9 Crimes

Because it's such a wonderful song I had to post it here.

Pearl Jam Censored

From Arstechnica:

The incident happened during a Lollapalooza webcast over at AT&T's "Blue Room" media showcase. Pearl Jam's performance of their big 90's hit "Daughter" morphed into the melody from Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and Eddie Vedder served up a pair of anti-Bush lyrics to the tune. "George Bush, leave this world alone," he sang. "George Bush, find yourself another home."

Fans at the event got to hear the words in all their glory, but in the webcast, the lines were censored—AT&T made the decision to silence them, apparently believing that they would prove offensive to listeners. When Pearl Jam found out about the censorship, the band posted a strongly-worded message on its web site.

 

Frightening that in this day and age, big corporations are still trying to censor, even these somewhat innocent political messages.

China Olympics 2008 Countdown

BBC News Pictures

KDE 4.0

Ars Technica has a very nice overview of the upcoming KDE 4.0. KDE is a windows manager for Linux, in case you stumbled on this page and have no clue what it is ;).

KDE.org announcement

Nvidia abandons Video Mirroring in Vista

Currently I use a PC (with 7600GT Nvidia video card) that is connected to a 19" LCD monitor and a Philips LCD TV to watch movies and also MLB.tv. This machine is dual booting XP and Vista Home Premium. I kept using XP because the nvidia Vista drivers wouldnt allow any resolution higher than 1280x1024 once the TV was on :(. This was no problem at all in the XP drivers.

So today I installed a new BETA driver from Nvidia and I was glad to see this issue resolved ! Also had to install numerous Vista updates and had to reboot twice :(. But much to my surprise there was no option like there is in XP to display video full screen on the LCD tv !!! And after some searching it turns out this feature has been abandoned :(. Apparently Ati does support this, and it's called Theatre mode. So next time you build a Multimedia or MediaCenter PC, get an ATI card. This feature is a musthave for me, especially for MLB.TV. I need to have the baseball feed fullscreen on my TV, and not the tiny window that gets stretched to full screen as that doesnt work properly.

Article on IT wire
Nvidia Forums

New photos

Added some new ones taken this weekend when it finally stopped raining ;).

From Foto's Juni J...

I adjusted some of the photos contrast color etc and uploaded those to flickr.

Also on greendale.tk.

Linux at Dell

Slackware 12.0

Slackware 12.0 was released just a few days ago. It's currently available as a torrent, I assume the mirrors will have images of the ISO soon as well. This has always been my favorite distro, used it many many years ago ( i am really getting old). Though Ubuntu is now on my laptop and mandriva on my desktop. It's not the easiest distro out there, but it if you know your way around config files and are not afraid to learn and do some research, I think it's still one of the best.

It seems this release has some really up to date software, more info on allaboutlinux.

http://www.slackware.com
Slackware torrents
Slackware forum at linuxquestions
Slackware review
Review at ShiftBackspace.com

Potter reaches cult phenomenon status

Nice article (taken from AP) at yahoo on Harry Potter's history. I am currently reading book 6 that I hadnt come to read yet, to get ready for the release of the final book 7.

In the beginning, "Harry Potter" simply needed a home. Several British publishers turned down Rowling, believing her manuscript too long and/or too slow, before the Bloomsbury Press signed her up in 1996, for $4,000 and a warning not to expect to get rich from writing children's books. An American publisher had bigger ideas: Scholastic editor Arthur A. Levine acquired U.S. rights for $105,000.

"I can vividly remember reading the manuscript and thinking, `This reminds me of Roald Dahl,' an author of such skill, an author with a unique ability to be funny and cutting and exciting at the same time," Levine says.

"But I could not possibly have had the expectation we would be printing 12 million copies for one book (`Deathly Hallows'). That's beyond anyone's experience. I would have had to be literally insane."

Potter reaches cult phenomenon status

Mac or PC ?

glumbert.com - Mac or PC Rap

MACorPC.org

Linux leaders plot counterattack on Microsoft

Interesting story on Zdnet.com:

Leading names of Linux, the world's biggest grassroots software phenomenon, are spending three days debating whether an increasingly commercial open-source community should fight or ignore the world's largest software maker.

Recently, Microsoft has sown dissension by claiming open-source programs such as Linux violate 235 of its patents while striking deals to insulate the customers of two Linux suppliers--Novell and Xandros--from patent lawsuits

news.zdnet.com

Console sales

Interesting article on arstechnica on console sales the past month. Apparently Nintendo is leading the console race by a landslide. Who would have thought !

As you know, Nintendo absolutely owned the first quarter of the year, and with 338,000 more Wii consoles sold in May, the sales show no sign of slowing down. Still, the DS took top honors, with 423,000 units sold. These amounts almost look anomalous, for the sales of every other system are so far below Nintendo's preternatural numbers. As this trend continues month after month, Nintendo's domination is becoming a fact of life. When will it end?

So it seems the public is more interested in original fun family games than the next run of the mill first person shooter, Madden 2012 or Need For Speed XXII. Also I think the ps3 and xbox 360 overlap the PC games market a bit, with similar releases, while nintendo has far more original games to offer. So a Wii is a better supplement for pc gamers than a 360 is. And I am not even starting on the ps3, that console doesnt offer much at the moment, though that might change in the future when better games appear.

Drobo

Scoble has a very interesting demo of this new harddrive device on his site, called a drobo. Basically it's an enclosure for up to four sata drives, and it combines them all in one big safe drive. You can use any combo of drives, and it keeps your data safe. Looks very promising. One big drawback, it's usb 2.0 only for now, and thats a little slow. And it's pricey. An ethernet and / or Firewire connector would be excellent. Also it's not available in Europe yet.

Would love to get one though, since I got quite a few spare disks laying around and with disk drives now being so cheap, I wouldnt mind buying a big disk to stick it in this device. So I am going to keep my eye on these and see whether it gets better.

scobleize.com podtech demo
Review on gizmodo.com

ROFLMAO

ROFLMAO

Charity on That Catholic Show

A new episode has appeared on SQPN.com of That Catholic Show. This one is very funny and has a nice message to boot.



That Catholic Show #4 Charity and Mercy
Make sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, it offers far superior video quality than the YouTuby video above.

Two Cats in a Box

Two Cats in a Box
Originally uploaded by Morphisat.

LOTRO The game so far

Posted a little bit on aboutlotro.info on my experience in Lord Of The Rings Online so far. In short, it's been a lot of fun so far. If you dont have a lot of playing time, but still enjoy MMORPGs, or would like to try one out, this game might be for you !

digitalis II

digitalis II
Originally uploaded by Morphisat.

Look what popped up this week in the garden :).

How Scoble reads his rss feeds

Article on Scoble's Blog on this video

Tech Tags: scoble rss

Secrets of the Lord of the Rings

Episode #3 of this podcast was released on the SQPN website this week. It's best of the three so far, in my opinion. Father Roderick does an excellent sound seeing tour of The Old Forest in LOTRO, while also telling about the history of The Old Forest and Tom Bombadil. The music and soundeffects from LOTRO come through really well in this podcast, especially the music while within Tom's house is wonderful.

Secrets of the Lord of the Rings #3

tolkien lotro podcast sqpn