HD

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Feb 082009
 

No, not harddrive. High Definition. I bought a FullHD (actually: HD Ready 1080p is the new name) TV (the LG 32LG5700) and a BluRay player (the LG BD-300). If you are a fan of watching movies at home, than BluRay on a HD TV will completely blow you away. The picture quality is beyond compare, and the audio quality is breathtaking (especially when cranking up the LFE). Since I already spent most of the money I had for it, I could only buy two movies: so I went for Transformers and Underworld. Transformers I had seen quite a few times, on the television as well as from DVD. Like I just said: the BluRay version will completely blow you away. Every little detail on the autobots, the details in the background, and of course the sound is magnificent.

Tomorrow I will experience how Underworld will score. Let’s hope the neighbours don’t mind some extra noise on Sunday.

 Posted by at 04:33

Upgraded my system

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Jan 242009
 

Today I bought new hardware and upgraded my desktop system. The “old” hardware will give my server more room to breathe (it’s an old P3 1GHz with 512MB memory, soon to be replaced by a AMD Athlon 64X2 6000+ with 4GB memory).
To upgrade my system, I replaced my motherboard, as well as the CPU (now a Phenom II 920), the memory (now 8 GByte) and the videocard (now an NVidia GeForce 9800GT by Gigabyte). Apart from the network card not being recognized automatically, the system was up and running after two reboots. The first to enable the network driver, and a second to enable the restricted NVidia driver.
Oh, and I replaced the 360W power supply with a 500W version. It also has a modular cable system, so only the power cords I need are attached, leaving you with less clutter in the case.

The Phenom II has a nice feature (or the motherboard has, I don’t know): you can group the 4 cores to act as one big core (ganged), or you can leave it to the default and have 4 cores (unganged).

Ubuntu now rocks again…!

VirtualBox tip

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Jan 132009
 

Some time ago, I installed OpenSolaris into VirtualBox. Not sure what for, but I needed to test something recently and started the OpenSolaris guest OS. Unfortunately, non of the passwords and/or users I normally use seemed to work. It was a test installation anyway, so I deleted the installation.
Now I’ve installed OpenSolaris (2008.11) again, and…..in the description field of the guest OS (in VirtualBox) I wrote down the root-password and the normal user and password combination. Simple, but very effective.

 Posted by at 16:36

Keeping my fingers crossed!

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Jan 132009
 

After a lot of Googling and trying different drivers (without much luck), I now have my X in reasonably working order. I manually inserted the modules DRM and RADEON into the kernel, changed my Xorg.conf driver to “ati” (instead of fglrx) and now I have a 1920×1200 resolution again. Still no hardware acceleration or other bells and whistles, but this will do until I buy a new motherboard (with PCIe), and an Nvidia videocard.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed until the next (kernel)update will fuck things up. At least now I know what *can* be done.

 Posted by at 14:14

Ubuntu 8.10 – part 5 (last part?)

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Jan 102009
 

Right. Yesterday the update manager presented me a kernel(headers) update, so I installed that. It required a reboot, which I just did. “X can only be started in low graphics mode”. WTF?! The last time I had this (see a couple of postings back) I reverted from the non-free ATI driver to the free driver. It meant a little performance loss, but it worked. Now the free ATI driver is not working anymore as well. “Saw a signal 11” is what it reports, basically saying: you’re fucked in the ass, so you’d better like it.

If I can’t fix this in a reasonable amount of time, this is the last thing Ubuntu does on my machine. What a fuck-up!

2009

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Jan 032009
 

As 2008 was a year of pain and suffering for me, I’m already beginning to suspect that 2009 will not be so great as I hoped it would be. For starters, I did not win the 25M euro in the lottery. I started 2009 with the flu. And I didn’t get as drunk as last year (there’s no hole in my memory). Fortunately I didn’t make any resolutions, so I can do whatever I want this year.

Last Sunday of 2008

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Dec 282008
 

Today is the last Sunday of 2008. As you can see by the time of this post, I did not get up early! So, enjoy it while it lasts…

 Posted by at 13:33

Ubuntu 8.10 – part 4

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Dec 232008
 

Most definitely annoying. F-spot stopped working again. Not sure why. Did a restart and all. This is exactly the thing why I left Windows for what it is, and switched to Linux. Got to kill Bill (for inventing .NET).

Back to work

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Dec 162008
 

Today I went back to work. Not my regular ours yet, but if things go like today, nothing will prevent that 😉

I’m happy things went so well. The last time I tried to work I had to give up because of the back and nerve pain. Now I needed to watch the clock to stop working because I shouldn’t make too much hours….

 Posted by at 23:18
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