Just wanted to say, I bought a CD today… Wow!

And then, just when you think that there can be nothing like Sigur Rós, you bump into Godspeed you! Black emperor… Strange, very strange. The music is a little bit different, the texts are different, but the sound as a whole is the same.

Funny…

I already mentioned Sigur Rós (Victory rose) in my iPod shuffle entry, but I think they deserve an entry of their own.

Two weeks ago, I heard the first sounds from this Icelandic group. It was the album Ágætis Byrjun, which is Icelandic for “an alright beginning”. Their music is really beautiful, much softer than for instance Björk. At first it made me think about The Gathering. But now it reminds me most of a giant evolution of the psychedelic music of Pink Floyd.

Their debute album, called Von (Hope) begins with a very intriguing introduction of two tracks Intro and Dögun (Dawn), followed by the beautiful Hún Jörð (Mother Earth). It is a pagan version of the “Our Father”.

Móðir vor sem ert á jörðu
heilagt veri nafn þitt
komi ríki þitt

Our mother, who areth in earth
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come.

Nice, nothing more to add…

This really must be the most strange debute I have ever heard; but it sounds great, almost like it is a record that you can use to test and adjust your stereo equipment to get the most out of their music. Every possible sound is contained in this one, low noises, high shrieks and everything in between.

Since their texts are all either in Icelandic or in their own pseudo-language Vonlenska (Hopelandic), I decided to do some language study on the first. The first step with every foreign text I get, is trying to read some text without any help of dictionaries or other documents. This might seem very hard, but since it is mainly a North-German language, it looks very much like Dutch and even more like Frisian. However, there are many gaps to fill still, so a dictionary is fairly obligatory. Luckily, there are translations available.

One of my housemates has seen Sigur Rós perform live and she said they’re even better then. So when they are around, I’ll try to catch a gig.

There is so much more to tell about the sound, but as always, it is better to hear it for yourself. So, my tip for this week: Sigur Rós.

I completely forgot I promised to write something about my iPod shuffle. So here you have it:

Many words have been said now about the shuffle by many users and I just can’t add much to that. It sounds all right, the electronic sounds of Sigur Rós tend to clip (can also be an encoding problem, but I don’t hear them that clear on my stereo) and switches slow between songs (about a second silence between each track which really is too ong). It might also give some audible feedback when pushing the buttons. Here are some interesting links about iPod shuffle.

• Apple Talk on Gathering of Tweakers (sorry, in Dutch)
• One of the first iPod shuffle covers and absolutely beautiful. The guy seems to got a lot of success by just putting some nice pics online :-)
• A funny mod, probably a weak pun on Apple’s comparison

Okay, so that is what they say and do with it. I had my own personal iPod experience. About a week after I had activated it, the left headphone started to make a cracking noise. That was a bit disappointing, but since I of course have warranty, I called Apple and they sent me a new pair without any question. Way to go, Apple! Excellent!

Pinpoint is the name of my first real project of Nogates. It is a bowling (hence the Pin) score (hence the Point) management application written in the beautiful Ruby programming language.

It will feature multiple frontend interfaces, but will primarily be built upon GNOME2/Gtk+. Maybe a Cocoa frontend will also be created, if I manage to understand the RubyCocoa bindings.

The SVN version can be checked out using the command:

svn co http://nogates.nl/svn/pinpoint</code>

Okay, after some bumps in the road thanks to a nice guy of TNT, the DVI-to-TV cable arrived today.

Yesterday, 11:18, I wasn’t at home, according to this person called Sabayo. I was however, and today at 11:58, the same Sabayo didn’t ring twice to deliver my package. Mildly irritated I called TNT at about 12:05 why I was at home and no one rang, but wrote a nice note for me. The guy at the other end didn’t understand either, but convinced the postman to come by my house again on his way back. And this way, at 15:51, the bag (the package I mean, not the postman) came after all.

Of course, I wanted to try it out immediately, but since I don’t have a television in my room, I first had to borrow the one from the kitchen. And find a cable. And find a new cable since the first one apparantly was broken as it only gave a distorted image once and then became completely silent. I almost thought I had a case of DOA, but luckily, with the new cable, the image was as bright and clear as it could possibly be on a television screen.

So, for those who thought I bought a Mac mini, you thought wrong. For those who thought I bought an iPod shuffle, you were right. I also bought an iPod shuffle :-) More about that later.

Take a look at the screenshot

… And guess what it is for. The one who gets it right… wins.

Now it’s time for some quality loafing till next week!

Apple introduced this new product family called Mac mini on MacWorld San Francisco last week, but since Orion was down, I couldn’t write anything about it…

Targeted at switchers who already have a good monitor, this little wonder of micro-computing might also come in handy as a portable movie player with TV-out. Hmm, have to think about it, € 499,- still is a lot of money for a DVD-player :).

All right, everything is nice and shiny again. Orion, my “personal” server got a reinstall and a backup restore right after that. I hope it will be a bit more stable now, since it got uptimes of about… 3 days at max.

So, my journal and website are back from hibernation. I don’t suppose you missed them :-)

All right then, I installed Linux on my Mac today, finally I was able to do so since the Debian installer from the 4th on has a kernel which supports this machine.

A bit of fooling around with chroot and dpkg gave me a working system, which can also be accomplished by following the instructions in the thread on the debian-powerpc list.

I’m happy and can go to sleep now :-)

I’m losing interest in installing Debian on my Mac; OS X is very nice after all. Meanwhile, the Debian PowerPC project is quarreling about going 64-bit all the way or just the kernel.

Patrons argue that the amd64 team does exactly the same, while they could have a 32-bit userspace. Opposers argue that the archive is large enough already and it isn’t really profitable to have 64-bit binaries.

In Ubuntu, PPC64 support has been postponed as a long term goal.

So, the only way I could get Linux on my machine is using Gentoo, but I don’t want to compile each and every little package until I get a working system, I want a system that “Just Works™”.