sadevil.org

Yay! I finally got the firstall of my certificates of the leasing firms - now we can go insurance-hunt!

Today we went to get the papers for the Prius, and got a sneak-preview at it too ;)
(no, the pic ain’t blurry, you’re just drunk! :p)

Purrty!

Today the 100 meters mad dash started to get all the paperwork in order for my too early delivered Prius.

Todo:

• Get certificates from previous leasing firms
• Get insurance
• Get licenseplate
• Get parking card

(I need the certificates to be able to get my insurance at a lower tarif)

Fun fun :p

The Belgian National Railways (known as NMBS/SNCB) really totally suck. Completely and utterly.

Today, yet another strike in Brussels South station, causing endless delays and cancellations.

Do you think the managers of the railways notice this? Ofcourse not. They might even get another bonus for ending a strike without having to give anything to the employees. The only ones who suffer are the travellers, who after a long day of work just want to get home.

I support the right to strike, but they’re really stretching it. No more sympathy from me, strikers!

Wh00t!

I just got called from Toyota Garage Holvoet… Our Prius is in! Two months early!

Wh00t!

We can haz car!

(sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)

Imagine there’s no Apple,
No products that begin with “i,”
No monthly iPod models,
No Apple stores to get you high.
Imagine all the people
Finding other things to do!

Imagine there’s no bloggers…
It isn’t hard to do!
No viruses or spyware,
No weekly Windows patches, too
Imagine all the people
Learning to get a life…

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say it’d be a nightmare
Without Google, Mac or Dell
We might have real conversations–
But the world would be dull as hell!

Imagine no new cellphones;
Kiss console games goodbye.
No David Pogue or Mossberg
To tell us what to buy.
Imagine all the people
Getting some exercise!

(You-hoo-hoo!)

You may say that I’m a loony
But rest assured I’m almost done.
I’m pretty sure it’ll never happen
So we nerds can live as one!

(source: The NewYork Times)

Amazing! Today I saw the second Prius on the road since I bought mine! wh00t!

*grin*

I’m currently trying to get Linux (Debian Sid) working on my MacBook… it’s installed, but still needs lots of tweaking.

Most of the things work out of the box, except the things listed below:

Specific things that work (after tweaking):

• Xorg with resolution at 1280×800
• WiFi (atheros)
• special buttons (volume/brightness/…)

Things that need to work still:

• Touchpad (well, it works, but it needs to work better)
• iSight

Sources I’m using at the moment:

• http://wiki.debian.org/MacBook
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Apple_MacBook

I’ll write a detailed post on this later… when I’m not uberly lazy ;)

An update after my previous ISP post:

• July 2007
  • Increase of data transfer for netconnect to 75gb
• October 2007
  • Increase in prices :( BOOO! Well, only with a few euro’s, but still… :(
• November 2007
  • Change in newsservice, now allowing more connections and dedicated text-news server ;)
• December 2007
  • Increase of data transfer for netconnect to 100gb, netconnect + boostpack to 120gb
• January 2008
  • Increased upload traffic in all accounts to 448kbit
  • Increased data transfer with the boostpack to 150gb
  • Increased download speed (2048kbit) on mediumband with boostpack
  • Started delivery of Cityconnect - a new ADSL2+ product line (available in Leuven only sofar…)

Needless to say, I’m still a very happy customer ;) But I am going to cancel my boostpack, since it no longer has use (I need the upstream speed, not the data transfer..)

I “recently” ordered (after doing some research) a Raidsonic Icybox NAS (full model: IB-NAS4220-B). I chose it because of:

• gigabit ethernet port
• dual disk support with JBOD/Mirror/Stripe
• runs linux
• Samba/NFS/FTP/iTunes server
• community site http://www.nas-4220.org/
• low power consumtion
• quiet
• …

The NAS arrived a week ago, and I ordered two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750gb disks (model: ST3750640AS) to go in it. I prefer seagate for the 5 years of warranty they give on their disks. They arrived two days ago.

Unfortunately, after initial stress tests I got the following SMART errors (using smartctl, part of the wonderful smartmontools) on one of the disks:

SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

The vendor-specific Attribute is:

ID#	ATTRIBUTE_NAME	FLAG	VALUE	WORST	THRESH	TYPE	UPDATED	WHEN_FAILED	RAW_VALUE
10	Spin_Retry_Count	0×0013	069	069	097	Pre-fail	Always	FAILING_NOW	0

which isn’t very healthy :(

The disk is packed up and ready to be shipped back to the store…