10 October 07 - 21:35Processed
I had the Spur "rib" burger last night, or at least it once might have been ribs. On closer inspection it turns out that it's nothing more than processed meat pressed to look as if it was once on a bone. Lame.
01 October 07 - 23:55Quicky
Internation bandwidth costs R69 per gibibyte from Axxess and local costs R17 per gibibyte, both for the "prepaid" option which is their way of saying "pay a little more and don't lose your unused bandwidth at the end of the month". With ADSL pricing as it is, and local usage not yet being excluded from ADSL caps even though ICASA said it should, splitting traffic yourself is obviously a good idea.
Previously I switched between the two accounts depending on what I needed to do. This was a pain in the ass. Now, thanks to a useful list of local IP blocks from alm.za.net, I connect with both accounts and route traffic accordingly. So much easier.
06 September 07 - 23:18Please excuse my lack of enthusiasm
As a person who has used Compiz and ditched it in favour of Beryl; the merger of Beryl and Compiz extras to form Compiz Fusion a few months ago did not leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
The reason people ditched Compiz still exists and now that Beryl is no longer actively maintained there is no where to turn. Compiz [Fusion] is slow, it has no mechanism to select the rendering platform and is still pretty unstable. So even if the developers feel they've done the right thing, the users get screwed over.
It's not even a 1:1 merger: it's a merger of a superior product into the _extras_ portion of its competitor, an extras portion that will probably not end up being included in the majority of desktop distributions. The Beryl developers should, by now, realise that they've been screwed over.
The king is dead. Long live the king?
02 September 07 - 01:36Equality
Anyone who visits this site, be it by accident or under duress, whiles using Internet Explorer is now a little closer to seeing the site as it's intended. I guess it finally started bothering me. There are still some parts that aren't exactly the same, but I can't really test properly because the only IE6 I have access to is running under wine, and my empathy for people who insist on using shit has run out.
14 August 07 - 22:08wiki
Yesterday I started using Zim to handle snippets of text, scattered todo files and other information. It's supposedly a desktop wiki, but I see it more as a text manager, in the same sense that something like Exaile is a music manager. It makes life a little bit easier.
Speaking about wiki's; slashdot linked to a guy who created a nifty offline wikipedia reader. The almost 3GB dump is enough to scare most off, but it does seem pretty cool.
13 August 07 - 23:10FFS 'n' stuff
Having recently switched to ADSL I now appreciate ISDN even more. Sure it's slow, but at least there was no dealing with a shitty cap.
I went with Axxess because they are quite well priced and have a very nice interface. The only thing that pisses me off about them is the amount of advertising they do. Surely if they spent less money advertising on dodgy sites they could drop their prices a little.
The (almost) perfect flv to avi conversion:
ffmpeg -i INPUT.flv -target ntsc-dvd -b 6500 -aspect 4:3 -s 656x448 -padright 32 -padleft 32 -padtop 16 -padbottom 16 -acodec ac3 -ab 192 -ac 2 -mbd 2 -qmin 2 -async 1 -y OUTPUT.avi
It takes forever but the quality you end up with is supehbluea[1].
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[1] Not a real word.