Posted by Per Hatlevik at 4:46 pm on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 6:13 pm on Monday, March 3rd, 2008
Nine Inch Nails have just released a new album. Similar to what Radiohead did with In Rainbows Nine Inch Nails released Ghost I-IV online and is experimenting with different distribution models. Straight from Trent Reznor’s lips:
I’ve been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn’t have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective - dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I’m very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts.
There are multiple ways you can get the album ranging from getting 9 of the tracks as DRM-free mp3s for free to buying a signed vinyl set for $300. It will definitely be interesting to see how many bands follow the lead of these two entrepreneurs and shed themselves of the shackles of a record label. It’s an exciting time for music to say the least!
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 12:16 pm on Thursday, February 21st, 2008
As some of you know, my apartment was robbed over Thanksgiving while we were all away and they took some stuff that was pretty important to us. Well, we were pretty quick about filing police reports and everything so about a week later they caught the guys on camera at a pawn shop just up the street from our place and a few days after that Sargent Harris raided their apartment and found a bunch of stolen merchandise. There is even an article in the Exponent, Purdue’s student paper about these guys. From the article:
The West Lafayette Police Department believes two suspects they have in custody are partly responsible for 75% of burglaries in West Lafayette in 2007.
Sgt. Troy Harris of the West Lafayette Police Department said that the two suspects, along with two others, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, have stolen approximately $50,000 worth of merchandise in the past year. He also said none of the listed suspects are believed to have acted together.
The first suspect, Michael Georgiou of West Lafayette, was arrested for multiple burglaries over the holiday season, and has confessed to being part of nearly 20 burglaries in a two-month period.
The Department also arrested Ray Moses, also for burglaries committed over the holidays. At the time of his arrest, West Lafayette detectives recovered nearly $10,000 worth of stolen merchandise from Moses’ apartment.
We worked pretty closely with Sargent Harris and it definitely paid off. We got most of our stuff back and the robbers got caught. Score one for the good guys!
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 1:22 pm on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
If you’re running Linux and you haven’t tried Thunar yet you are definitely missing out. As far as file managers go it is one of the best and I use it on a daily basis. The only problem with the package in Debian is that while it supports thumbnails for many file types it does not support thumbnails for video files. Luckily, it’s not very hard to add support for thumbnails using mplayer and a few short scripts. I followed the howto here and it works really well. In addition to running thunar-vfs-update-thumbnailers-cache-1 I had to run thunar-vfs-mime-cleaner-1 but other than that it just works.
That’s it! Now, whenever you open a directory with movies in Thunar it will automatically create thumbnails for all the videos. These scripts depend on having mplayer installed obviously but as far as I know most major distributions these days include mplayer or at least have a mechanism to install mplayer. In Debian the best way to get mplayer is to use the Debian Multimedia website.
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 3:21 pm on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
For those that don’t already know there will be a total lunar eclipse tomorrow evening. This eclipse has very good visibility in North America and it will be a total eclipse so it should be quite the visual experience. In the eastern time zone the eclipse begins at 8:43pm with the total eclipse lasting from 10:01pm to 10:51pm. I encourage everyone to find some time to step outside and enjoy the show!
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 4:24 am on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Someone mentioned this guys blog on the mythtv-users mailing list and since the setup really is quite extensive and ridiculous I thought I might as well blog about it myself. From the blog:
Over the past several years I have been slowly building up my “whole house” entertainment, security, and controls systems. I used to (and still do) drool at the multi-thousand dollar systems the rich put in their homes and do my best to get the same performance with less than 1/10th the cost. So far I have been doing quite well, if I do say so myself.
The reason I am starting this Blog is simply due to the number of questions I get from people who have seen my setup. A lot of people want to know how to put one of their own together, they want to know how mine is different, how my network is configured, and what hardware I am using.
This guys literally has 10TB of network attached storage which is almost unheard of on a home network but with the increase in digital media sizes and types we will all probably have this much storage, or more, in less time than you might think. It definitely tickles my geeky bone just to look at this network diagram and imagine what I could do with all that hardware. I guess I can dream. Time to stop procrastinating and get back to studying.
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 4:27 pm on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007
So, we’ve been playing Rockband pretty religiously here and it’s an awesome game! We usually have at least two guitars and drums plus an occassional singer so we definitely are making some noise. We played some poker last Friday and when that game was finished we proceeded to seession some Rockband. Let me tell you, when we turn up the volume this game gets loud, especially the singing. We’d only been playing for abouit 45 min when we hear a knock at our door. Of course, Karla is in the back with her Miller Lite and she yells, “Uh oh, it’s the cops!”. Sure enough, from the other side of the door we hear, “You’re right about one thing!” The officer was actually pretty nice and at least in West Lafayette the first noise violation is a warning so it didn’t cost us anything. Only problem is that once you get a warning at an address the next violation is a mandatory fine of up to $500 
. This warning sucks because it wasn’t even that late, only a little after midnight on a Friday but we were certainly causing quite the ruckus. This makes this the third apartment I’ve lived in in West Lafayette and the third noise violation I’ve received, but I’ve never received two at one address so I’ve never paid a fine. In any case, hopefully we don’t bring the cops back because we will definitely be rocking out again.
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 6:20 pm on Monday, November 26th, 2007
I went home for Thanksgiving break on Monday and had a really great time for a few days. I got to hang out with my family. Went to a show at the new Guthrie theater. I saw The Home Place which was interesting but the play was a bit boring and just didn’t really interest me that much. Thanksgiving was a good time. 15 of my relatives gathered at my grandma’s house around 1pm and had a really nice turkey dinner. That only lasted a few hours and then Hans and I headed to my dad’s house to eat again, it was nice.
Also got to see a few Carleton people and some people from high school so overall it was a nice escape from Indiana. The only downer was on Friday. While on my way to the casino I got a text message from Jake saying we had been robbed. The investigation is still on going so I won’t bore anyone with the details but let’s just say that the thieves love video games! Today was the first time I’ve had to file a police report and that definitely wasn’t fun but I guess shit happens. At least it gives me an excuse to buy a new LCD monitor .
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 3:23 pm on Friday, November 16th, 2007
I just want to inform everyone that the team I assembled to compete in the annual Quiz Bowl put on by the Purdue Engineering Student Council has finally returned with the trophy! I’ve competed in the event for the last three years and we have done well every year I’ve been involved but we had never won. Members of my winning team include Jeff Spector, Daniel Mendoza, Raoul Rausch and Terry Tarnowsky.
The format of the event this year was basically the same as in previous years. The first round was a round-robin seeding round with four teams in each room. After this round we were seeded fourth, though I guess we really tied for third because we tied one other team for first place in our room. The rest of the tournament was run similarly to jeopardy with a big board of categories and questions worth between one and five points. After all the questions on the board had been attempted there was a final jeopardy question and teams were allowed to risk an amount up to their total score. The next few rounds were pretty easy victories for us. In the third round we more than doubled the score of our opponent so during final jeopardy we didn’t even have to risk anything. In fact, we answered every single final jeopardy question correctly throughout the entire tournament.
Once there were only three teams left we did another round-robin format but only one on one. We beat both teams consecutively and were declared the unanimous champion. I’ll get a picture up of the trophy soon.
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Posted by Per Hatlevik at 12:58 pm on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
I’ve been meaning to get a new mp3 player for awhile and just recently purchased a refurbished 4GB nano from Apple’s online store. I really liked the iRiver I had but it only has 256MB of storage so while I really like the integrated fm tuner and it’s ability to decode ogg files, it just comes down to not having enough space for my music. And, since the refurbished 4GB nano is $99 and you can almost always find a promo coupon for 10-15% off it was pretty inexpensive to get one.
If you’re like me you might be a little scared of buying a “refurbished” product but as far as I can tell the most common reason for the nano (or any Ipod) being refurbished is a failure of the battery which is technically only serviceable by an apple technician . Plus, if you buy from Apple’s store the refurbished units come with a 1 year warranty against defects so it has a decent level of warranty protection. Of course, I’m going to be seriously pissed in a year when it fails.
Due to the popularity of the Ipods their support in Linux is excellent. There is no Linux version of iTunes but I wasn’t planning on buying any music from Apple anyway so that is a moot point. I use gtkpod to put music on the device and it works perfectly. As far as I can tell gtkpod supports virtually every Ipod Apple makes and can upload movies and music to the units with ease. Though my nano doesn’t support video playback it does support displaying and storing photos. Unfortunately, photo support hasn’t quite made it into gtkpod yet but there are two other applications I’ve used, both of which work: tripod which is available in debian and pythonphotopod which is a python script with a nice graphical interface.
All in all, I really like the nano. I still have a lot of my music encoded in ogg format but gtkpod supports auto-transcoding to mp3 when putting music on the Ipod so that isn’t a problem. The lack of a fm tuner is kind of sad but now I’m able to carry so much more music that it really isn’t an issue. If you’re looking for a small, light mp3 player that has good battery life and isn’t going to kill your wallet then I definitely recommend at least considering one of the refurbished nanos.
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Awesome Architecture