Went to exchange my TFT with the dead pixel yesterday at Mediamarkt. After queueing in line for about an hour, finally it was my turn. The service department was very friendly, I got my exchange ticket right away. Then I had to go into the store, fetch another monitor to be able to swap it. Alas, no more Syncmaster 920N available (except 3 which also had dead pixels). Can I use this paper I have in my hand here to get one at another Mediamarkt? Yes sir, no problem. Had to run to pick up Diana at her class in Mechelen (and turned up half an hour late there), so we drove through to the Mediamarkt in Antwerp. Where they had the monitors (albeit 20 euro more expensive, which I would have had to pay on top), but they were very sorry to say that I had the wrong kind of paper and they couldn’t take it. Back to Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, no time to bash the people there, just got the right paper and stormed off direction Mediamarkt Basilix, Brussels, hoping they had a monitor there. Again bad luck, it closed at 19.30 (wtf) and I was there at 19.45, thinking it would close at 20.00.

So I’m sitting here, with a 19" CRT and a 19" TFT next to eachother… sigh. Hopefully I can get another identical monitor soon, or I’ll have to bring back the other as well and buy 2 new ones of a different type. :p

I just set up FreeNX on my Sarge machine and it works really nice! I was hoping it would be able to "receive" remote desktop (rdc) connections and channel it to an X server (to use standard Windows CE/TS thin clients with a Linux server). I found the .deb’s too late, and as such followed another howto for Ubuntu .

Here’s how I did it on Sarge:

apt-get install cdbs autotools-dev patchutils autoconf bzip2 zlib1g-dev libpng12-dev libjpeg-dev xlibs-dev libfreetype6-dev libmikmod2-dev libssl-dev libxaw7-dev automake1.9 automake1.4 expect tcl8.4 netcat ssh build-essential dpatch

Add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb-src http://debian.tu-bs.de/project/kanotix/unstable/ sid nx

apt-get source nx freenx
cd nx-1.4.92+1.5.0

sed -i s/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 5.0.0\)/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 4.2.0\)/ debian/control
export DH_COMPAT=4
dpkg-buildpackage

cd ../freenx-0.4.4+0.4.5

sed -i s/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 5.0.0\)/debhelper\ \(\>=\ 4.2.0\)/ debian/control
sed -i s/openssh-server,\ openssh-client/ssh/ debian/control
dpkg-buildpackage

cd ..; dpkg -i *deb 

Edit /etc/nxserver/node.conf and add the following line:

COMMAND_XAUTH=/usr/bin/X11/xauth

If you want to use SSH authentication instead of FreeNX’s own passdb backend put the following lines in there as well:

ENABLE_PASSDB_AUTHENTICATION="0"
ENABLE_SSH_AUTHENTICATION="1" 

Fetch the 1.5 client for Windows (2.0 from Nomachine doesn’t work). Enter the correct details (enable "encrypt all data" if you want it to work through firewalls and NATs — that way you just have to open up SSH and be done with it). Enjoy!

Very nicely done, although a better quality video would be nice to have:

Diana now started at KUL doing a "schakelprogramma" (conversion program) in Information Management so next year she can start the course she actually wanted to do this year but got rejected… Hopefully we’ll pull through with 2 years of only one person earning anything…

I’m still not very convinced any of the administration at the KUL is actually in any state that would stand a 10-point checklist of how things should work…

Good luck to my little studentje! 🙂

We’ve got it! We have our new car since friday and it looks and drives *grrreat* ! 🙂 Pics will probably follow… but it (or she ;-)) can look like this:

Pïcs courtesy of alfachick‘s nicely tuned car at alfa156.net 😉

Last week I spent some money in "gamer-izing" my computer case. It’s a nice Silver Lian-Li aluminium thingy, a bit less nice-looking because of 2 white/beige Plextor DVD & DVD-RW front bezels… So I spent some cash via Ebay on 2 nice aluminum bezels , a nice thermometer/fan monitor display , a few Akasa blue-led fans and a sidepanel with plexi so you can see inside the case (woops, some cleanup needed ;)).

Friday we had some time to kill at Mediamarkt , and I ended up walking out with 2 Samsung SyncMaster 920N 19" TFT monitors… Now I really got the über-PC 😉 (Unfortunately I already have a dead pixel on one of my monitors, so I’ll have to go back to MediaMarkt some day soon).

A funky dialog box from $program, courtesy of The Daily WTF:

 A bit harsh perhaps, no?

Via IRC, a project started by the Openminds people to demonstrate and test Ruby-on-rails (+ Google Maps) at Barcamp. It’s a Euro bill tracker, where people (like myself) enter serial numbers for their Euro bills, hopefully that same bill will come into other people’s hands who will also use the site and boom, a Euro bill flightplan is born. Some rough edges still have to be cut, but it’s already Web 2.0’ish as it is 😉 Let’s start tracking!

Update: Woopsie, forgot to mention the URL, it’s 7bills.eu ofcourse 😉 

Prepare for another blog storm… first a nice tip I found on this page …

Sometimes I use mutt to read my mail, which nicely autodecrypts and checks pgp/gpg signatures. But then I’d need to retrieve everybody’s public key, like the Ubuntu security etc (which I couldn’t find anywhere by the way), but no more! gnupg now automatically retrieves keys from the keyserver you specify just by adding keyserver-options “auto-key-retrieve” into ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf.

I don’t know if this makes it any less secure though… but WorksForMe(tm)