February 2006 Archives

Mozrat told me about Flock, a new project that is based on Firefox but adds clever things like Flickr and blogging integration. I decided to give it a try as the theme it used was rather slick and I'm a sucker for eye candy. Things I noticed in my first few hours of using Flock.

• when you hit ctrl f to find something the search box will flash a few times indicating where it is, nice touch!
• Yahoo is the default search engine, smells like some investment here
• Yahoo is the MAP bar, why?
• no last.fm, what gives?
• I cant get the blog tool to work with s9y

So far I have not had a crash that a lot of people talked about, can't wait to see what they will add next although I have some serious reservations regarding their coding intention

After suffering the abuse of the users at my place of employment for inflicting Entourage on them I decided to roll out Thunderbird. So far it has been a success, people love the features, it's simple look and the fact it does not crash. While installing Thunderbird I found that the Mac version was on 1.5 while my Kubuntu Thinkpad was still running 1.0.7, nuts, let's upgrade. Not as simple as one would think, I found these instructions on the web which I then fucked up by doing sudo before the copy command. After trying to launch Thunderbird I got a pesky message claiming I already had Thunderbird open (very helpful). Anyways, to cut a long story short I found that by using sudo I now had a new profile folder owned by root. A quick chown -R on and I'm back in business, phew. Looks nice this new Thunderbird!

My name is Gerard van Schip and I was born in the most unromantic and backwards country on the planet. I found out today that only under very rare circumstances you can change your name to either your mothers maiden name or a new made up but Dutch sounding name. If you are a foreigner moving into the Netherlands you can change your foreign sounding name into a Dutch one but you can not change your Dutch name into a foreign one if you live abroad. After emailing, writing and phoning lot's of times with the Dutch Justice department I have now resided in the fact that this won't be possible to do in the Netherlands. So where do I go from here on my quest to change my family name to my wife to be last name? It looks like my only option will be to change my nationality to a more forward thinking country on matters like these, England or Japan by the looks of things. This is something I have no problems with in light of my recent experience with the pencil pushers in the Netherlands. Forward and open minded country my ass.

This is something I hear a lot, something I looked into when I first switched to Linux and guess what I discovered? There is no comparing them spread over all the different distro's. The last few weeks I have been playing with various distro's and discovered that both distro's look either shit or hot depending on the distro. Just my personal opinion here but just try it out and you will find the same. So far I found that KDE looks good on open SUSE and Kubuntu while Gnome looks good on Fedora and Ubuntu. Both KDE and Gnome look ok... ish on Mandriva, what's the deal with Mandriva anyways? I heard and read reviews that it is supposed to be super friendly and good looking but out of all the distro's I tried I found it the most frustrating and amateuristic looking one. So there ya go, please all of you bury your hatchets, both KDE and Gnome suck and shine depending on your distro of choice.

I bought this little gem on eBay from a guy in the Philipines. It was made on November 1971, one month after I was born ^_^ There where no instructions on how to use it and a web search did not reveal anything so I thought I would blog about it in case someone else does a google. The time can be changed by pulling the crown and turning it. If you need to change the day you will have to turn the crown a full 24 hours to advance a day. This watch also lets you choose between Kanji and English which can be changed by pressing the crown all the way in. Lastly the top button is used to stop and start the chronograph function while the bottom button resets the chronograph.