Er staat Uurtje IJsland, maar dat is het niet. Ik kan het eigenlijk ook gewoon niet categoriseren. Het is gewoon een verzameling muziek die ik kan waarderen, uit verschillende genres en stromingen.

1. Einóma (.is) – En Route
2. Dungen (.se) – Panda
3. Efterklang (.dk) – Chapter 6
4. Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson (.is) – Litbriði
5. Yann Tiersen (.fr) – The Deutsch Mark is Coming
6. Under Byen (.dk) – Af Samme Stof som Stof
7. Howard Shore (.us) – The Passing of the Elves
8. The Gathering (.nl) – Solace
9. The Album Leaf (.us) – Eastern Glow
10. Dungen (.se) – Sol och Regn
11. Gingerbread Patriots (.us) – Blood Beetle
12. Amiina (.is) – Bláskjár
13. Yann Tiersen (.fr) – Comptine d’un Autre été
14. Nightwish (.fi) – Dead Boy’s Poem
15. Sigur Rós (.is) – Dögun
16. Sigur Rós (.is) – Hún Jörð

Directe download: hier

Because it was decided that Pluto no longer is a planet, but rather a dwarf planet, I on my part decided to take the Iceland blog off Planet Luon.

Really? Well… No. The actual reason is that Planet destroys the markup of my (admittedly invalid) RSS feed. Apparantly, the HTML that can be encoded inside the RSS feed, is not just normal HTML, but some other form where the object and iframe tags are illegal. My own feed reader however renders them well, because it is actually a web browser, right? So, why would you disallow those things? I want to do hip new things in my feed! Don’t hold me back!

So I ask of you, readers subscribed via Planet Luon, add http://ijsland.luijten.org/feed/ to your readers. The site is now removed from Planet Luon.

Heh, I just read my holiday 2005 planning and apparantly I didn’t do a very good job last year. Most of the projects still aren’t finished :-)

However, something of a little more importance has come between them since I’ll be going to Iceland in a few days. So, no History of Computing, no Hypermedia, no Linux, no LEDR, no Miriapodo for a while.

Goed, in een poging hip te doen zal ik me maar eens overgeven aan het videobloggen. Eens kijken of het wat voor mij is. Helaas zit m’n camera vast aan m’n computer, dus onderweg filmen zal er nooit echt in zitten. Veel meer dan mijn hoofd en af en toe wat foto’s zal er dan dus ook niet te zien zijn.

Mijn excuses voor het enorm lage geluidsniveau, ik kreeg het niet harder dan dit. Een draai aan de volumeknop moet het euvel maar even tijdelijk oplossen. Volgende keer (mocht die komen) zal ik er beter op letten. Een reactie via de website stel ik zeker op prijs!

While my stays in Linux (Ubuntu 6.06 currently) still are very brief, mainly checking some things out and then quickly rebooting to OS X.

All in all you could say I’m very much hooked to OS X, it only has one very big drawback: You have to pay for many pieces of software… Beh, don’t like that ;-)

However, there are quite a few very good Free Software apps available, libgaim based IM client Adium being one of them. Safari is a nice browser, but some things just work better on a Gecko based browser like Camino and today, I found a freeware newsreader I really like: Shrook. It is not Free yet, but it’s getting closer :-)

Actually, the reason I wanted to ditch NetNewsWire which I previously used was that it wasn’t a Universal Binary and somehow apps using Rosetta take up all your system resources and make it dead slow to the point that clicking the NNW-icon keeps you waiting for about half a minute before anything at all happens. And it isn’t limited to NNW also, other apps become slow too.

Shrook has a few interesting features I haven’t seen on other readers. Firstly, there is this thing called Distributed Checking which uses the fact that other Shrook users probably have some channels in common and if one of them has an update of the channel, this fact is submitted to Shrooks server and then pushed through to the other subscribers. So basically it is an implementation of push in a pull technique!

Secondly it is possible to synchronize your subscriptions with the Shrook server and in this way keep track of them on other machines as well (along with their article’s read and flag status!).

Zit je net lekker een beetje TV te kijken, komt er een nieuwe reclame van Centraal Beheer voorbij. In eerste instantie is het gewoon de al wat oudere reclame van de kroongetuige die een nieuwe identiteit krijgt en vervolgens nationale bekendheid krijgt…

Nou, we kunnen nu zelf uit het huis ontsnappen zonder gezien te worden in Calucci, the Game. Briljant!

Voilà, nu doe ik voor de tweede keer mee aan een viral marketing truuk :)

After two weeks and two days with my MacBook, I think I can come to some conclusion about it.

Firstly, I called it Idéfix, after Obelix’ dog since it is also white and black (the screen is really black compared to the white of the enclosure) and it goes with his master on all of his adventures, like how mine is going with me to Iceland.

Heat problems

None. Really, I don’t know what the others are doing to it, but mine isn’t getting hotter than any laptop I’ve had my hands on. Unlike my old Fujitsu-Siemens, the keyboard hardly gets hot. The area around the tab-key is the hottest, while the right side actually remains quite cool.

In the past week, temperatures steadily rose to around 30 degrees and it was noticable on Idéfix. The little fellow can’t really get rid of its own heat, so it now gets hotter than normal.

Speed

It is fast, really fast: Converting a DVD to MPEG-4 is twice as fast as on Hoefnix, my Power Mac G5 2 x 2.5 GHz. It manages to get 60 fps while Hoefnix only gets 30. That isn’t a daily task of course (well, for some it might be), but overall, it feels snappier than the Power Mac.

Handbrake converting Forrest Gump DVD into an MPEG-4

Battery life

Better than my Fujitsu, but that goes without saying since that battery is broken :-) But okay, I already got four hours, with Bluetooth and AirPort turned off.

Critics

Yes, tiny thing, namely that it could be finished better! The keyboard leaves a grease mark on the screen, not very nice and something the Fujitsu didn’t have (one of the few good things about that one).

The polycarbonate case is a bit wobbly at some places, nothing terrible, but I think the finishing on that could be a bit better. One screw isn’t fastened deep enough, I tried to give it an extra turn but it won’t go in further.

Further stuff

The first days I took it with me in its protective cover (see picture).

Idéfix nicely packed in its box

The second day it teared open and it was also raining, so I added a plastic bag of the Media Markt. The reason I didn’t have a proper bag for it is that they simply don’t exist yet. The form factor isn’t new, but apparently if a notebook isn’t an Apple, it isn’t worth making a sleeve for according to the manufacturers… Because I cannot do without, I decided to get me a not-so-expensive one which doesn’t fit exactly and look for a good one at a later point.

Tucano Second Skin 14

Yes, it says iBook. Yes, it is for a 14 inch model. Yes, a MacBook fits in it, if you add a piece of insulation tube :-)

Insulation tube

I’m switching away¹ from PowerPC… Yesterday I already installed Linux on my SGI O2+ (MIPS R5000 architecture), today my all new and shiny white MacBook (Intel x86) arrived!

You know how hard it is to to shut up to anyone about it for a whole week just to make this surprise post? Especially when you’re going to the Apple Centre with the whole bunch ;-)

First impression: Nice thing! Also ordered the mini-DVI-to-DVI cable, so I can hook it up my Dell 2405FPW and enjoy the full 1920×1200! Apple removed the stupid restriction that the consumer level notebooks could only mirror the screen on the external screen, you can now also expand your desktop.

¹ Well of course I'm only joking about switching away from my PowerMac, but it sounded cool ;-)

Took the GPS receiver with me on a walk over the TU campus, storing my location every second on my laptop, meanwhile taking pictures.

Then, imported the track list and photos into GPSPhotoLinker and applied the locations to the EXIF tags of the photos.

After that, I uploaded the photos to p.hot.os where I added a little bit of JavaScript magic and using the Google Maps API I can now draw a nice map with the exact location where the photo was taken.

Kickass!

En dan nu voorlopig de laatste podcast van mij die alleen maar bestaat uit muziek. Nog éénmaal een tracklist en dan ligt de podcast voorlopig even stil.

1. Sigur Rós – Hoppípolla
2. Sigur Rós – Með Bloðnasir
3. múm – Green Grass of Tunnel (linkerkanaal) / Grasi Vaxin Göng (rechterkanaal)
4. Björk – Jóga (Howie B Main Mix)
5. Trabant – Enter Spacebar
6. Silví­a Night – Congratulations (het moet dan maar)
7. GusGus – Northern Lights
8. Innvortis – Dagurinn sem ég er ekki til
9. Sigur Rós – Glósóli
10. Björk (met Tom Yorke) – I’ve seen it all
11. Apparat Organ Quartet – Global Capital
12. Björk – Í dansi með þér
13. Sigur Rós – Smáskifa

Het eindigt met hetzelfde als wat voorafging aan de allereerste set tijdens de originele uitzending. Het was leuk, ik heb ervan genoten om het te doen, maar er moet een einde aan komen. Ik hoop dat jullie een leuke indruk hebben gekregen van de muziek uit IJsland. Natuurlijk is het bij lange na niet alles wat er geproduceerd wordt, soms lijkt het wel alsof iedereen in een bandje zit of tenminste één persoon kent die in een band speelt. De site rokk.is besteedt aandacht aan de lokale muziekscene en niet alleen aan rock zoals de naam zou doen vermoeden.

Directe download: hier

Extreme bargain alert! I got this 3CD plus a DVD with the complete recordings of The Fellowship of the Ring at a ridiculous price of € 5,95 at Makro… Something of a 90% discount off the Amazon-prize. Someone really must have messed things up since I’ve seen it at said Makro for something around € 40,- not too long ago.

Contents:

• A booklet with information on the various themes in the music, certainly an interesting read.
• 3CDs with the complete musical sound track of the first of the Lord of the Rings movies.
• 1DVD which contains the same music, only now in four formats: standard Dolby Digital Stereo and Surround and in 48kHz 24bit Advanced Resolution Surround and Stereo Sound. Anyone who can play DVD-Audio?

It seems that software to play the DVD-Audio portion (it’s what goes in the AUDIO_TS directory on a DVD) simply doesn’t exist. One has to have a hardware player for it, but now the same hardware players are dropping support for it in favour of HD content.

I really enjoy this “Extended Edition” of the soundtrack, it’s fun to picture the complete film along with the music :)

Ja, dan blijkt het eigenlijk toch best leuk te zijn om anderen je muziekverzameling te laten horen en tegelijk een beetje creatief naar je muziek te luisteren. Toegegeven, heel geweldige mixes zijn het niet maar het houdt je van de straat he. Omdat ik het dus niet kon laten heb ik een tweede set gemaakt.

1. Eivør Pálsdóttir – Brostnar Borgir
2. Emiliana Torrini – To be free
3. Björk – Isobel (remix door Deodato)
4. Björk – Oliver
5. GusGus – Barry A/B (remix)
6. Trabant – Superman
7. Sigur Rós – 180 Sekúndur Fyrir Sólarupprás (remix door Curver)
8. GusGus – Gun Acid (remix)
9. The Sugarcubes – Hetero Scum
10. Sigur Rós – Fönklagið (live in Reykjavík 1998)
11. Innvortis – Hvað er þetta helvítis eitthvað
12. Sigur Rós – Hafsól ‘97 vs. Hafsól ‘05 (Mithrandir mix)

Hafsól is één van de allereerste nummers van Sigur Rós en is een van die nummers die blijven gespeeld worden en in de loop van de tijd een complete evolutie meemaken. Ik heb geprobeerd beide versies in deze set onder te brengen en dé manier is natuurlijk om ze te mixen.

Directe download: hier