Firelog

I spent the day soldering, desoldering and destroying components, and managed to drain 9 batteries (3 AA, 6 AAA) due to short circuiting (they still give reasonable voltage, they just don’t deliver any current). Of course, I’m talking about my school project. The circuit board for the gun can be seen here, and I have an experimental setup of two of six targets right beside me. I’m kinda amazed how fast the batteries drain when I accidentally (melting isolations isn’t a good idea…) short circuit them. I have measured the current (0.01 A), so I know it should be no problem… I wonder why I didn’t use rechargeable batteries when testing…

Anyway, last night I did something entirely different. I spent the day trying to get Mac OS X Panther running in PearPC 0.3.1. When I got it running, I fell in love with the look of it, but was disgusted by the performance of PearPC. I had seen some stuff about making KDE look more Mac-ish, and decided to give it a try. About 5 hours later, after a long discussion with the baghira KDE theme about it not wanting to obey my settings (it’s CVS, so I accept it), I was finally happy wih the outcome. My shiny “KDE OS X” can be seen here, here and here.

//Firetech

Ok, so I got a little addicted last time, I can admit that. But if I though that was bad, this time it’s worse…
As I’ve said earlier (in the P.S.), I went skiing today, and this time I did more than well, I didn’t fall more than once. Ok then, I actually ended up on me bum more like 5-7 times in what I would call miscalculations, but I only dropped a ski once, and that time, it took me two minutes to get the damn ski on again, since the slope I was in had a pretty steep angle and lots of loose snow. I feel like I have a lot more control in the slopes now, though.
Anyway, I’m beginning to see a pattern… Everytime I go skiing, I want to ski even more, but since I’ve drained my bank account by now, I’ll have to wait, until the next season. While waiting, I should try to fix some kind of part-time job, so I can earn money to buy my own set of skis.
Skiing has become quite a drug for me (maybe because of the adrenalin?), and I’m surely addicted by now. Too bad I’m living in the wrong end of Sweden, where we have 1. no slopes 2. low chance of snow :(
I’ll have to go cheer myself up with a banana…

//Firetech

I heard about Ugress some months ago, and downloaded some of the tracks freely available from his homepage. (Ugress is one man, but when performing live, he has some help…) Then nothing happened, until yesterday, when I thought “why didn’t I download the rest of the tracks?”. So, I went to the homepage and downloaded all of the tracks, and discovered that all of them were quite nice, especially since they are free. The videos are quite cool too, especially the fanmade ‘Reason to Believe’ video, made in LEGO!
You should definetly check Ugress out. His style (according to himself) can be described as ‘electronic cinematronic poptronic funksamplic music’, or in other words: ‘cool’. ;)

//Firetech

There is a lot of snow outside right now, and it has been kind of a snow storm (nearly, but not really) all day. Until around 5 pm, when it started raining instead, melting some snow away, while also creating instant ice on some places. The ideal driving leaving-the-car-and-walking weather, that is… :D
In other news, it’s fun to come to school and finding out that one lesson is cancelled, and negotiating away the other (that would have started three hours later), so that you don’t have any lessons. We went to Burger King instead. ;)
No school gave me a lot of time to polish this WordPress template (based on NFOoverload 1.5, download here), and I think I’m satisfied now. That ugly black box in the title (that I added because the tagline wasn’t visible) has been taken care of (ooh, shiney :D), just like the background and a lot of other stuff. NFOoverload has a nice look itself, but I thought it could use some improvements, so this is my version. I call it Firebrick. (It’s based on Kubrick…) Want it? Just tell me, in the comments or somewhere else (see the About page).

//Firetech

So? I deleted all the old entries… So? The backup I had turned out to be a symlink in a tar ball… Shit happens.
Anyway, Firelog is back on track again, but this time it’s got a new costume, even a new body. I spent some hours trying to find a decent blogging system based on PHP/MySQL, and after getting frustrated and tired for the umpteenth time, I found WordPress. I think it’s a lot more complete than SPB, but it’s still not bloated. You don’t find yourself under 15 tons of options like in some other systems. You go to the options you need, when you need them, and they are well organized. (Unlike my room, but that’s another story… ;))
The old entries and categories etc. will be finding their way into WordPress once I get the backup from the backup server. (I don’t have access to the backup files… :() I also noticed that the backup system was b0rked, so the last backup was made on Christmas Eve (should be every day). I managed to copy the last four items anyway, so nothing should be lost…
Let’s hope I don’t screw this incarnation up.

//Firetech

Update (Feb 4 2006) :
There we go, everything’s back on track. I went trought all the old posts and updated them a little, too… :)