Alien Pastures

I assume all of you had a safe year-ending? With all the fireworks, a finger or an eye is easily lost… I also assume that you are full of good intentions for the new year. I wish you all a prosperous and happy 2012, and I hope we will see a new shining release of [...]

Last weekend I prepared another diner which I had not cooked for a very long time. I love rich oven dishes, and traditional greek “moussaka” is a long-time favourite of mine. I learnt how to cook it while I lived in a student home. There are many variants of moussaka which do not honour the [...]

Some time ago I ran into this website promoting a very cheap computer the size of a credit card. The Raspberry Pi is being created by a charitable foundation. It is designed to “plug into a TV or be combined with a touch screen for a low cost tablet“. Typically its target is “teaching computer [...]

Part one: what do I want? I hinted at this topic in a previous post. I have a big collection of (mostly) paperback Science Fiction books – some hardcover books too. I used to read a lot more in the pre-Internet days, nowadays it’s just during my holidays that I get enough time to read [...]

KDE team have issued a security advisory (CVE-2011-3365) for the KSSL component in KDE 4.6 and 4.7. I have applied the proposed patch to fix the security hole and updated packages for kdelibs are available from my ktown repository, for both KDE 4.7.1 and KDE 4.6.5 (because I intend to keep that release for a [...]

Hi I just upgraded the blog software and took the opportunity to also update to a new version of the wp-andreas01 theme that I have been using for my blog since day one. The new theme is more versatile, fixes some rendering bugs, draws a wider pane (1024 instead of 800 pixels) which I think [...]

Well, I guess it is time to dump good old Google Toolbar. In a previous post of mine, I showed you how to allow Firefox to keep using the Google Toolbar even though it lists as “unsupported” since firefox-5. But this is not a long-term option of course – at some point the plugin will [...]

Hi! A number of big packages are coming up fairly soon. There will be a new LibreOffice (3.4, a major release), and VLC as well will probably have another release shortly. Also, I should be working on KDE 4.6.3. I am looking at ways to make this manageable for me. Compiling LibreOffice packages takes forever, [...]

This weekend, I setup a Wireless Ethernet Bridge. What the heck, I hear you say! I’d better explain why I did this, and what it actually means. I have a wireless network in the house that extends to a large part of the rooms. Unfortunately we have thick walls and ceilings with a lot of [...]

A few sounds I wanted to share with you. I have a broad musical taste, ranging from classical to metal, from ethnic to industrial. I am drawn to all these kinds of music because of the physical and emotional impact. Music has to move me – I have never been a follower of hit lists. [...]