that server cabinet a company decided they could just throw into a skip, giving my mother a heart attack.

Maybe if I stuck to it, and found some good haunts I’d be able to build a truly free cluster for messing around with!

Now if only electricity was free as well…

I have this terrible affliction which I get from my father, the hunter gatherer thing is highly developed in both of us and has been as long as I can remember.

Even as a kid I’d spend hours taking apart electronics equipment I found out and about somewhere, to the horror of my mother, taking out wire coils and anything which took my interest with the aid of my trusty soldering iron.

I still do that today but to a much lesser extent, today I’m more interested in computers and related equipment, as a result the closets I use to store for general stuff are pretty full… Need a floppy drive? I’ve got 8.

You get the idea.

One thing I lack are keyboards, but that;s because I have this hygiene thing and you won’t believe what the insides of most (even on the surface clean looking keyboards) look like.

I also have quite a cool collection of magnets I got by disassembling hard drives, as well as platters and cases that I would ideally like to convert into something cool at some point…

For those of you that do not know hard drives have some pretty strong magnets, if attached to a radiator the strongest guys I know can’t pull it off, they have to slide it…Gives you an idea, no?

Obviously kids love them, and when my aunt was over my little cousin couldn’t get enough of them, while we made sure he didn’t hurt himself. (more…)

I went to the DMU Anime society on Wednesday and it turned out to be quite a lot of fun, we watched Blood Trinity among other things, which I quite enjoyed, and they even had a raffle. After spending £3 on tickets (50p/per) I did eventually win a dvd, a copy of .hack//Roots, which retails on amazon.co.uk for £19.99. To be honest it’s a bit shit, but I won it so I can’t exactly complain.

I’ll probably be going again the people seemed fairly cool.

I’m sure it was awesome, and I sure I missed a lot, I really did mean to go and I’m sorry I missed it.

The worrying thing is, I thought “Hey this looks cool, and is within easy walking distance from where I live.” but sadly fate was against me this weekend… I somehow ended up being unable to pull myself out of bed even after being awake for a few hours, so most of the day was gone by the time I was out of bed and dressed.

You’re surely asking yourself, what does that have to do with the Machinima festival? It’s fairly simple really, it was staged at my University, and as such I would have had an excellent opportunity to attend but sadly I’m just too lazy.

I’m sure it ruled, and I’m going to get as much information on it as possible…Watch some of the submitted material even and hopefully they’ll be back here next year.

What really annoys me is that someone from the Electric Sheep Company was supposedly there, representing their entry, so I could have gone up to them and said “Hi! I know this guy you work with.” then had a very long winded conversation about nothing, but sadly it was not to be.

I have turned into a real lazy student bum.

Okay as some of you may know I bought a bluetooth headset a while ago, and rarely use it because you look like a tit wearing one in a car, and like a right loony if you walk around with one, however I have adequately long hair to conceal one now and will be depending on my bicycle as my main form of transport from this Saturday the 22^nd of September onwards, so I will probably use it.

I digress…I’ve been trying to get it to work on my computer for the past couple of months without success, the trouble started when back when I was using Arch linux (insert link) and upgraded to a testing version of the distro which broke distro-specific btsco package, what do I do as the resourceful little villain that I am? I obviously set about compiling it, which didn’t work, so frustated I gave up on it until I picked it up again not too long ago.

Having finished my stint of work (I’d have blogged about it but it was mind numbingly dull) I had little else to do than playing around with my kernel, reading and watching random things, this naturally led to trying to get the blasted bluetooth working.

So I get the btsco source, and as usual the stupid thing didn’t compile yet again, I searched around and found this link, which describes that one needed to patch the kernel, rejoicing I patched the kernel and as if by magic it now compiles!

I was really excited at that point, so imagine how I felt when I type in the magical sommand of modprobe snd-bt-sco and it doesn’t load, an absolutely earth shattering experience when bored and sleep deprived while listening to The Smiths…

So after some more searching I finally find the following link, which describes that it contains an error in the source, which is fixed after simply editing one single line of code, something even someone like me whose C programming skills extend to writing a program which outputs “Goats are better than Moose” over and over while triggering the system bell.

So after recompiling, the kernel module now loads, and my bluetooth works perfectly albeit untested due to the incompetency of my friends for not picking up their phones and wasting my SIP credit.

In conclusion, even though getting certain things to work in Linux can be rather painful even after years of experience, like everything in life if you stick with it, it will eventually work with a bit of luck and research.

I’d like to thank Christian Mager and the Gentoo Forums for having the answer I needed at exactly the right time, I also took the liberty of uploading the patch to my site which can be found here in case someone needs it right away.