Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

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Posts by: Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper

I finally found the first watch band I’ve ever been excited about in my entire life and I just wanted to share it. It’s the Ballistic Nylon Strap (24mm, 5-Ring, Black). The reason this is so exciting for me is that when you attach your watch to it, you end up with a non-standard watch band [...]

How many times have you heard something that starts with “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older” and then end up hearing things that make you cringe and silently vow to yourself that it’ll never happen to you. Yeah, me neither. But let’s imagine that we have. If “it’s a funny thing when [...]

I really should have done this years ago, back when I was syndicated on a couple of FOSS planet RSS aggregators. *sigh* Anyway, after talking to my good friend Scott Knaub, and hearing how much money he periodically gets from just putting Google ads on his pages (I mean, it’s not tons of $CASHDOLLARZ, but still, [...]

I came across this article today on BitMob, titled “A characters’ history of Street Fighter 4“. I’ve been playing and loving Street Fighter since Street Fighter 2 came out in 1991. I spent untold amounts of money at the arcades during my college and growing up years, playing Street Fighter with my brother Josh. And [...]

I’ve been meaning to blog about the two tablets I’ve been playing with for the last year+ for quite a while, and just never found the time or motivation. Let me say up front that I’m not writing this with the intention of swaying anyone’s opinions or influencing anyone’s purchase. I’ve been mulling the goods [...]

I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am. At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has [...]

I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. It’s seriously the best mouse I’ve ever owned. And it works really nicely in Linux, especially thanks to this excellent Ubuntu wiki page. And, reportedly, it works really nicely in Windows too, with Logitech’s mouse config software (which does me absolutely no good being that I refuse to run [...]

I have a 13″ MacBook Pro that I use for my personal and non-work shtuff. I resized OS X down, installed Linux (Kubuntu), and set up a shared partition so that I can keep files there that I want to access from both OS X and Linux. Things like my music and video collection, Snooker [...]

I recently blogged about Desktop Linux possibly having some core/fundamental problems that might be keeping it from enjoying mainstream adoption and 3rd party developer attention as compared to, say, OS X. To my immediate defense, I’ll say that it was actually more of a brain dump and rant (True Story!) than a well-thought-out dissertation on all [...]

It’s a shame that my first blog post in months is something so antithetical to my normal posts as this, but 1) I haven’t blogged in forever (darned Twitter/Identi.ca/Facebook!!!) and 2) I just bought a MacBook Pro and am really happy with it thus far. So bear with me. Or don’t. I don’t care. If you’re [...]

Woot, I got one! I’ll post again once I get the pictures off of the camera, but I got to the local Sprint store at 7:00 (AM!!!!) this last Saturday, waited for an hour, and managed to snarf up 2 Palm Pres– one each for my beautiful bride and I. I realize I need to [...]

I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours [...]

Dear Lazyweb, I need to buy a laptop for personal use. I’ve been using Thinkpads as work laptops for so long that I think I’d like to try something else out for a change. It needs to be Dual Core/Core 2 Duo/whatever. Would be nice if it had a fast 200+GB drive in it. And [...]

I pray a lot for my kids. I always have. I ask God to protect them, shield them, guide them, and watch over them when I cannot. Watching your oldest child reach 18 years of age, start college, start driving, and be out of your line of sight and protection for large parts of the [...]

<kergoth> anyone messed with protobuf? <vanRijn> kergoth: i once had a hamster i named protobuf, does that help? <kergoth> fraid not <vanRijn> actually, it was a guinea pig <vanRijn> and it was named Squeaker <vanRijn> but still <darth_mall> vanRijn: that’s practically the same thing! <kergoth> hehe <vanRijn> darth_mall: I KNOW RIGHT! I think I’m getting [...]

I’m excited. I love learning stuff, I really do. I just did  a 12-minute screencast for work, and I think I’ve finally figured out how to get everything to fit together nicely. I’d never done a screencast before–not on any platform–but being that I needed to showcase some development work that I’ve done for the [...]

Woohoo! KDE 4.2 is released!! I only wish the last few KPilot bug fixes would have made it into the 4.2.0 release, but we were too late. Still, if you think you knew what KDE4 was all about, think again. Check out KDE 4.2.0. =:)

I just sent this to the KDE PIM mailing lists, but I know not everyone who uses KPilot subscribes, so I’ll re-post it here… Howdy all, I just wanted to get a note out to as wide a distribution list as possible to spread some important news about the upcoming KDE 4.2 release and KPilot’s [...]

I spent a crapload of time this weekend, going through all the old and crufty KPilot bugs we’ve done a really horrible job of keeping up-to-date on, and triaged the bejeebers out of the list. I think we had ~ 150+ a few months ago. I went through the last 100 of them individually today, [...]

I discovered a nasty little data corruption bug in KPilot last night and have put some fixes in for it just this morning. The good news is that we didn’t lose any data. We just gave you a lot more data. =:) So, if you’re helping to test KPilot for our KDE 4.2 release looming [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged (I blame Twitter), and I had an interesting week, this last, so I figured I’d blog about it. Probably should be a bunch of individual posts, but blef and here goes…. Yesterday was an awesome end to an otherwise already pretty good week. I got to play Tetrinet [...]

Stark contrast to my last post, I know, but I felt it was only fair to blog about the wonders of OpenSUSE 11.1, even/especially with my little nVidia chip. First off, I still think there’s something wonky going on with X and/or nVidia’s driver in taking so long to start that kdm ends up giving [...]

So, first off, OpenSUSE 11.1 has to be the sweetest, best put together distro, like ever. Really amazing, quality stuff.  The new installer has some excellent improvements, and package management has never felt zippier (zyppier??) However, there are a few problems that I’ve hit that I’m still trying to figure out after 2 days of [...]

I installed OpenSUSE 11.1 yesterday and there’s some… challenges… that have kept me busy for the last 2 days. But I’ll cover those in a different post… Most relevant to the title is this: OpenSUSE 11.1 doesn’t come with blackbox or bbkeys, so I set about compiling them myself and hit some problems. Blackbox, of [...]

I happened to see this amazing shoryuken.com post that has an awesome video about Keystone II and the next *drool* version *salivate* of the most awesome fighting game ever *slobber*: Street Fighter IV. I was also excited to see my fellow VMwarian, Tom Cannon, in the video. DANG I wish I was back in Cali [...]