Tag: personal

I have been wanting to blog about this for ages. So in November last year I decided that my old trusty Athlon XP that has served me for years was really due for replacement. It was still fast enough to run vim and Firefox and such, but the machine became annoying as soon as I switched to Gmail last Summer. The machine could just not keep up with me typing e-mail in the browser. For a very long time I have been wanting to buy a Mac Pro (or Powermac G5 before), in the end I chose for a different solution.

So I ended up buying components for a Intel Core 2 Quad, 4G RAM and RAID1 on pretty fast SATA2 disks. I bought the cheapest PCI-e video card available to drive my dual Iiyama displays. After assembling the machine myself, I loaded it with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. Figuring out the partitions (software RAID and LVM) took a while (apparently I needed another install DVD image for this) but after that the installation process was fantastic. Completely flawless, everything worked out of the box.

The end result: my own self-built “Mac”. Everything works in Ubuntu, also suspend (what I would buy a desktop Mac for). The configuration I have right now would be impossible to get from Apple for 500 euros, and works as flawless as the Macs I have. Plus, it runs Linux which I still prefer over Mac OS X for programming tasks.

Really, really glad that I ended up getting this as my new desktop machine. I am pretty sure that my next desktop machine (which I will get in 4 years or so :) will again be a Linux machine and not a Mac. Though for laptops I still prefer Macs, sorry ;)

Oh yea, what I did learn was that I could also just have upgraded the browser to Firefox 3 on the old Athlon. Oh well, it is still amazing to watch a Quad core compile GTK+.

This year’s lowlands festival started on Friday. For the last six editions I have been there, but we are missing out on this one. Also because it was sold out incredibly early, I think they broke a record with that. More importantly, we are not going because the line-up totally sucks this year. In a news article today they reviewed the Friday evening and mentioned there was dance, rock and even metal. Like having metal is special, I mean the previous incarnations of lowlands always had a very large share of punk, metal and alternative bands. Unfortunately, that has really been on the decline over the last few years. This also attracted a different kind of people and the real authentic “lowlands feel” that I felt during the first time I went really started to evaporate in the last few years.

Too bad really. We’re opting for proper concerts instead these days (and living in Amsterdam is very helpful for that :). We will be seeing Korpiklaani at Pagan Fest in September and hopefully we might even catch Enserifum when they hit the Netherlands. Seems like Anti-Flag will be playing the Melkweg in November.

Oh yeah, the studies are done now and I should be receiving my BSc and MSc certificates on Friday (both in Computer Science, surprise). So I have been getting back into GTK+ in my spare time now wooooo. Should definitely be playing more guitar and bass guitar as well.

Apparently blogging about stuff helps, one day after blogging and complaining about my missing Internet connection my DSL modem was delivered. Rejoice.

Once all of GNOME has migrated to git this week, I should try to find time to check out the new repositories and rebuild everything. I hope I can finally get my branches in order and then slowly get back to hacking yaaaay.