I just realised I have not post pics of my new pedalboard yet..

Tadahh...

It didn't come in such a nice condition tho, so I had to reupholster it.. with this!

INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH! It looks very nice tho, like carpet..

The other side of the pedals are stuck with this..

So yeah, they stick like glue. I can flip the thing around and the pedals won't drop off. If you're lucky you will get to see it next jamming!

(it's bloody fucking heavy tho)

Best Vuze replacement so far

It's been nagging me, Vuze taking up 300MBs of memory and sometimes more, on my old iMac with only 2GB of ram. 2GB is little nowadays, how fast time flies. Anyway, Vuze absolutely kills my iMac. It beachballs my Mac to no end. So today, during spring cleaning, I decided to take up a solution suggested by Jem: uTorrent.

Well if you are an avid pirate, you should know that uTorrent was bought over by BitTorrent, a completely legal, legit company, sometime back. That doesn't make it very safe, but it is the fastest and most lightweight client on windows. So recently, after the cows finally came home (hey, Lunar New Year, happy year of the cow guys) they released a supposedly kick ass Mac version. I remember Jem hyping about it "it has RSS downloading and it's really fast!" so I decided to give it a try.

Then I realised, the hard way why people always say not to follow hype.

First of all, there is no RSS downloading in sight. RSS downloading only existed for a little while on a leaked pre-release alpha build. It's beta now, and it's not there. But what was true, was that uTorrent is pretty damn snappy, and barely took up 30MBs of memory.

So fine, no RSS downloading, I can live with workarounds. Stumbled upon a program called TV Shows, where you just choose what show you want and from which episode you want to watch it from and it will download the torrent files for you, once they are available. The version on that link doesn't work but this dude fixed it. Pretty damn cool, works better than Vuze. +1!

Now I don't only watch TV shows, I watch anime too. So I need something that can handle generic RSS downloading for me, and I found Automatic. Automatic works roughly the same way as how Vuze's RSS downloading works, so that's good enough for me. Oh, both TV Shows and Automatic has options to open your torrent files for you, so they start automatically.

All's well, well almost, till I realised, uTorrent does not have web administration. I mean, what if I need to download something and I'm not at home? I've always loved Vuze's web administration, and I can't live without it.

Then I remembered an old gem: Transmission. It is a BT client that I believe, originated on the Mac. Popped by the site to take a look after this long while, from all the google results of people comparing Transmission to uTorrent.

I must say, I did not use Transmission back then as I couldn't select files within a torrent to download. It's such a simple feature and they didn't have it. But they have it now. And because it originated from the Mac (I believe so) it is the only BT client that fits the UI of the Mac. Simple, sleek and informative. It is also extremely lightweight, much like uTorrent. So I gave it a shot, and WOW. It does everything uTorrent can do, and looks much better. AND, it has a web interface that looks EXACTLY like the Mac interface. Not even Vuze can match that. Also, it has built in peer filtering, with a list that is consistently updated from the intarwebs, just like Vuze can. That's 2 to nil for Transmission against uTorrent. Together with TV Shows and Automatic, Transmission just supplants uTorrent. This solution is better than Vuze too, if any portion of Vuze fails you can't just replace it, you got to live with it.

If you use a Mac, give Transmission a shot. It's pretty damn good.

Please guys, use GTalk

Guys, replace MSN with GTalk. MSN is passe. And you don't even need to create an account if you are cool and already have a gmail account. On Macs, you can use Adium. On windows, I bet there is a windows client. Dump MSN man.

This is amusing and informative at the same time

I never knew there was such a detailed categorization of shit.

"The Bristol Stool Scale or Bristol Stool Chart is a medical aid designed to classify the form of human feces into seven categories." -Wikipedia

Finally a decent contender to the iPhone..

Fuck man the Palm Pre is really sweet.. It aggregates all your contacts from everywhere into a single, simple interface, from Facebook to Gmail to Exchange. It also aggregates all your conversations into a single interface, be it IM or SMS, so you can SMS or MSN someone from the same window and it looks like 1 flowing conversation. Yes it also aggregates your calendars from everywhere. UI wise, it can do everything the iPhone can do- swipes, pinching, etc. And it's actually smoother. And guess what, it can multitask. The only thing that will be lacking will be powerful third party apps because the API is HTML CSS and JS, but that might just change, who knows.

So what is it going to be, to be stuck on Apple as a stuck-up fanboy or go on to something better? Palm was the 1st ever PIM I've ever used and it made my life so much better (before it died on me, and then the company died as well). Now they finally come up with something that is as wonderful and exciting as my Palm V. Funny thing is that it doesn't have the same charm the iPhone gave when it 1st came out.. Maybe it was the Reality Distortion Field..

My newly refurbished room!

Tadahhhh...

It's not as pathetic as before now. Still pathetically small, but at least it's finally pleasant.

A pity I don't have any before pictures to show you how pathetic it used to be, it was so hideous I couldn't even bear to take any photos of it lest the camera breaks. Anyway, try to imagine it without the blinds, without the rug, and with an ugly toilet-like florescent circle-light on the ceiling. Took me quite a bit to get the blinds on, I used cable tie, but the end result is great. Yes, it works flawlessly. :D Blinds, rug, ceiling lamp and lamp shade courtesy of IKEA.

The most beautiful video I've ever watched

Our world is indeed a beautiful place..

I still consider you my friend

Just that I won't trust you anymore. And I hope that after reading and realising what I've said, everyone else will stop trusting you too. Which is fair, since you don't trust anybody anyway.

Do not onto others what you do not want others to do unto yourself.

PS: To all you other readers out there, if you don't understand what's going on, don't worry. You will understand once it happens to you.

PSS: To all those who asked.. what about the friendship? Let me put it this way.. I gave him my absolute trust and friendship, and yet all he did was to wear a mask, pretended to be my best friend, while instigating things to go against me behind my back. So what makes of this friendship? This friendship didn't exist at all, it only existed in my head. It was what he wanted me to believe. He doesn't even consider me his best friend.

But I still consider him my friend, because this friendship did exist once, before everything happened. Maybe about 3 years back. But I guess it's long gone.

D:

I used to think the iPhone was an elitist piece of Apple fanboy-ism. Now it's as common as Nokia 3210s during its heyday. What the heck happened. D:

Betrayal..?

I really wonder how I can be the one that betrayed you, when you were the one who took her away from me. And not only that, you failed to take care of her, failed to keep her in control, blaming the reasons on everyone else but yourself. I was trying to get back with her, to correct the wrongs, but it was too late for me to do anything. And this, to you is betrayal? So when you took her away, when you fail to give her happiness, you didn't betray me? And I didn't even bring it up. I took it like a good friend, that maybe things just weren't meant to be. I didn't blame you. I never did. Now you turn around and blame me instead, on the pretext that I backstabbed you? When it was you who did so to me?

And what about the band. Every single band I have, you tell me it won't make it. Is it your so called intuition, or that you just don't want me to succeed? You destroyed TEG, what we have built up for so long. You planted hate and discord among us so we would fight and destroy ourselves slowly. Made us stop doing covers knowing that we like to do covers. Made us do originals that we can never do. Made us irritated with a sloppy drummer that actually isn't sloppy at all. There's also a reason why we stopped gigging. Cos you hate to gig.

And then when Jason left, you told the rest of the band that TEG is no more, without my consent or knowledge. True that I grew sick and tired of the band, but as we all can see, it was all your doing. And deep inside, no matter what you do, I've always wanted to give the band a chance. I never wanted the band to split.

And what about my new band? That won't make it too? Once again you are trying to plant hate and sow discord among us, telling me how bad gene is, how bad rico is. Trying to influence me to dislike or hate them. Leaving the band and then telling me the band won't make it.

Telling my girlfriend that I betrayed you, trying to paint an ugly picture of me. You try to destroy my bands, and that's not enough, and you have to try to destroy my relationship as well. As though destroying my previous relationship and previous band wasn't enough, you have to try to destroy every subsequent one.

And yet I'm the one who betrayed you.

Random musings..

In order to be successful in what you do, you got to love what you do. If you do something for the sake of being successful or money, then you will never be, because there is no love. If you do what you do just because you love it, without giving a care about the world, life will reward you will success and money. Which is quite ironic.

But this is why crafty businessmen are the richest people in the world, cos their love in life is to fuck with people and earn their money. And as though that is not enough, life rewards them with success and even more money because they did what they love. Nice.

Laziest Mac user of the century

And that's me. Look what I got for my iMac:

So. WTF is this? It is a media center program called XBMC, which originated from the Xbox, and now it's available for almost every single platform. Even the Apple TV. Basically what it does is it categorizes all your movies and TV shows, automatically. Even Anime. Yes, it's AUTOMATIC. So I just put the files at the right places, and it will detect them, and download the cover art, plot synopsis, and episode summaries, and put them sort them nicely, as above. So all I need to do is fire it up, arm myself with the remote, and pig out. Wonderful.

And to top it all up, I installed Quicksilver on my iMac again. Spotlight is just too friggin slow. Yes, I'm the laziest fucking Mac user ever.

Something very funny happened recently..

One day, somebody said..

I'm sorry, I can't be perfect..

.. and all he could do was..

Runaway, runaway..

.. and all I have to say, is this.

See who gives a fuck.

:)

WTFU

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/~san/wtfu.mp3

http://sanxp.ath.cx:81/~san/wtfu-vanilla.mp3

Betty, finish the damn song, and Fi, you know what to do ;)

Oh ya Betty, I think I made your warwick into a warmonster. LOL. Hope you like the effect.

Shit.

The new Macbook Pros actually look kinda nice D:

And the screens are super thin!

Aww aren't they sweet..

The new MacBook on the left, and the new MacBook Pro on the right. I actually don't mind the new MB design, but I detest the new MBP design, even when they are similar. Maybe because I'm more tolerant to change and fresh designs on the hip and trendy low end model, but not on the more professional, expensive model. I'm keeping my old MBP. Forever.

The new Macbook Pro

Look here for more details.

I can't say I like the new design, but it looks like it will grow on me, like the aluminum iMacs. Carrying glass around is kinda shady though, won't that be heavy? Hmm.

Terminal elbow grease, again!

Yes, something on my system screwed up, again! I couldn't move my ~/Pictures folder over to my newly created partition for backing up. Finder kept complaining that there was a problem with the file, but question was: which file? Finder's really smart for not telling me, so after some digging around, I realised some duplicate files iPhoto created were somehow corrupted. Those I rotated, cropped, resized, whatever. So I went looking for them, with this.

cd ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library/

find . -name *_2.JPG

A few idiots showed up, but the modified files are fine, just those that are lingering in the originals folder, where they shouldn't be anyway. So,

find ./Originals/ -name *_2.JPG

Lesser idiots showed up, and there were everywhere, and I didn't want to delete them by hand. So,

find ./Originals/ -name *_2.JPG -exec mv {} ~/Desktop/ \;

Just in case I needed them later. Now, everything goes over. Finally. Apple needs to get their act together.

One year

It has been a year since the last gig. Can't help but to realise that nothing has been done since the last year, even with all the talks and resolutions, besides finally recording a 2 year old song properly. Oh well.

Just a random thought.

Leopard permission problems (what's new?)

Ok, just found out about this while fiddling with a new.. er.. hdd of mine (yeah it was supposed to be secret but wtf). Anyway a little background: I was thinking of coming up with a way to organise my stuff inside, and I decided to follow *exactly* how macs lay out their stuff. Basically, there is a Users folder in root, and then my shortname folder in it, which is my home folder, and all the other jazz inside the home folder. I will then create symlinks from within my home folder to point into folders in that folder, just as though they were at the same place all along.

For example, ~/Music, which is essentially /Users/san/Music, or more accurately, /Volumes/san/Users/san/Music, will point to /Volumes/san\ Storage/Users/san/Music instead. All these can be done with ln -s

Very simple right? Yes, till I hit a problem after creating a symlink pointing to the home folder on my new drive; accessing this symlink stalled my whole mac. Finder stalled, Safari stalled, every fucking thing stalled, I even had an error that Finder.app did not exist while trying to open a folder from my Dock. Great. This symlink I created, whatever I tried to call it, when pointing to /Volumes/san\ Storage/Users/san, would just lock up. I cannot find a better explanation of this fuckup better than a stupid permission problem went bad.

I checked the Get Info of the 2 home folders and compared them and I found this slight discrepency: there's a group called (unknown). Not only on my new drive, even on my old one, and every damn fucking file and folder in my home folder.

So I checked it up. Lo and behold, yet-another-mac-permissions-fuckup. Everyone who upgrades from Tiger, or migrates a Tiger user account, will get this problem. That practically means all of my dear Mac friends reading this, except for the lucky **** who bought Macs that came with Leopard. Yes you Geoff, and you too bee.

Why did this happen? Basically, Tiger got it all wrong: when you create a user acount, say 'ass', you will be also assigned to a group, called 'ass'. This isn't the convention in the Unix and Linux and BSD worlds, it doesn't even make sense, so Leopard fixed it. Now, all (new) accounts are under the group 'staff'. But guess what, they forgot to convert the old Tiger users over. There is no such group called 'ass', or 'san' or whatever you decided to name your account. So it shows up as, you guessed it, (unknown). So they sorta fixed the problem, which wasn't really a problem, and created a new one. What new problems? Reportedly, Spotlight is semi borked with this permission problem, and you get a performance hit because of that. (Jem, I guess this was our problem all along) Also, your Finder might crash when you try to delete the (unknown) user group, or it might just crash for no particular reason, like me accessing the damn symlink I created. It's also plain UGLY. Macs are meant to be preetee.

So. Fix? Or no fix? A brilliant way would be to create a new account and manually copy all your shit over. That would be something I won't want to do, and I guess neither do you. Another way, is to do it by nipping the problem at the bud, and fixing the rest with some smart terminal fiddling. Which I did, and my Mac still runs, so I guess it's safe.

Instructions are detailed here but I'll summarise for you. First, go into your System Preferences, click on Account, and authorise yourself. Right click on your own account, and click the only option there, Advanced Options. Here you will find your poison: Group ID will be exactly the same as User ID, 501. Change Group ID to 20. Click Ok.

While you are at it, it is probably a good idea to temporarily disable Spotlight on your whole HDD, using the Spotlight preference and putting your drive in the ignore list.

Now, open terminal, and type this: ln -aln Documents It can be any folder for that matter I just used Documents as an example. You should see a bunch of drwx------ number 501 501 number date myFolder there. The 2nd 501 is what we are interested in, and if it's something else like 502, just take note of it. The 1st 501 is correct and we are not touching it.

Next, run the command

cd

and then followed by

sudo find . -group 501 -exec chgrp 20 {} \;

Basically, cd jumps to your home directory, and the command will find everything within your home directory, and change all group 501s to group 20. If the number you got just now is some other number just replace 501 with it. Don't do anything and wait. Once it's done, restart your computer and run permissions checking just in case. If ACL turns up for Finder and some other passwd shit, it's a 10.5.5 problem, download the 10.5.5 combo updater and reupdate your Mac.

You can double check your folders now, the (unknown) should now be 'Staff'. Re-enable your spotlight and everything should work as per normal. My iMac seems zippier now, but I don't know if that's because my spotlight indexing was still ignoring my main drive.

With this I learnt how to set the Users folder on my new drive to Root access only, and my own folder to be my access only. So nobody can delete the Users folder by accident without inputting a password, and only I can access my own stuff. Heh. This also probably means I'm restricting access to only my Macbook Pro and my iMac, and Macs in general that allow me to input a password to let me in. Oh my god, :O so damn troublesome! I can't let any Tom, Dick or Harry hack into my computer and steal my files! Damn I want a windows computer so I can be hacked D:

Sigh, Macs are so troublesome and lousy, we don't have .dlls for anyone (like your neighbourhood friendly virus) to hack openly, as everything on windows is permission 777. We need to know stuff about permissions and owners and groups, so god damn troublesome. Windows is so much better, I can just delete NTDLR and get away with it. :( I want my Vista PC..