StarQuake's Blog

Playing the guitar

StarQuake — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:59:48 +0000

Been playing the guitar for some time and I’m getting the hang of it. Can play a few songs. Here are my favorites:

I have some problems playing the Bm but practice makes perfect!

The titles are now in a different font

StarQuake — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:12:33 +0000

As you can see the fonts are in a non-standard font. It was done using Cufón. It replaces certain titles or other elements with a picture. I didn’t like the Flash replacement plugins but I really like the way Cufón changes the fonts. No flash needed!

Quick note to myself

StarQuake — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:12:57 +0000

I always forget how to recursively remove the svn directories from a directory. So here is the command for me and anyone that might need it:

find . -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

It removes all svn directories in the current path.

Be careful though!!! A typo like a ‘/’ can easily remove your entire filesystem, so try replacing rm with echo the first time so you can see what files are about to be deleted.

Guitar Lessons

StarQuake — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:57:43 +0000

A while ago I started learning to play the Guitar. I first used the lessons from GarageBand which is part of the Apple iLife software bundle. I already had some knowledge on how to play an instrument. I’ve had a few years of lessons in playing a Flugelhorn. But a guitar is a bit different.

I practised the first 5 lessons of GarageBand which includes some of the easier chords like : Am C D Dm E Em G. After that I looked for a song that could be played with these chords. I found one : Jolene by Dolly Parton. A nice song to get started.

Then for a while, I did not touch the guitar.

A few days ago I started playing again. I like the band “Editors” a lot and I saw a live session of them on a belgian radio channel. One of my favorite songs, at 3:15 “An End has a Start” sounded easy so I googled for guitar tabs for that song. I found this:

tinyurl.com/y99ukqt

It has the mostly the same chords and has an new chord (for me that is) that sounds like a “Dadd9″ chord. I really love that song and it’s a really good way of keeping me interested in playing guitar. The Dadd9 also helps training my fingers and getting a step further.

Just wanted to share this with on my blog and hopefully someone will come here googling for guitar lessons. Maybe this could be an inspiritation to get started or to keep practising.

Great site: Album Reminder

StarQuake — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 11:17:54 +0000

Yesterday I found a great site, it’s called Album Reminder and it reminds you of new album releases of your favorite bands. You can enter your favorite artists or import it from iTunes. You can also just copy & paste artists from other sites like last.fm. (last.fm allows you to copy your favorite artists to the clipboard)

I haven’t had a reminder yet, but I will report back if I get one.

Ubuntu Karmic

StarQuake — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:16:52 +0000

Running Ubuntu Karmic Beta since a few days now. It’s running smooth. Some new features I like:

Apport reports crashing applications
The system feels more responsive
Firefox 3.5
Pretty icons in the task bar

Problems not really fixed…

StarQuake — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 09:14:31 +0000

Mmmm…. It seems the problem is not fixed yet. npviewer.bin still crashes, not as often as before though. Going to upgrade to the beta release karmic. See if that helps.

Problems with flash are fixed!!!

StarQuake — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:17:02 +0000

The error I was getting was this:

Sep 23 13:07:14 webmonkey kernel: [675069.159578] npviewer.bin[6502]: segfault at ff99cd48 ip 00000000ff99cd48 sp 00000000ff9f059c error 14

The problem is fixed after upgrading the following packages to updates-proposed:

libgl1-mesa-glx 7.4-0ubuntu3.3
libgl1-mesa-dri 7.4-0ubuntu3.3
libglu1-mesa 7.4-0ubuntu3.3
mesa-utils 7.4-0ubuntu3.3

Problem with some of my links

StarQuake — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:44:05 +0000

There was a problem with some of my links. I thought that after editing URL’s always turned into links automatically. But that’s not the case. I don’t know if it stopped working or it never worked at all…

Anyway it does work now with this plug-in: coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/auto-hyperlink-urls/

It even makes the URL’s a bit prettier by removing the http part. And it also understands links like robas.com.

Ubuntu 9.04 64bit

StarQuake — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 10:00:36 +0000

I’m running Ubuntu 9.04 64bit. Everything works fine except one thing:

Adobe Flash! Grrr….

I installed the default flashplugin package but it keeps crashing on a few sites. It’s really annoying. I installed the flashblock plugin and set it to block all flash content for now.

Apart from that plugin everything is smooth. It works like a charm!