WFMU’s Beware of the the Blog features a great Bollywood video clip. The clip istself is very infectious and will surely get a smile on your face.

I can highly recommend the whole blog site. It features a large number of interresting movies. Highlights include the food triology by Jan Svankmajer and The Complaints Choir of Helsinki

Link.

Boingboing features a very nice picture of a fly wearing eyeglasses. And since it is easier to copy than to write you own below follows a copy of the boingboing article:

National Geographic has a photo of a housefly wearing miniature eyeglasses, which had been “crafted and set in place with a cutting-edge laser technique. The glasses fit snuggly on the fly’s 0.08-inch-wid head.”

The article doesn’t say whether or not the glasses improved the fly’s vision (or whether or not the fly had vision problems to begin with), but they do look rather snazzy.

Link.

A while ago I blogged about a falling mannequin. Seems that someone has changed the flash file, so it now features a falling G.W. Bush. He just keeps falling and falling and …

Link.

This information is here for historic purposes. I am not maintaining the ebuilds anymore and they will very probably not work on your system anyway.

With the current amount of ebuilds on my blog it might be hard to find each one of them. So I decided it is a good idea to have them all together.

Here is a list of the ebuilds you can find on my site (if you have questions or comments, please leave a comment with the ebuild):

• Amarok-svn ebuild. This ebuild will build the latest Amarok (the music player for linux) version from subversion. You can�t be more up-to-date
• Exscalibar ebuild. This ebuild enables the moodbar extension for Amarok
• SmartDJ ebuilds. This set contains all the dependencies to install the SmartDJ plugin for Amarok

Here is a list of related ebuilds that are not hosted on my site and for which I don’t have any responsibility (so don’t mail me if they don’t work):

• libgpod-cvs-0.4.0 ebuild. A CVS ebuild for ipod support maintained by Nathan. If you have questions concerning this ebuild please contact Nathan under: nathan at toonetown dot com

Enjoy.

In august 2005 I decided to get myself a home theater PC (HTPC). Before starting the whole event, I wrote down a couple of small requirements for the machine:

• It should ‘look’ nice
• The size must fit the stereo
• The machine must be very, very quiet
• The sound quality should be as good as possible
• The machine should be able to have all ‘HTPC’ functionality without using Microsoft Media Edition

The hardware
As you can see in the list above, most of the requirements (looks, size and noise level), are dictated by the choice of case. Since the machine is going to be located in the living room noise turned out to be the main reason for choosing the case.

Based on the above I ended up buying the following components:

• An HFX classic case in black. If installed correctly (with all the heatpipes, etc.) this case can live without any active cooling. This means it is as silent as a case can be. I got it with the default power adapter (ST30NF 300W) and the iMON VFD-IR. Info.
• An Abit AV8 Mainboard. Info.
• An AMD Athlong 64 Processor 3000+ with Venice core. Although at the time of buying there were faster processors on the market, I chose this one because of the power consumption. Link.
• A gigabyte of RAM.
• The old ATI card that I had laying around, which I figured should be up to the job. It is an ATI Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9600 Pro
• A Hauppauge MCE 500. This TV card basically features two Hauppauge 150 cards in one. So it is possible to record from two channels at the same time. I opted for a version without a remote control. Info.
• A Terratec Aureon Space 7.1. I digitized all my CDs so the sound output of the HTPC is one of the key requirements. After a log of reading on different forums I learned the following two things:
  1. Stay away from Creative as they seem to do funky stuff with their bitrates.
  2. ENVY Chips have the best consumer sound available.

  I chose the Terratec because of the overall positive reviews it had and I must say, it sounds like a beauty. Link.

• A Seagate 250 Gb SATA Hard disc. A little googling showed that for Seagate has an excellent name when it comes down to crating quiet hard discs. Link.
• A BENQ DVD DD DW1640, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive. Because it operates very silently. Link.
• Since I could not have cables in the living room I needed to go with a WIFI card. Finding a wifi card that would work with 64 bit linux proved to be a very hard undertaking. I think I tested about four cards, before I finally bough a Linksys WUSB54GP v4.0 802.11g Adapter. The card has performed very well during the last 11 Months. And with the release of kernel 2.6.17 it’s driver is finally included. Oh, and it looks pretty funky standing up on its feet. Link.

The software

To make sure that everything created on the machine is transportable and free, I chose to install Mythtv on my HTPC. Mythtv features all the PVR functions one needs and it also comes with modules for listening to music and looking at photos. As stated before music is one of the key features of my HTPC and since I completely moved to digital Photos the ability to present slideshows in my HTPC application comes as very handy.
Initially I chose gentoo linux. This worked very well, but took an enormous amount of time to stay up to date. So after 8 Months I turned to Kubuntu Edgy Eft. More on that later.

As it turned out, a lot of the components (both hardware and software) I chose made a lot of problems… So building everything took way more time than planned.

Read more: the hardware arrives.

Just found this nice Barbie and Ken photoshoot. The two are really ‘loving plastic’.

Link.

The Kill Bill’s Browser site is trying to get people to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. It features a cool and well known design plus 13 reasons to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox:

1. YOU’LL ONLY SEE PORN WHEN YOU WANT TO.
Sick of seeing pornographic pop-ups all over your computer while you’re helping your daughter with a research project? Since Firefox blocks pop-ups, you won’t get tons of porn in your face when you’re least expecting it. On the flip side, since Firefox stops spyware from taking over your computer, there will be nothing to slow you down when you go and look for porn.

2. YOUR KIDS WILL ONLY SEE PORN WHEN THEY WANT TO.
Sorry, buddy… the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

3. YOUR COMPUTER WON’T SPEND ITS FREE TIME TELLING THE WORLD ABOUT VIAGRA SOFT TABS.
Experts say 80% of spam comes from hacked PCs. Firefox has much better security, so your computer will get hacked less. Do it for the children, the children! (caveat: reducing Viagra spam may also reduce total number of children.)

4. MOZILLA DOESN’T INFLATE PRICES AND USE THE MONEY TO VACCINATE CHILDREN IN AFRICA.
Uhh… wait a second. Maybe Microsoft’s monopoly hasn’t been all bad. Better donate to Oxfam. Seriously, you should.

The site even states that if you own your own site you can get $1 from Google for each Soul you save from the IE hell (I wish more of my friends were still using IE now…). They also have a script that can tell each IE user to switch to firefox.

Link (via Boingboing).

You can use the form below to send me an email.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

The shameless content thievery department found the following info on Boingboing.net.

Here are MP3s made from hundreds of 78RPM discs recorded between 1900 and 1930. Included are notes on the transfer process and discographic information.

Link.

Now I only wished they had a torrent.

Jord Swart is a managing consultant working for a Content Management consulting company in Cologne. He is responsible for projects dealing with one of the world’s leading Information Lifecycle Management companies.

He spends most of his time ‘on site’ with major customers in Europe and is mainly responsible for the initial phase during customers engagements.

Jord has worked in a wide variety of companies, including banks, insurance companies, electronic industry and the packaging industry.

Before starting his current job, he has worked for 4 years as a technical Consultant for Interwoven. During this period he established himself as an expert in Web technologies and a project leader. Before that he used to work as a Network specialist for Origin in Holland.

Based in Cologne (Germany), he travels extensively, and speaks the following languages: English, Dutch, German and some French.

If you are interested in a full CV, you can find the contact information on the contact page.