Year: 2008

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I’m kind of fascinated by this new trend of stream-based legal music players. I mean, they’re in no way a real alternative to those of us who like being able to listen to our music when offline (and yeah, there are some of us who aren’t online 24/7. Sometimes, for instance, I’m taking a walk. Or riding the train. Whatever), but they are a nice example of a new idea, born of the availability of illegal music on the web – these sites and services represent the industry’s attempts to renew themselves for the new millennium. I see them as one of the last shudders of a dying industry – as many of you already know, I don’t really see the point in there being a music “industry”. The idea that people would suddenly stop creating music just because they’re not paid to… it’s just ridiculous.

But anyways, yeah, Spotify… I recently got hold of an invite, and decided to test the bugger out. Here are my results…

The Client is Mac/Windows only, in theory. Luckily, the Windows client runs very well in Wine under Linux, so that’s not that big of an obstacle. It’s very clean and simple, which is never a bad thing in my book.  It’s a bit like a much better looking Itunes without the bloat. And it’s fast, at least on my computer. No UI delays whatsoever. Impressive.

Not many customization options at the moment, though. I can’t even find a way to sort the contents of playlists by track number, which I find kind of barbaric. I got the same problem with my phone. I mean, I prefer sorting my music by artist – year – album – tracknumber – trackname. Why is this a problem? Or are everyone just so used to having a bif unsorted CLUMP of a folder containing all their mp3’s and just using the random/shuffle function? have people forgotten how to listen to albums? I mean, take Beatles for example. Listen to the White Album. It’s a self-contained whole, each track laid out beautifully, there’s some real thought put into the way the tracks are ordered. And now they fucking sort it ALPHABETICALLY?

…yeah, where was i? Yeah the client. It’s simplistic, which is both good and bad. I give it a solid 7 out of 10 just for being different, since most players out there are bloated pieces of crap.It’d been nice to be able to listen through a browser, but I guess that’s just not in the stars…

The Library is kind of impressive, actually. I decided to use a very non-scientific method of checking it out quickly: A few weeks ago, when I got my new phone (review on its way…), I got a 2gb memory card with it. I then spent a few hour combing through my massive collection of mp3’s and selected a few artists and albums I simply could do without. Together, they form a pretty good picture of my taste in music (or lack thereof). A crossection, I think you could say.

So,  in alphabetical order:

Atari Teenage Riot: Burn, Berlin, Burn

Nope, but they did have 1995, which is also a good album, I think. Not quite as good, but good nonetheless. I suppose I should be happy they had anything.

Bad Religion: The Gray Race

Nope, but they did have a few appearences of Bad Religion on a few compilations. I hate compilations, they cheapen the whole listening experience.

Bikini Kill: Reject All American

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha *sniff* hahahahahahahaha

No, seriously. I didn’t even expect to find them. So I’m not very disappointed.

Creedence Clearwater Revival: The Very Best Of

Erh, yeah. Unsurprisingly, they did not have the exact compilation I have, but one very similar. Not very surprising, you can’t have a music service without creedence. It’d be like… I dunno, fire without heat? Simply not done, and it’s against the laws of nature.

Dropkick Murphys: Do or Die and Sing Loud, Sing Proud

Like five or six compilation albums, no full albums. Bummer.

Frida Hyvönen: Until Death Comes

Two songs, in total. So no. Not that I particularly mind, Frida was put onthis listas an afterthought. I’ll probably replace her with Sedlighetsroteln/Looptroop any day now.

Jefferson Airplane: Surrealistic Pillow

Yes. Pleasantly surpsised, I discovered no less than 9-10 full albums, amongst them what I usually think of as one of the greatest albums ever. Mostly because of White Rabbit, which is of course one of the best songs in all of existence, but the rest are good too.

Johnny Cash: American IV: The Man Comes Around

Yup, most definitely. Plus a lot (A LOT) of other Cash albums. Very nice.

Judas Priest: Hellbent for Leather

Nope. A bunch of other Judas stuff, though. Not that I really care, Judas Priest were put here for the same reasons as Frida Hyvönen.

LOK: Naken, Blästrad och Skitsur and Ut Ur Discot Och In I Verkligheten

Naken, Böästrad och Skitsur I could find, as well as Sunk 500 and others, plus a bunch of singles. Reasonably happy.

Lolita Storm: Girls Fucking Things Up, Hot Lips Wet Pants and Sick Slits

I got three albums, they got fucking squat. ‘Nuff said.

Marilyn Manson: Antichrist Superstar

Yup, and every other CD this little sellout creep has ever done. Sellout or not, he’s part of my history and I still like some of his early works…

Nationalteatern: Greatest Hits

No, but on the other hand, it’s a fucking compilation. They do have a number of the real albums, which is kind of surprising, and very nice. I guess they’re not subversive enough anymore. Maybe because people don’t listen to the lyrics anymore…

Negativland: No Business

Nope, just Over the Edge vol. 4, a particularly pointless creation. If they at least had had stuff like Dispepsi… But nope.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Murder Ballads

Yup. Kind of an impressive Nick Cave collection, actually. Nice.

Rammstein: Sehnsucht

The only Rammstein I find are a few singles and some soundtracks they’ve appeared on (Matrix, Resident Evil etc).

Rasta Knast: Probegepogt

I would have been very surprised. Actually, I was suprised there was anything, really. Three songs from various punk compilations.

Ronny Eriksson & J-O Orkestern: Orätt-visor

I already know this is kind of hard to find, so I was very unsurprised it wasn’t in the Spotify library.

Sophie Zelmani: Time to KillAtari Teenage Riot: Burn, Berlin, Burn

Another afterthought – not that I dislike Sophie in any way, but she’s just not primary list material. Oh, and tis album wasn’t in the library.

The Beatles: Magical Myster Tour, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the White Album

Yeah, big Beatles fan here. Snd, predictably, there’s no Beatles here. There’s no beatles anywhere.

The Dresden Dolls: A is for Accident

Pleasantly surprised; more or less everything by this wonderful “brechtian punk cabaret” band, even an album I hadn’t seen before. Very nice.

The Kristet Utseende: Pang på Pungen i Portugal and Sug och Fräls

Seriously? They have like every CD and single released by them. Very, very surprised here. I guess they’re bigger than I thought. And these guys are from my home region Hälsingland =)

William Shatner: The Transformed Man

Nope, but they did have a sompilation of his and Nemoys “best” works… =)

Commercials and banners: Yeah, they are disturbing. I just had to suffer through a fucking PER GESSLE commercial as well as a spot for the horrid rapper PETTER in the middle of a Dresden Dolls album. Had the library been bigger I’d definitely consider paying just to get rid of this crap.

And so, conclusions: The client is simplistic but will probably be improved, the libarary gave me a few surprises but I’m not ready to give up on mp3’s just yet, and commercials are STILL THE FUCKING SPAWN OF SATAN’S COCK!

All in all, 6/10 or so.

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My god this is an inferior piece of machinery. Its games are severely limited in space, I assume this is related to the big N’s insistance upo the continued usage of obsolete “cartridges”. In theory, cartridge-based systems should have the one redeeming feature of virtually no loading times, but as we all know, this is simply not true.

I guess the reason all videos in games for the DS look like they come from some poorly-designed FMV game from ’93 is because A, a cardridge can only hold so much information, and B, the DS’s hardware simply isn’t good enough to play back decent-quality video. It all looks very, very horrible – I just saw the intro for Final Fantasy XII on the DS, and my god, Square hasn’t had this amount of MPEG-artifacts since… well, not even FFVII was this bad.

The DS has two small screens, which combined would form, I guess, roughly 2/3 of the PSP’s screen. OK, one of the DS screens is a touchscreen, but in most games this is used either very little or very badly. Color me unimpressed. The DS also lacks an analog stick, and while there are plenty of problems with the PSP’s sorry excuse for an analog stick, at least Sony tried.

So, hardware-wise, this feels clumsy, ugly, and simply inferior to the PSP in every aspect I can think of.

On the other hand, the DS has something the PSP has been lacking, for the most part. It has games. The PSP thinks it has games, but really, most games for the PSP are badly done remakes of PS2 games. 99% unplayable. Still, there are a few gems for the PSP, and I won’t pretend the DS doesn’t have its fair share of really crappy games,  but still – the DS has a shitload of games, and by sheer statistics, it’s bound to have more really good ones than the PSP. That the same games would be much, MUCH improved by the PSP’s superior hardware is a moot point.

All in all, I’m not that disgusted with the DS. Sure, it’s total crap hardware-wise, but it’s got Front Mission and a bunch of Final Fantasy games, as well as a few rather interresting puzzle-type games. And after all, I don’t need to pick one over the other – the PSP and the DS are now both in my posession, which means I can get whatever portable game that suits my fancy, without having to worry about the hardware.

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OK, here’s the deal: I refuse compromise. If I’m going to get a cross between a palmtop computer and a phone, I’m going to insist that it has all the benefits of a really good palmtop and a really good phone, or else I might as well continue to use what I got, which is a low-end but perfectly functional phone and an old, but near-perfect and hierto unsurpassed palmtop (Psion 5mx).

I’ve owned a Psion 5mx since ’99 or so, and I’ve tried a few models in between, but this is the only palmtop I could ever actually use. it has the bare necessities – good clones of Word and Excell, a notetaking app that simply rock the ass off everything everywhere, and a reasonably open SDK and architecture. There’s lots of great freeware etx for the Psion, and I could probably make my own if I needed to. The drawbacks of the Psion are mostly related to its aging standards, rather than its still very great internals. It can only communicate with a PC through an ancient COM-port (or, very shakily, through IR), for instance. No USB or Wifi here. It has one expansion port, only capable of accepting CompactFlash cards. The built-in dictaphone has no OGG or MP3 support.

So, I’ve found myself on the constant lookout for anything that could possibly replace my trusty 5mx. If that gadget also happens to be able to double as a phone and, perhaps, even tripple as a party-mode camera… So much the better.

The problems are many. Most machines are either too large to fit in a pocket, or have too small (or no) keyboard. And no, on-screen keyobard doesn’t count, you Apple-cunts. Psion 5mx has by far the most perfect palmtop keyboard I’ve ever seen. It’s perfect in size, and the hinges and the slide function that makes the machine perfectly balanced when opened up are simply perfect. Also, the 5mx boots in absolutely no time, which is very important, since it enables me to wake up at 3 AM and jot down a dream or an idea that came to me in my sleep without it escaping me, and I can also just take it out during long walks and instantly begin writing stuff. So many palmtops etc fail there. Other problems include short battery life (the 5mx has a classic green LCD screen which draws next to no power from the two AA-batteries included), lack of an SDK (the Iphone once again comes to mind) and a hundred other little nagging things…

But really, if anyone has found a machine with the following specs, please don’t hesitate:

  • 8 hours+ battery life. Active usage, not passive.
  • QWERTY-keybard, preferably with characters å ä and ö, nordic style. The keyboard must be small enough to write on using thumbs only while the unit is held in both hands, but must also be big enough to let each key be usable without extra tools.
  • Word- Excell- and notetaking apps. And, preferably, a solid SDK and a bunch of third-party apps.
  • No DRM.
  • Support for OGG and MP3.
  • Wifi and USB connection. Bluetooth support a plus, but no must.
  • Touchscreen is great for when you want to draw something, especially if there’s a stylus hidden somewhere inside the unit.
  • Fast boot times. I mean seriously fast.
  • If it includes a camera, please let it include at least basic settings like zoom, depths etc. I don’t know half the words in english, but those of you who know anything about photography probably know what I mean.
  • If it includes a phone… Well, I just call and text, no need for any spectacular phone features. It just needs to work.
  • Preferrably some kind of good expansion port. Think external USB drives as well as Sony Memory Sticks. Whatever, as long as it’s usable.
  • I’d like a dictaphone feature that I don’t need to fiddle with. Ideally, just a button somewhere on the outside of the device that I just press and it records. The 5mx has a great one in theory, but lack of mp3 supoort and buttons that are a pain to press (seriously, they hurt) has, together with an absolutely horrible microphone, made this one of the least-used feature of my machine.

Anyways, I don’t seriously expect this dream-machine to exist in the real world. They all have flaws – most have no qwerty-keyboard at all, those that do either have too large or too small or have some other flaw, like short battery life etc etc.

But dreaming is nice… =)

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Oh yeah, I’m on a roll here. Time for some more testing. This time, it’s all about the simplicity – and the media. I’ve been tinkering with a HTPC (without HD support or a TV card…) to replace my aging X-Box/XBMC solution. XBMC is the standard I expect other applications to measure up to. It suits me perfectly – regular, old-school directory browsing (no fancy-schmancy indexing), speed, looks neat… I’ve chosen to use Linux (trusty old Ubuntu) as the basis for my HTPC, and so I’ve tried a few of the media center solutions out there. This is less thurough than when I tested autio players, since this is mostly a way for me to remember which I’ve tried and what I didn’t like about them. Currently, the HTPC is a bit sluggish, but rund XBMC for Linux without too much fuss.

Eliza

Inflexible, slow, indexes everything. Neat, simple interface, but lack basic features (like turning on/off subtitles).

My Media System

Inflexible and slow, like all indexing apps. Shows huge subs by default, lacks working configuration dialog. Looks great.

Entertainer

Very good-looking, but uses set directories and indexing. Next.

MythTV

A lot of crap I don’t need, geared towards TV-card users. Too much for me, and I couldn’t get its database backend to work properly.

XBMC Linux

Not as fast as its X-box counterpart. Looks good as always. Works great, too.

…In other words, I’ll probably stick with XBMC.

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OK, here’s another round of “Krank tests stuff and says nasty things about them”.

In Windows, I’ve been using Foobar for a few years, and it’s more or less erverything I want from an audio player; an opt-in library function, great flexibility, extensions to do more or less everything… And an incredibly low footprint. And it’s portable, as in I can stick it on an USB stick and take it with me. Well, as some of you may know I switched to Ubuntu a while back, and after an initial experiment with MPD (Music Player Daemon) I began using foobar2000 through Wine. MPD didn’t really work for me; too library-based. Sometimes I got just one single downloaded song and I just don’t feel the need to add it to my library, you know?

Anyways, today I had some spare time and decided to try out some of the more popular Linux alternatives. I limited the scope of this experiment to only include non-winampish software, since I have come to really dislike their interfaces. The foobar/itunes/amarok interface appelas more to me, with playlists being central and part of the main window etc. The players I’ve tested this time around are: BMPx, Exaile, Songbird, Foobar2000 (through wine) and Amarok (late additions: Rhythmbox, Banshee, Quod Libet, Decibel). Foobar2000 was seriously modded using addons etc, and I did my best to look for addons etc for the other players as well. If you think this is unfair, fuck off.

So; let’s begin.

1. Indexing my library.

Being a very manly guy, I am of course sporting a large… audio library. To be exact, I have 14.184 song, totalling 62.4 gb. They’re all on a shared folder on my server. I know this means slower indexing and access, but it’s the same for everyone so the test’s still fair. I used Stopwatch from the Ubuntu repos to measure how much time it took each player from the moment i clicked “OK” in the directory selection box to the moment where the indexing process declared itself finished. There is, I think, enough distinct difference in time between the different players to excuse my inexactness.

  • BMPx: 6:09
  • Exaile: 11:58
  • Songbird: Epic fail
  • Foobar2000: 8:10
  • Amarok: 14:50
  • Rhthmbox: 18:40
  • Banshee: Epic fail
  • Quod Libet: 9:00
  • Decibel: 8:17

BMPx was the fastest, but either it didn’t index IDv2 tags at all or it just ignored secondary and tertiary genres. Since I use a lot of secondary etc genres, this made BMPx a less than perfect choice for me. Songbird failed completely, getting stuck about 1/10 into the indexing. I waited for 10 minutes, but it was just… stuck. I couldn’t even see what file it got stuck on. Less than ideal. Same thing with Banshee, but Banchee got stuck on different files every time. Either way,I’m not impressed. Quod Libet fared better, but gets a heap of minus points for the complete lack of progress intication – I couldnä’t see how far it had gone or what file it was currently indexing, nothing.

2. Opt-in database/library indexing of every song

I’m not really a “library” kind of guy. I’m the kind of person who is very much anal about directory structures and ID3 tags, so flat libraries never really appealed to me; I want direct file control. I got nothing against libraries, I just don’t want to have to use them all the time. And also, like I wrote before, I like being able to listen to a file without necessarily adding it to the library.

  • BMPx: yes
  • Exaile: yes
  • Songbird: no
  • Foobar2000: yes
  • Amarok: yes
  • Rhythmbox: no
  • Banshee: no
  • Quod Libet: In theory…
  • Decibel: yes

I was expecting problems here, but it was only Songbird that seemed to add my selected file to its library. (Late addition: Rhythmbox and Banshee also failed, and Quod Libet seemed to support what I wanted, but I couldn’t get it to work. And if I don’t, then your average joe won’t even fucking bother…) Being kind of unimpressed with Songbird since the last test anyways, I simply sighed, and moved on to:

3. Ability to index by multiple genres

Like I wrote before, I use a lot of multiple genres. For instance, swedish punk songs are marked as “punk” and “svenska” (“svenska” is swedish for “swedish”). That way, in good library browsers, I can choose to listen to all punk or just my swedish punk, and even all music in swedish regardless of genre.

  • BMPx: no
  • Exaile: partial
  • Songbird: partial
  • Foobar2000: yes
  • Amarok: partial
  • Rhythmbox: no
  • Banshee: no
  • Quod Libet: yes
  • Decibel: no

Exaile and Amarok simply merged my multiple genres, so “punk” and “svenska” became a genre known as “punk svenska”. Sure, this allows me to select all swedish punk, but not all punk or just all swedish music. Songbird lets me select multiple genres, but (like BMPx and Rhythmbox) didn’t seem to index secondary genres. I couldn’t get Decibel to show genres at all.


4. System resources.

I am a big fan of resource-friendly software. Not only because I’ve spent a lot of time on low-end systems, but also because I think it’s kind of rude to use more than the resources necessary to accomplish a given task. They’re my resources, and if I want to waste them on useless crap, I get some useless crap programs and run them, in stead. Resource waste should be opt-in, is all I’m saying. The first number is processor usage and the second is RAM, both according to the Gnome System Monitor. I’m using a 3.0ghz hyperthreading CPU and tests were run using a fully indexed library (except, of course, in the case of Songbird) and the same song playing (“Balladen om Olsson” by swedish punk band “23 till”).

  • BMPx: 2-4% 34mb
  • Exaile: 3-6% 154m
  • Songbird: 4-11% 137mb
  • Foobar2000: 4-11 26mb
  • Amarok: 4-7% 52mb
  • Rhythmbox: 2% 37mb
  • Banshee: 1-2% 52mb
  • Quod Libet: 0-2% 67mb
  • Decibel: 1-2% 30mb

Both Exaile and (unsurprisingly) Songbird get big fat epic fails here. 137 mb’s without even a library to blame it on? Crap, is what I call this. Utter crap. BMPx was low but not very surprising given its limited indexing, so the two big winners here are clearly Amarok, which performed admirably and surprisingly good, and foobar2000, which (as usual) worked very, very well. Rhythmbox was a very nice surprise here, although its small footprint might be exmplained by its relatively simplistic id3 tagging.
5. Album art

All my music has folder art. In each album’s folder is a file called “Folder.jpg” which contains a medium-to-high resolution version of the album’s cover. I want this to “simply work”; I want the player to support album art and be able to detect the existing folder art.

  • BMPx: no
  • Exaile: yes
  • Songbird: perhaps; couldn’t make it work
  • Foobar2000: yes (through addon)
  • Amarok: yes
  • Rhythmbox: yes
  • Banshee: no
  • Quod Libet: yes
  • Decibel: no

Yeah, Songbird fucked up here, as well. Big whoop. And, as usual, BMPx was too limited; it could use album art but it did not detect Folder.jpg’s. Same with Banshee.
6. Smart Folders

I’m not much of a “smart folder” person, but I imagine I could be, if they were done right. As in, intuitive and fast. For those who’ve been living under ricks for the past few years: Smart folders, Smart Playlists or Saved Searches or whatever you call them are a way to have a playlist which, for instance, contains all your hard rock – and which automatically adds or removes items when they are added/removed from the library. You can usually specify a number of rules – for instance, songs in swedish that aren’t punk, or hard rock bands not beginning with a “p”.

  • BMPx: no
  • Exaile: yes
  • Songbird: no
  • Foobar2000: partial
  • Amarok: yes
  • Rhythmbox: yes
  • Banshee:yes
  • Quod Libet: no
  • Decibel: no

Songbird fails as usual, but promises to do better in its next version. There’s an extremely non-intuitive foobar2000 addon to accomplish something like smart folders, but it’s far from perfect. Rhythmbox was the absolute best here, its smart folders being easy to set up, intuitive and easily accessed. Banshee was similar, but not nearly as good – Quod Libet only supports a kind of limited”saved searches” feature.

7. Support for transferring files to an mp3 player

Sure, I can transfer stuff to my various mp3 players by simply dragging and dropping using Nautilus or other explorer-like software – but I’d like the possibility to do it through my audio player software as well. If nothing else, because my archive’s directory structure (Artist/year – album/(CDx)/tracknum – trackname.mp3) isn’t really ideal for mp3 player use, where multiple subdirectories are kind of tiresome. I don’t own an Ipod, so I couldn’t test that functionality, but I do have a few regular USB-connected cheap things.

  • BMPx: no
  • Exaile: partial
  • Songbird: partial
  • Foobar2000: yes
  • Amarok: yes
  • Rhythmbox: yes
  • Banshee: no
  • Quod Libet: yes
  • Decibel: no

Exaile had a few plugins, but I couldn’t get them to work very well. Same with Songbird. Amarok has support, as does Foobar2000 (through a plugin) but they’re all but intuitive. Amarok didn’t autodetect my devices, though, which might be because I’m not using KDE. I don’t know. Rhythmbox and Quod Libet excelled here – they found my mp3 player automatically and adding songs to it was a breeze. I am genuinely impressed here, and that’s not happening very often.

Conclusions

So, where does this bring me? Well, of the five I tries, only three made any lasting positive impression. Amarok is very, very close to what I want from an audio player. It only fails the “send to device” and the (to me) very important “multiple genre selection” criterias. The late addition Rhythmbox was very impressive when it came to sending stuff to devices and smart playlists – but also failed the multiple genre crtiteria. I mean, c’mon – is it really that hard? Am I the only one who like using multiple genres? Quod Libet was also amongst the top contenders, but failed short mainly due to difficulties in playing external files and lack of smart folders.

The overall worst one was, beyond all doubt, Songbird. It was so useless I actually found it hard to even see if some of the stuff I was looking for were there. Its indexing seems broken, its interface horrible,… It’s possible this’ll be something usefull in the future, but right now it’s just crap.

My conclusion is simple: I’ll continue using foobar2000. I’ll try a few of these at some point in the future, to see if they’re good enough. A few of them, like Exaile, Quod Libet and Amarok, are kind of close – while others, like Songbird, seem to be just crap. I can’t believe this is the same Songbird I keep getting referred to, this is completely useless…

Anyways, I hope this helped someone.

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Been trying out another new hot MMORPG lately. Tabula Rasa, by the same guy who did Ultima Online back in the day. Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa. How large does your ego need to be if you insist on putting you’r fucking name in the TITLE of the game. It’s literaly called “Richard Garriot’s Tabula Rasa”, which feels more than a little 90’s to me. It has a nice interface, though nowhere near WoW in flexibility or CoH in sheer goodness. It’s got collect-everythin-quests, which very much appeals to me, since I’m kind of anal. I’m told there’s a story, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. The controls work, even if it’s a bit too FPS for my tastes. It works in Linux, though not as good as in Windows. I place TR firmly amongst the more interresting  MMO’s. I’m contemplating paying for a month, since I get CoX for free for at least one additional month due to me having introduced new players to it.

(I get cocks for free. Heh =)

Oh, and now, when Uru Live’s been cancelled, I find out they didn’t delete my char after all. They just claimed they did. To make me stay. And now it’s too late to go back. I hate everything.

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Life with Linux, week two…

A week ago, I decided to – finally – begin my move to Linux. Not the first time I try, but this time, it seems like Ubuntu is at least mature enough for me to stay. I still dualboot, since some stuff just won’t play nice (games, mostly). I run Photoshop and InDesign in a VirtualBox shell, which means they only get access to about half of my RAM, but they work and they work well. And as for the rest of my usual gripes, they have all been addressed. Foobar2000 has given way to MPD + gbemol. ID3-TagIT was discarded in favour of EasyTAG, WingIDE (for Python programming) had a Linux version (which, btw, I’m probably going to pay for one of these days. It’s that good) and so did wxFormBuilder, most of what PsiWin could do, I can do using PLPtools – and better. Except for conversion of transfered documents. I can’t seem to get Psiconv to work properly on my files. Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice are, of course, identical. DaemonTools has its counterpart in AcetoneISO2, font managing works just swell with FontMatrix, I read my digital comix with Comix, still use Putty and Mumble, Brasero is a rather competent CD burner and if it isn’t enough, Nero exists on the Linux platform as well. I use a combination of BitlBee and X-chat to do all my IM stuff, distraction-free. The XBMC port for Linux works very well, which is really important for my next project…

So, what are my thoughts? It all works very well. I used to feel awkward in Linux, constricted and disturbed. I used to itch to get back to windows. That’s usually why I end up going back to that monster of an OS with my proverbial tail between my legs. Not this time. Whanever I boot up Windows now, I feel strange. Like I’m wearing the wrong size in clothes or something. It’s very annoying. Luckily, I only boot into Windows to play certain games, like City of Heroes or Tunguska. Linux is no longer a strange land to me, but more like a new apartment. All my old furniture is there, and the whole thing feels more and more like a home. Too bad I couldn’t find a good spot for that gigantic sofa, or I’d be able to move out completely from my old apartment.

It’s good to be home, in any case.

Expect more reports as things progress.

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Just got my latest project up and running – a 3ghz P4 given to me by my parents. It was in seriously bad condition – incredible amounts of dust and what might be the dumbest cooling solution I’ve ever seen made the beast extremely hesitant to even start, much less run for extended periods of time. The parents had just bought a spanking new Dual Core Something (can you smell the envy?), and unloaded this piece of crap on my doorstep. At my request, of course – I’d been the one to try to fix the problem countless times before, and as their toll-free tech support I guess they felt they owed me something.

I kept the motherboard and processor and the two 256 mb RAM sticks, put it all in my own extremely good-looking and easily cooled chassi. The S-ATA disk also made the cut – but the cooling system was scrapped, and I brought my own graphics card. And thus, from the remnants of my then-current 2.4 ghz 1gb RAM machine and my parents’ discarded 3ghz 512mb RAM scrap-heap, I built myself a Frankenstein’s Monster. I’ve been trying to make it behave. The CPU fan is still too loud (but that might be fixed in the next series of upgrades), and sometimes this strange beast misbehaves – but it seems to be rather stable now, with CPU temps around 47-71 (as opposed to 80-96. Yes, celsius).

I just managed to install three new fans. Two were simple replacements for two that were way too loud (and let me tell you, replacing them was no easy task – this chassi is mostly easy to work with, but this was a monstrous task, fully comparable to doing anything with a Compaq *shudder*), and one was added. The whole thing is still way too loud, but it works – and it’s stable.

For the moment, that is enough.

Next step: Identify sounds, try to limit them at minimum expense.

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Most of my computers over they years have all been slightly old. As in, I can’t remember ever owning somthing that’s actually state of the art… But anyways, as I wait for the hard drive check on my old computer to finish so I can safely transfer the C and D partitions from my old harddrive to my shiny new *ahem* erh, slightly used but still better SATA drive… I thought I’d begin documenting my computer upgrades etc. I’m a nerd, after all – and it’s nice to have something for posterity.

Anyways, let’s get started. This is more or less archaeology, people. Archaeology of my memory. It’s a shaky science,so don’t expect any stable dating or anything.

The first computer I got for my very own self was a Pentium 133. In fact, I got two of those in short succession – Memory fails regarding their previous owners, but I do remember people elsewhere were sporting shiny new 450 pentiums. The 133’s ran Windows ’98 and did so reasonably well, they had enough RAM for me to have a home-LAN with people playing Starcraft. Good times.

I think I remember getting my dad’s old 233 or 350 Pentium when they got something slightly newer and shinier at some point, and getting rid of one of the 133’s. The other is long since lost in time and space. This was in the old, golden days when HUT was my home and a pretty nice place to hang out.

In 2000, I got my first job. October, I think it was. Something like that. It was just for three months, but it was a paycheck… Wait a minute, this has to have been before the HUT days, for I got that job in 2000,when I lived in a kinda-hippie collective… So I guess I had a 233 or 450 or so when I was living at HUT… Anyways, for my new paycheck I got, of course, a computer. A pretty cheap one. Got it pretty cheap. It was a 1ghz P4, and it still serves me good – it’s the server this here page is served from. Vastly upgraded since then of course, with extra RAM and stuff.

Oh, look at that, the disk scan is done. Time to run, but there’ll be more to this…

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OK, new webserver Lighttpd in place, old webservser stopped-but-not-scrapped-quite-yet, and all seems well. It was a very easy migration, I must say. The Ubuntu package of Lighttpd performed admirably, setting up 90% of all necessary options for me. I just installed, activated two modules (server status and fastCGI), entered all of my virtual hosts in the config file. That whole project seems stable enough right now, which means I spent all of 3 hours on the project. Including a lot of testing etc, and also I’m doing my laundry at the same time… Cool.

Anyways, for now I’ve sacrificed my Frets on Fire online server, but that’s more or less OK, really – I don’t play much since I got my Guitar Hero guitar anyways.

…and some stats:

Before the change, there were 11 Apache processes running. Afterwards, there are 6 PHP-CGI processes running and one Lighttpd process. The table below should explain everything (all numbers are in mb’s):

Apache: PHP-CGI: Lighttpd: PHP-CGI + Lighttpd:
Virtual memory: 11*33=333mb 6*25=150mb 5,2 155,2
Resident memory: 11*11=121 6*6,6=39,6 5,2 44,8
Virtual Memory: 11*25=225 5,2 280,2
Resident Memory: 11*6,6=72,6 1,9 75,5

…and in case anyone missed the point here, the table clearly (?) shows that my current setup takes all of 44 mb’s of resident memory, while the previous setup ate 121 mb’s. And even if I scaled up the number of PHP-CGI processes used so they mateched the number of processes Apache used, it’s STILL be 75,5 versus 212 mb’s.

I’ve also switched to Dillo for my webbrowsing needs on the server, where i used to use Epiphany, and Top is currently my favorite when it comes to process management, where I used to use gnome-system-monitor.

My next project will be to change from uTorrent via Wine to rTorrent. Then, the only RAM thieves left will be MySQL at 23 mb’s and Linuxdcpp at 51. And yes, Linuxdcpp is absolutely necessary – it’s the only linux client allowed at the hubs I frequent. The alternative would be dc++ via wine, and that’s just not happening. Noone will be happer then me should I be able to switch to DCTC or something…

Anyways, the hunt for more memory continues. Over and out.