The Belgian government introduced an electronic ID card in 2009. While I was a bit wary at the time - I always am when the government discovers the advantages (and seemingly neglects the security risks) of the digital age - I was intrigued. The new eID was touted as being cross-platform (not just Windows and Mac OS X, but also Linux), so I decided to purchase a reader anyway - if only to find out what info could be read out from the card (thus accessible to anyone with a card reader).

I was pretty anxious to get my hands on a Logitech Squeezebox - and particularly the Classic one. Since I'll be moving to a new place soon I'd like to move my server (which now sits next to my stereo, is connected to it by RCA jacks, and runs MPD) to a closet, but that means I'll have to find another solution to access my music library over the network. The Classic seemed like the perfect solution. The newer models have too many bells and whistles and costs a lot more. But the Classic, being sold by only a few shops now, seems on the verge of being phased out, so I decided to wait no longer, buy it, and set up the whole thing. The plan was to add a real NAS (like the Qnap TS-219p, which can run Debian and has an advertised power consumption of ~ 20W under load) to complete the setup and have a power-efficient and centralised music playback solution.

Why Arch and not Ubuntu? Why Linux at all?

Although my original intentions were to install Linux, I first tried XBMC on the AppleTV OS - mainly to see how it performed. I was quickly annoyed by the fact you cannot autolaunch XBMC anymore (you can, but it will lose focus with recent firmwares, and to my knowledge the AppleTV OS has no way of calling XBMC back to the foreground). I'm picky and demanding, so that's not the only thing that irritated me. The limited shell on OS X put me off too. Although the shell itself is more or less fine, the limited selection of programs (and their limited possibilities) was disappointing. The long-term maintainability is not all that either; you need to hack the AppleTV firmware each time a new one comes out; basically you'll be performing the same steps (installing the Broadcom CrystalHD kext, installing TurboKext Enabler, modifying startup files etc.) over and over. Although the AppleTV Patchstick creator takes a lot of work out of your hands, you still have to go through the same setup procedures. I for one am not looking forward to that, and if Apple decides to stop support for the device, you're on your own too (I know, I am a positive thinker). Pit that against a rolling release distro with a proven track record, the familiarity of a real Linux environment, the flexibility of the Arch build system, and you know the outcome... Also, what would be the fun in just buying a device and using it like the manufacturer intended you to? If you can't hack it, there's no fun in it!

This is a pretty useless post, but nonetheless I want to congratulate the Americans on their new healthcare bill. It doesn't make it any less socially a third world country amongst the rich nations, but at least there's hope.

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! OpenWrt 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.