Kasperian Moving Parts

kinda like batman, but with a wife and 3 kids

RSS

Category Archives: Life in General

I know it’s stealing Firefox3′s thunder, but Opera 9.5 was just released and it is REALLY well done. I have always been amazed at how blazing fast it is and this release continues in that vein. However… Is it just me or does the Gmail “move to trash” / “delete” shortcut (shift+3 or “#”) TOTALLY [...]

I don’t think I truly know what the words “vacation” or “relax” mean. Seriously. We’re visiting friends right now and I’ve taken the week off, conceivably to “relax”, or have a vacation. But I don’t know if I’d be able to relax if my life depended on it. When I’ve not been running around town [...]

I switched from SUSE 10.3 to Kubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) just this evening. It’s always good to get a feel for how the various distros are doing. Anyway, it took me a bit of digging to figure out how to get the artwiz fonts (smoothansi, in particular) to work as my konsole font. Thanks to this [...]

I had THE most frustrating day yesterday. After a hellish night of not sleeping (darned cold!!), I wake up to find that my internet connection is totally borked. Looked at the router’s status page and it can’t get a DHCP address from my lovely ISP, Charter.net. Spent an hour on the phone with Charter’s completely [...]

Oh HECK yes!!! I am SO buying this the split-second it comes out!!! Here’s an awesome review to boot!

I’ve been using Firefox 3, beta5 for a while now and am very much liking it. It’s crashed a fair bit, but that’s understandable being that it’s only a beta5. One thing that has bothered me, though, was that quite a few of my must-have extensions aren’t released for FF3 yet. TinyURL Creator, for one, [...]

KDE3, KDE4, Plasma, Twinview == Not Good Originally uploaded by vanRijn Dear Lazyweb, This frustrates me and makes me all kinds of sad… For some reason, whenever I start my normal KDE3 session, plasma and KDE4 insists on starting up as well. So I get KDE3′s kicker and KDE4′s plasma stacked, which is less than [...]

Dearest Lazyweb, I’m seriously confused. It would seem that this incredibly awesome little multimedia gadget called the PSP can’t actually pull off having more than one playlist for a single directory of songs??? Let me get this straight… you seriously want me to copy the same song to 10 different directories if I want 10 [...]

I’ve never had an eye exam before today, but I am a HUGE fan of Brian Regan and absolutely LOVE his skit about going to the eye doctor. It is totally hilarious! What I was not prepared for, however, was how accurate his observations were! I thought that he must have some nutty eye doctor, [...]

That’s right, folks! If yer lookin’ for a big hole to throw $300 into, just go out and buy yerself a 32″ RCA CRT TV! That’s what I did just 2 short years ago, and shore enuff, the only useful purpose this monstrous beast now serves is to beep like a Geiger counter when it’s [...]

I have discovered how to save millions on Christmas and birthday gifts. Just have something shipped to you that is packed in bubble wrap. The “something” goes to you, and the bubble wrap keeps the wife and kids entertained for hours!

I know I need to drink more water, and after the recent health disturbances, I knew I had to get serious about it. But I also knew that unless I had something unique and stylish and cool, it would be a chore to me and I’ve no hope of being consistent on something that’s irritating. [...]

Old Geek Receipt! Originally uploaded by vanRijn I finally broke down and bought an HP C5180 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier dealie. It’s a sweet little device, I must admit. Very Linux-friendly, comes network-ready, and now all of our computers at home can scan and print via network, out of the box. So, said new scanner has enabled [...]

I just sent off an e-mail about some of the challenges and surprises that I’ve hit as a Remote-Working Geek and it occurred to me that not only have I not blogged as of late (I suck, what can I say–but I have a list of like 10 things I need to blog about), but [...]

My Replacement Moleskine! Originally uploaded by vanRijn Dude, seriously, my faith is much more than restored in Moleskine due to this. I had blogged previously about the premature death of my beloved Moleskine, and had forgotten all about Moleskine’s excellent warranty. Well, I e-mailed them and exactly as they’d promised, today I received a brand [...]

My apologies to Huey Lewis and the News. And warning: this is a wandering, brain-dumping, meandering post which may very well be of no interest to you. There’s nothing like spending the weekend in a hospital to give you a little perspective. I blogged previously about feeling dizzy and nauseous, and I attributed it to [...]

100_5656 Originally uploaded by vanRijn I’ve been looking for a better screen protector for my PSP than the one I had (a Hori) and was just about to go out and spend $20 on an Invisible Shield, but I found people talking about using 3m Scotchgard instead. It’s certainly less expensive, and if it works, [...]

The Hori screen protector that I have on my PSP has managed to become poked and has subsequently created a bubble on my PSP’s screen. So I was looking at getting an InvisibleShield screen protector, being that they’re all but bullet-proof. And then I saw a couple of crazy nuts that talked about just buying [...]

Now, this one I’m really speaking out of the side of my head on… This is totally based on first impressions of NetBeans, albeit after 3<x<5 hours have been invested in said first impressions… I’ve been using Eclipse and CDT for a while for my day job at VMware (which, by the by, totally rocks!!!). [...]

I’ve been looking for a way to have VIM functionality inside Eclipse for a long time. SlickEdit has it, sort of, but it’s prohibitively expensive and ugly. And then I saw this nifty little vimplugin sourceforge project and got my hopes all up. Sadly, it’s not quite there yet. After figuring out how to associate [...]

I ran across this on Planet Gnome… Openbox 3.4.6 and ObConf 2.0.3 released Feb 02, 2008 – 12:53 pm EST Openbox 3.4.6 and ObConf 2.0.3 have been released for mass consumption! This Openbox release introduces a new look! The Clearlooks theme has been updated to match the latest GTK Clearlooks engine. As well Openbox and [...]

It actually felt pretty good to “unplug”, as it was put in The Matrix, and allow my brain to focus on nothing other than family, video games, and good old-fashioned American football today. I just realized today that I’ve not had an truly restful weekend in about 3 months, what with new job, travelling, trying [...]

4 KDE Geeks on a San Francisco Walkabout Originally uploaded by vanRijn This was at the start of our 3 hour tour, which led us from 3rd and Market street, to Fort Mason, to Fisherman’s Wharf, then back by trolley (!) to 3rd and Market. Man, I’m tired! Left to right: me, Thiago, Helio, and [...]

No more need be said. =:)

Woohoo! Day one from the KDE Launch Event at Mountain View, CA, and I’m tired, stoked, tired, excited, and… tired. Memorable spots include: Waking up at 3:00 a.m., EST, flying all day, getting stuck in Silicon Valley traffic for 2 hours, etc. Visiting a beautiful, big mall in Santa Clara. My eldest would LOVE this! [...]