Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Another two months uptime, another powercut :|

But this time, 5. 10 seconds of power for every 20 minutes of darkness… But it finally prompted me to discover the useful combination of screen and cron’s @reboot timer, to allow various user-level services to start automatically (eg IRC logging)

Firstly, my desktop had it’s first non-hardware-related reboot in years, due to SVGAlib messing with the display. They put “Warning: this will almost certainly mess up your display and require a reboot” in the docs, but not on the front of every app that uses it

Then I found that in the process of upgrading to breezy, X had gone — the two core parts of it had been marked mutually exclusive. Also, the font paths mysteriously needed changing. For the first time in memory, linux’s “warning: do not use this software, it is not ready, and is guaranteed to break something” has been less stable than windows’ “finished, bug-free, ready for business use” :O

Zomgpics. Twas quite the medium sized affair, small enough to see in a couple of hours, yet big enough to warrant the 10 pound entry.

Much free stuff was gained, along with some products, like GitS:SAC — which has an impressively non-ghey English dub (*comparatively*. It’s still not great, but it’s good enough to watch, and lets my eyes focus on the visauls rather than the subtitle bar). Also t-shirt, and azudai manga.

I’ve set up an icecast/ogg server with music database and web front end, so I (and anyone else, for that matter), can listen to my music collection from anywhere online \o/

ED for less hate> People fail at finding good software; Even when offering bittorrent / foobar / mplayer / firefox as replacements, most choose to stick with what they’re using already. Even those who are willing to change keep needing me to poke them along, else they get slack and end up using bad things all over again :( Much as I could use psychology-fu to explain it, chalking it up to “people are morons” is much more efficient…

To explain why this has a point more than religious style evengialism – if people used decent software;

* I could be distributing my videos in mpeg4 or snow, saving 25-75% of the bandwidth used on videos, and having higher quality. As it is I need to use the bloated and ugly mpeg1, because that’s all some people can play.

* With jpeg2000 I could further cut file sizes by 3-5 times, and have lossless mode for files worthy of it.

* With full alpha support I could have anti-aliased widgets, rather than the current indexed pngs, which are as jaggy as gifs.

* If people used IRC I wouldn’t have to deal with the horrible mess that are IM networks.

* With any decent music player, I could be using ogg or flac to get a better filesize / quality ratio, and not be infringing on encoding patents.

* If people used firefox I could spend 5 minutes writing good code rather than spending hours breaking things to look right in IE, having to work round all the rendering bugs.

The common denominators are so low that they hurt, yet people are happy with them through stubbornness and ignorance. So sad :(