Present Perfect

Apparently, the first track off Mew's new album is called New Terrain, and when the song is played backwards, it's an entirely different song called Nervous. Obviously this stretches the concept of 'song' a little, but both songs definitely have their own lyrics that you can somewhat make out.

Oh, you crazy Danish indie band! Your raised fist against my new music app will have to be dealt with somehow, but I don't think I will add the concept of 'this track is this section of audiofile, but played backwards' just yet until I can find at least one more case of this kind of craziness!

For now, I will probably make do by reversing the file to a second flac file, and labelling it as an extra bonus track or something.

But still, awesome attempt from a brave band! Luckily I already had tickets for their fall show in Belgium, finally!

Apparently, the first track off Mew's new album is called New Terrain, and when the song is played backwards, it's an entirely different song called Nervous. Obviously this stretches the...

The phone doesn't take great pictures, but I'm sure you get the idea:

71095

A nice, inspiring view.

The phone doesn't take great pictures, but I'm sure you get the idea: 71095 A nice, inspiring view.

Woke up around 10.30 at my parent's place in Gent, after a birthday. Went to Evergem to have a brunch with my godson and his parents. Drove to Beerse, in the Kempen, for the baby shower of Willeke's fourth kid. Gorged myself on candy.

Drove back to Mariakerke for a tango evening at the enchanging Parkkaffee, a place where I used to play with the boy scouts as a kid. Our teachers were there too. Kids recognizing Kristien were all nice and polite and either asked for autographs or came to bring them pictures they made.

Then drove off to the coast to the seaside house my parents bought last year, which they've done up wonderfully, and now has a little garden area with a fishpond, and a bunch of sewage tubes where they grow their herbs, an idea I definitely must steal.

Belgium is so wonderfully tiny, you can get pretty much anywhere in under two hours!

Tomorrow I will work from the first time from this house by the sea, and it looks like everything is ready and working here to do so. Awesome!

Bonus: there's a maintained pool here and because the weather's been so good, they will keep it open next week for one more week than usual.

Woke up around 10.30 at my parent's place in Gent, after a birthday. Went to Evergem to have a brunch with my godson and his parents. Drove to Beerse, in...

This morning I wanted to upgrade my laptop to F11 after both my work and home desktops had been upgraded to F11 64-bit a while back.

Since a few releases I've been maintaining and extending my own upgrade guide which makes the process decidedly less painful. In the past I would have my flow interrupted for a few weeks as I ran into yet another thing that wasn't installed or set up. Now I can just put myself in 'machine upgrade' mode and follow the instructions, and adapt them as I go.

Two particular things were annoying this time so I fixed them permanently and crossed off some todo items from my GTD list in the process.

First of all, since the laptop is i386 as opposed to the x86_64 installs I had previously, I hadn't yet rebuilt packages that I maintain for i386. So I started rebuilding them. And then I realized that I shouldn't rebuilt noarch packages, I should fix my packaging symlink script to take those into account too.

So, converted my ugly shell script into a slightly less ugly python script that finally is smart enough to put any noarch rpm into the package repos for all archs.

Then I rebuilt the arch packages, and finally created a tao-release rpm so that enabling my repo can now be a one-click install. Should have done this a long time ago.

As you might expect, no promises on quality in that repo, but I use it myself over a bunch of machines, and drop packages there of projects I work on, or packages I still need to submit to Fedora.

While I was on a roll, I also finally updated those package pages and links, dropped the links to the pre-Fedora-9 packages (though they're all still there if you browse), upgraded from WordPress 2.8.0 to 2.8.4 (still a huge drag).

Anyways, a good start to a Saturday after the worst migraine attack I've ever had last night. My back feels like it's welded shut, but hey, today seems to be an ok day.

This morning I wanted to upgrade my laptop to F11 after both my work and home desktops had been upgraded to F11 64-bit a while back. Since a few releases...

5 things I want from an ebook reader:

• I should be able to take notes while reading. Bonus points for having decent OCR so later on my notes are searchable.
• I want to use it to learn languages. So I want to read a book in Spanish, and words should be clickable or stylusoverable and give me the English translation. It's my number one annoyance when reading paper books in new languages, and I don't want to lug a dictionary around.
• I want it to be easy to get books onto it based on my Facebook reading list, Amazon wishlist, O'Reilly bookshelf, ...
• I want to be able to put my own texts on it; pdfs I've downloaded, manuals we make, .... No proprietary formats please.
• I should be able to do this stuff from Linux.

Obviously this goes on top of normal requirements like 'be light enough to carry around in addition to my usual laptop' (I usually carry a book as well so that should be no problem) and 'have decent battery life'.

Does this already exist ? Can I buy it in Europe ?

5 things I want from an ebook reader: I should be able to take notes while reading. Bonus points for having decent OCR so later on my notes are searchable....