Jaunty Jackalope

I finally got around to upgrade my work laptop to Jaunty Jackalope. Things worked pretty ok, the only snag I found so far was that the ftp.funet.fi mirror was actually missing some packages, causing the update to terminate prematurely.

I haven't had time to walk around the release that much, but so far, no problems.

Keyboard shortcuts in Outlook

Sometimes I end up in Outlook, and I have to navigate around. After taking some time to try to find the most basic keyboard shortcuts (such as moving to the next message), I finally found this link. Very useful information, but one would think that "move to the next message" would be common enough to warrant its own place in the menus.

Stort hål i marken

Resecentrum

Rejält gjutet och armerat.

Crane

A large mobile crane outside the railway station in Uppsala. It looked larger in real life, though.

Märklig dörrskylt

Såg den här skylten inne på Nickis Äventyrslek. Man undrar ju varför knappen sitter där den sitter...

Adventures into album covers

I've spent several hours trying to complete my music library with the correct album covers, including various tracks I really don't remember where I got. I'm sure some of them are illegally copied from somewhere, but the majority are ripped from physical CDs that I own. (I have a whole bunch of old vinyl albums which I haven't digitalized yet, though.)

Mp3Tag has been an invaluable help; it can search freedb given a set of tracks, and it can also search Amazon.com. There is also a menu option for searching discogs.com, but that never seems to work. I'm not sure why.

Several hundred tracks did not have any tag info at all. I had to go purely by file and directory names. Very weird, I'm sure that when I ripped them, they looked good. My programmer brain wanted to start disecting the files to figure out if the files contained any clues to which program I used to rip them, but the rational part of my brain said that that was a waste of time. Which it surely was. I'm still curious about how it really happened. After getting the album and song names correct, Mp3Tag could fix the rest.

I still have problems with a couple of albums. I borrowed a CD from my sister (which I still think I haven't returned -- I'm sure she's forgotten): "Pops by Gershwin" with John Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra. I can't find any information about the album at all. Even Google lets me down.

The OCD part of my brain tells me that I have to keep going until there are no more unknown album covers, while the other not-so-OCD part protests and would rather play another level of GTA:IV. We'll see which part wins.

How (not) to transport secret documents.

Oops.

Christmas!

New hardware is always fun. My new machine arrived today (well, I had to actually go and pick it up at my local computer vendor, EIS).

I was a little adventurous and installed Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Since the machine has 4GB of RAM, it felt less than optimal just to be able to use 3 of those. Lets see how that turns out.

The graphics card is a ATI HD4870, which takes up two slots (just one PCIE slot, though), one being used just for the fan and heatpipes. However, I was expecting the box to be full of cables, wiring, etc., but it was surprisingly empty. The cpu and cpu-fan was much smaller than I expected. The included keyboard wasn't too good though. Much too noisy and cheap-plastic feeling. I think I'll switch back to my old and battered HP keyboard.

The Antec Sonata III chassi is very nice, black and silent. When writing this, I actually cannot determine if the faint humming sound is the ventilation in the room itself or the computer case/graphics card. Excellent!

So on the list of things to do (after installing Firefox, which is the very first thing I always do on any Windows machine I get my hands on), is:

• Set up a backup solution
  
• Install Steam
• Figure out a way to transfer all my old game files (I don't really want to play GTA: San Andreas from scratch)
• Restore stuff from my old harddrive

And a bunch of other things, but that'll probably be enough for tonight.