I’ve had it for ages now, but only used it for the first time yesterday: the Anti-Bohrstaub-Aufsatz für Staubsauger ! Very handy stuff, even sucks itself to the wall, and no drilling dust at all to be found! Recommended, and cheap. Thanks to my darling wife for the present 😉

Since this weekend I’ve assembled my new PC after it being in boxes for a few days. I simply didn’t have the space to do it.

I bought a new one because the old one started crashing a lot … in the end Windows wouldn’t even boot and I worked on my laptop for over a week. It’s amazing how much more you do around/in the house when you don’t have a working computer 😉

Specs of the new one:

• Intel Core2 Duo E8400 (3GHz), Zalman cooler
• 2x 2GB DDR2
• Asus P5Q-WS mainboard
• 2x 250GB WD SATA HD on 3Ware 9500S
• Geforce 9600GT 512MB Zilent
• Lian-Li PC60 Silver case
• Plextor 16x DVD-ROM
• NEC 16x DVD-RW with Lightscribe
• Hauppauge WinTV PCI (Almost 10 years old!)
• 2x Samsung Syncmaster 920N 19" TFT

Should be OK for the upcoming years, and the upcoming GTA IV, I hope 😀 

(And the first game I’m going to play on it is… OpenTTD, yay for such power hungry apps :D) 

Last sunday Bertem lost power for about 2 hours. The fact that it went down at 20:00 -precisely- was a bit odd I thought, called Electrabel and heard an ITR of 2 hours…which was about right.

At those times you realise a) how nice it is to have a UPS b) how little you can do without power.

Watch a movie, nope. Read, nope, too dark. Clean up, hardly, too dark. Watch TV, nope. Computers, nope. All my computers, servers, routers, modem, etc had power, but Telenet was down, too. Sigh 😉 

We moved, too. 2.5 months ago now, but as this blog was running a bit behind…

We’re now in a house (with a garage we can actually get the car in!), 3 bedrooms, etc etc. It’s way bigger than our old appartment, yet it seems we’ve pretty much used up the available space again.. We’re almost not surrounded by cardboard boxes anymore though… 🙂

– Moving now to a new, bigger house

– Car still broken, but getting there, thanks to all supporting Alfa Romeo 156 Club members and blade/Koen helping to get it fixed!

– Moving to Telenet for our phone line because Belgacom charges 135 eur to move it and I can not back it out to a discovery line again, special promo from Telenet made me switch, getting free Digital TV ànd a free (well, 1 EUR) digibox for it as well.

– Toby doing well but still needs to learn some manners sometimes 😉

– New black kitten Zoe will probably enter the family once we settled in moving our stuff around

– Had a great time last sunday at the first AR156C sleuteldag  of 2008 (pity I didn’t have an Alfa to sleutel)

– Burger king rocks: large triple whopper menu + cheese + bacon + coke + frietsaus = heaven

– Time to lower the electricity cost at the new place, will likely swap some hardware around for silent and cool/low power things (even though at the end we are getting money from Electrabel, our monthly bill will be higher from now on, due to increase in prices I guess, argh)

– Busy as hell at work 😮

– Real Soon Now(tm), Java MythTV LiveTV frontend! Started a year ago, now Geert continued development 🙂  

– Donations accepted 😉 

As a last post in this blogathlon, what I’m going to do next: well, move, obviously. Also migrate my server stuff which is still running on old Dual P3’s to the new Supermicro server as soon as I get the new chassis delivered.

After that, next project should be opening a nlams2 point of presence for Phyxia Networks at the NIKHEF datacenter in Amsterdam. 

For the new home: finally get the entire mythtv installation in working order. This includes: DVB-T inputs for VRT and RTBF, DVB-S to Astra (we don’t have any sat hardware yet, that’s for after the move), dual analog cable tuner on the PVR500 card, all on the backend machine; then the correct setup of the living room frontend, building a new frontend for the bedroom (we’ll also need a monitor or TV for there) and also finishing my Java frontend so we can also watch livetv (and perhaps recordings) on our Windows workstations.

Enough work I’d say 😉 

Hmm, haven’t posted anything in a while… too busy with work/catching up sleep/my newly found hobby "Alfa Romeo 156"/playing Age of Empires III: The warchiefs. Many many hours into each of those. 😉

Especially those 8-player AoE3 3-hour battlegames make time fly by so quickly 😀

Oh, and the car will have a pretty nice look once I got it back on monday and some enhanced functionality after next weekend, too. Looking forward to the club’s sleuteldag 😀

Another Immo beauty:

So, our appartment got sold so we’re looking for a new place. A nice house for us and our cats, we hope 🙂

So while surfing immoweb, we ran across this beauty:

Wng in grne omg, bos aan 2 zdn in doodl str, zr rstg en vlg, bij Halle en Bru. Lg kad ink wgns besch wng. Elctr toeg poort, 20m oprit
& gar mt carprt. Betgld vlk trr gele srtgls en moillon afw. en pdn aan 2 zdn mt grze dallen. Ctrl verw mt gaswndktl Vaillant (prpn). Wn/slpkmr met prkt, inger kkn en brgrmt mt vinyl, btglde badk mt waskom en dch/stm-cab + wc, kln kmr en hal mt vsttpt. Krpkldr en lg zldr aanwzg. Sept-put mt elctr pmp, rgnwtrput mt hndpmp. Immoknt zich onth. Afspr vr bez op Za/Zo mglk.

I guess some people think they have to pay pr ltr. Trnsltns wlcm! 

One of the gifts we received was a Nintendo Wii! Including one Wiimote and Wii Sports. On our way home we passed by MediaMarkt and picked up a second Wiimote (including WiiPlay) and a Traditional Controller, plus a Wiimote charge station with rechargable batteries for 2 controllers. Upon installing it we immediately started playing tennis, bowling and all the other fun stuff. The Wii controller really is a novel way of control (yes, I’m 8 months late with my constatation) 🙂

It’s a bit silly that it has built in Wifi and the (ethernet) LAN connection costs an extra 40 bucks; I’d expect it to be built in like in any other console. That said, the wireless connections works fine and supports WPA (thank god) unlike the DS. 

Got some Wii Points and made Diana happy immediately by buying Super Mario 64. 

Now looking for another Nunchuck, seems to be a bit harder as they’re sold out everywhere. :)