The mobile phone was turned off, OFF!

I was just alerted to an article in Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) that talked about an 18 year old man disappearing in the town of Varberg last night. The actual piece is a missing persons notice, which is always sad and worrying, but the real kicker was at the end:

"His mobile phone, that had been turned off, could be restarted remotely ..."

WTF?! When I turn my mobile phone off, it is supposed to stay OFF! Who came up with the bright idea to have the function to be reactivated by remote, and who in their right mind gave this certain someone permission to do so?

Unfortunately comments seem to be disabled for this article in DN.

OK, so the original story seems to have been somewhat retracted, and the Police claim to be confounded about the earlier statement made by the, so far unnamed, telecommunications company.

Even though it might be confusing to some people, I will still be removing the battery when I want to make sure my mobile is off!

Sunday, 07 February 2010 at 19:57 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

On the Lighter Side of Things

Since most of my blogging these days seem to happen when I'm not crazy busy at work it is not so surprising I get to blog today. I'm going on Christmas vacation tomorrow! Three weeks of non-work stuff ahead of me. Very necessary after apx. four months of 15/7 hours/day of crazy work!

This week I began winding down, a bit odd since we still have a lot of things to do, but I guess my mind has already prepared itself and put the brain in relax mode. That hopefully explains why I've overslept two times only this week, compared to one time only over the the last four months.

Since I'm off on vacation I dropped by the clinic today to get my complementary (new|swine) flu shot. Hopefully I won't get any of the dreaded side effects or even a fever.

While winding down today I found another great TED talk, this time by Dan Gilbert it's about how we humans ar bad at estimating things. He has some funny examples that really makes you think. :)

I also found some other neat stuff, completely unrelated, but still useful. In particular if you are an avid Emacs user, like me. The first is about managing several code projects, MK-Project. The second is about fixing the annoying scrolling. Enjoy!

Thursday, 17 December 2009 at 20:29 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Cool Images

Wow, this guy has really got some nice work to show! His work reminds me of Salvador Dali, who's work has been a real inspiration to me.

Since I am also a big fan of Tetris I linked one of Erik's works here. Tetris huh, I think my mind got seriously broken in my early teens when I was practically always playing it. I sometimes still see tetraminos everywhere I go.

Sunday, 26 July 2009 at 08:33 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Some neat Code

Saturday, 04 July 2009 at 21:58 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Heh

NerdTests.com says I'm a Dorky Nerd God. Click here to take the Nerd Test, get nerdy images and jokes, and write on the nerd forum!

Friday, 12 June 2009 at 19:53 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Current Meme

Thursday, 11 June 2009 at 01:37 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Link Collection 2009-02-28

This makes it possible to debug why a disk needs to spin up, and to increase battery life even more.

Dislike NetworkManager? Try wicd ...

Minimalistic distro Crush Bang Linux 8.10

Ah, what every FLOSS dad is looking for, a way to make your kids interested in your world instead of the dark side, and what is better than to trick them into it with a cool Linux game? Read Uwe Hermann's blog about Teeworlds, or visit the home page.

OK, so my kids are five and three years old, maybe World of Goo is more to their liking? ;-) Try the demo here!

Saturday, 28 February 2009 at 23:36 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Reminder to Self

How to recode AVI-files to be able to write them to a Video CD. 

ffmpeg -i original.avi -target pal-vcd copy.mpg
vcdimager -t vcd1 -l "Title" -c vcd.cue -b vcd.bin copy.mpg
cdrdao write --device /dev/cdrw vcd.cue
Note, vcdimager is able to take multiple .mpg files as argument, very useful when burning multiple family videos to the same disc!

Tip from Johan Risberg on how to be able to reattach a UTF-8 Linux screen session from Cygwin. First, start irssi in a screen from a Linux login with LANG=LANG en_US.utf8. Then reattach to the screen, preferably using -xRR, with LANG=C from Cygwin.

Saturday, 14 February 2009 at 21:13 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Link Collection w31 2008

George Dyson, son of legendary Freeman Dyson, talks about the first computer, the first software bugs (both physical and logical) and the initial struggles of hackers. Fun history lesson for computer engineers and programmers alike. (Now, go crawl the web for "Dyson Sphere" and "Star Trek"! :-)

Is Ubuntu 8.04 really that buggy as everyone suggest? My guess is that we've reached a breaking point where beginner users (< 1 year) are starting to outnumber the older "hard core" users. Or have the top 20% moved on to other distros? Even XKCD has picked up on it...

Michael Meeks of Novell was interviewed recently by the Austrian paper derStandard.at, and one of the things he mentioned was the OpenOffice fork they maintain, very interesting new features, not (yet) included in OpenOffice.org, e.g. .docx and VBA support!

A couple of days ago I managed to convince a friend of mine to try running bleeding edge GNU Emacs from CVS. He almost gave up, kicking and screaming, due to his Bitstream Vera fonts becoming totally screwed up compared to Alexandre Vassalottis snapshot build from January. It turned out to be caused by the Emacs font back-end defaulting to the old X font renderer rather than the new XFT one.

Here is my ~/.Xresources file that seems to fix the problem. Run xrdb -merge ~/.Xresources to merge in the new settings without logging out/in again:

The Canonical SourceForge equivalent, Launchpad, is slowly turning into something really cool. Take the tour if you are curious and want to know more.

I cannot believe I haven't heard of pastebin before. Thanks Rooth!

My dear wife is a GNU Nano user. Here are a couple of tips for her, and other die-hard Nano users.

Are you an electronics or computer engineer? Then you've probably had trouble explaining boolean logic to people. This dude explains it all using dominoes.

Finishing off with this, unbeatable, hardware hacker. He's transformed his EeePC into a veritable monster! See his guide to the most basic changes necessary...

Wednesday, 30 July 2008 at 16:22 | /misc | permanent link to this entry

Test posting using blosxom

First try to consolidate on using an already working implementation of a blog script rather than writing my own. I'm trying out Blosxom, which is somewhat overkill for my needs. I actually wrote up a simple Perl script a couple of weeks ago that did what I wanted, oh well, what remains now is to do some Emacs hacks to smooth things over a bit.

Saturday, 05 August 2006 at 22:35 | /misc | permanent link to this entry