I don't have any monies but that does not mean one can dream...

A few months ago, Netgear's latest 802.11n sibling hit the shelves. Sporting Atheros 802.11n dual-band wireless, dual radio, Gigabit Ethernet, a USB 2.0 port (for storage, not for printers) and - last but not least - an OpenWrt-based OS, this stylish device has everything a SOHO enthusiast would want. If that doesn't make you run to the store, you can always check this excellent Small Net Builder review that shows the WNDR3700 holds its own quite well.

Xfce's Terminal has been my terminal of choice for ages. It's a relic from the days that I ran Xfce as a desktop, days that are long gone. I've gone quite minimalist since but Terminal does just what I need it to do - it's a terminal emulator that doesn't get in your way. Sure there's urxvt and the likes - the best thing to push my buttons is to put me in front of an .Xdefaults file and tell me to configure urxvt. Hell, I'm all in favour of control - but urxvt's configuration borders on the insane. However, there's one feature urxvt has that Terminal (and a lot of similar emulators) doesn't have though, and that's the possibility to manage the WM_CLASS properties of the terminal windows you launch. A typical WM_CLASS output would be this:

[stijn@hermes ~]$ xprop WM_CLASS
WM_CLASS(STRING) = "terminal", "Terminal"

To the skilled Linux user, rsync and the OpenSSH suite aren't strangers. In fact, they're frequently used and praised by a lot of people for their convenience and versatility. Together they form an excellent remote backup solution.

Rsync supports operations over SSH out of the box. So far there's no problem. To automate those backups, however, you'll need to run a job scheduler (like Dillon's cron daemon). This doesn't pose any problems either - running it unattended does though...

It's been a while since I posted anything at all, and besides my never changing wallpaper (which seems to bother other people more than it bothers me, strangely) quite some stuff has changed. I've ditched the calendar altogether and integrated the mail notifications into my main conky bar at the bottom of the screen. The tint2 configuration saw some minor aesthetical changes.

Some of you might know LZMA as the default compression algorhythm of 7zip. *nix counterparts had support through LZMA utils. GNU Tar could be patched to support it, but there was no way for libarchive to support it - until recently. A new spec, a new name (xz) and a future change of license allowed for xz support in the codebase. Since pacman and makepkg rely on libarchive for compression handling, that makes it possible to build and install packages with xz.

For those unfamiliar with LZMA/xz, in the realm of compression formats it stands between gzip and bzip2 for compression and decompression speed, and it tops the list when you talk package size. Now let's have a look at how to get this going.

Red alert indeed! Kamikaze 8.09 hit the shelves on March 4th and comes with a quite impressive changelog. The most intriguing addition to this already feature-packed embedded Linux distribution is the LuCi interface.

I have to admit I have never been more baffled by an OSS product.

I have been wondering for quite a while why Vim was so hard to read. Although I am by no way proficient at Vim, I do like it (yes, I tried nano, thanks but no thanks). I like my eyecandy so my terminal does pseudo-transparency, but even with a full black background the comments are still hard to read - they're in dark blue by default. Recently, with setting up the VPS and things, I do spend a lot of time in SSH sessions, and there's no geany in there. So I had decided for quite a while to go hunting for a nice vim colour scheme.

I had this site open in Firefox for weeks (I have the 'Read it later' extension but somehow I still manage to pile up tabs that I don't look at for days, don't ask why). So I went checking out how the themes looked, pulled one in, only to discover it didn't work as advertised. I dropped it into ~/.vim/colors/ like instructed, but no. I could load it, yes, but it stubbornly refused to give me the same colours as the online previews.

That's right. This is a sequel. But unlike most it should be part of the good ones.

As readers of my previous article on encryption might know, I take my privacy at heart - even though it gets increasingly hard in this digital era.

But let's not lose focus here. I share the interest in encryption with a few friends of mine, Teran being one of them. He hinted at a design flaw that affects a lot of mainstream encryption schemes - Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault, but also open source solutions like dm-crypt or TrueCrypt.

Yesterday I called a car rental agency in Hannover to book a car (part of my job). Since my German is completely shabby, I asked if the person on the other line spoke English - instead, she offered to speak French...

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The good lady probably presumed he's calling from Belgium so he must talk French. Why yes, I do - but it's not my native language (and it turned out her English was excellent, probably better than mine). You see, historically, Belgium, when it became to be, was conceived by its ruling class as a unitary state with one official language - French. La Belgique sera latine ou elle ne sera pas. Now, that was the Zeitgeist - you really can't blame them. Everyone in charge pretty much thought like that back then.
Its proponents argued the local Flemish dialects were not similar enough to one another to be effectively used in administration - although they had been since the Middle Ages, and quite successfully. So for almost 150 years, Belgium was a state 'home' to two cultures - the Flemish one (Flemish dialects are closely related to Dutch) and the Walloon one (which originally did not speak French, but was gallicised thoroughly in the past two centuries).

I know mine does! 'Jungle Drum', a song by the Icelandic siren Emiliana Torrini - full name Emiliana Torrini Davíðsdóttir - has been getting quite some airplay over here, and its energetic nature forces you to make up your mind about the song - either you like it or you don't. I think it's a great song, and it got me curious, so I started checking out some other stuff of hers.