I recently decided to start hating freedom less, and ordered a 4GB Sandisk Sansa Clipp+ portable audio player. This player costs around 50€ depending on where you order. The main interesting features are:

• Small size (pictures later)
• Fairly cheap
• Expandable memory (MicroSD slot, with SDHC support)
• Ogg support

Of those, i actually concentrated on the ogg support. Very few players have .ogg support nowadays, it’s all mp3 drm mumbo-jumbo. There is a list of known Ogg players on the xiph site, which can be found here. I basically wanted a smaller device, which plays a multitude of formats. My previous player is the iPod Video (5th Generation). While the screen and user-interface is nice, I didn’t really use the screen for anything. I mostly listen to podcasts, and some music. In this sense, the Clip+ is ideal. The microSD slot means you can just pop in an up to 16GB card, and presto, you have tons of space with no moving parts.

So on to the actual review.

What’s in the box?

The box is, as the device, small. Contents are: the player, headphones (the cheap earplug style), 20cm mini-usb cable and assorted paper manuals. To start using the Sansa, connect it to a USB port on any computer, and let it charge until full (didn’t take long, i had maybe a 70% charge out of the box). Charge meter shows how much charge is in the device while charging, so you can follow the charging more closely. The power button on top of the device takes  a short press to turn the device on. First you’re greeted with a Sandisk logo, and then it tells you the database is updating. What it probably does is indexes the contents.

First sign of trouble!

First problem struck right here. It got stuck in the indexing phase, and it was unable to continue. To turn the device off if it’s crashed: press the power button for 10-15 seconds. This, however, did not help. Every time the device booted it stuck in the same spot.

So, off to google and did a little browsing. Turns out you can use a Windows machine to re-format the drive. When the Clip+ starts, it checks the storage, and creates necessary files/folders if they are missing. So apparently (and in my case) you can just format the entire thing without doing any damage to it.

After the re-format, the device started fine, and i haven’t had similar problems since.

Usage

To use the device, connect to your computer, and copy over some music. I tried a bunch of ogg files, copied them to the Music folder on the Sansa, and ejected the player. Started up… updating database…. And soon i was given the main menu. The main items are: Music, SlotRadio, FM-radio, Voice and Settings. All of those are self-explanatory, except the SlotRadio, which is apparently some kind of pre-loaded MicroSD card, containing..something. I haven’t seen these in Finland, so i’ll just skip that part.

Music, obviously contains your music. There is playlist support, but you can also use functions such as shuffle, on-the-go lists (ad-hoc playlists), or just browse all the songs in one large list. There’s also a simple EQ with a few presets and a custom setting, with 5 bands.

Navigation happens with the four “arrow” keys, and you can return to the main menu by pressing the “home” button. The home button also functions as keylock when pressed for a few seconds. Do it again to deactivate.

As the name indicates, the rear end of the Clip+ is a giant clip, which makes it easy to clip on anywhere. The 28 gram weight means you can put it anywhere and hardly notice it.

Conclusions

So far i’ve been pleased, except for the out-of-the-box error i had. The firmware is easily updated, and can be done either manually, or using a windows utility which detects the player and automatically downloads the correct version for you. The device seems very open, and there was talk of a rockbox firmware available for the device. The expandability means you can probably use this device for a very long time, if your needs don’t change. You could potentially get the 2GB version for like 30-40€ and then use a pre-existing memory card to expand it further, keeping the price very low.

It’s not user friendly like an iPod, nor will the battery last for longer than about 8 hours, but i still like it. I like devices that can be expanded and are not artificially constricted by laws or stupid corporate creeps. I like to choose my format, and not need any kind of special software to copy it onto the device. This is just like any memory stick that plays your music.

Overall, i’d maybe give it 8/10, with a Stallman badge for good measure.

The build

I got word from Jimm’s Pc-Store that half of my parts had arived. The rest i would buy from Verkkokauppa.com because they had it in stock. I ended up getting a 250 gig hard drive for 39 bucks, simply because the cf solution was not immediately available (not in stock), and it would have cost nearly three times as much. Otherwise the parts list in the first post holds true.

I started by skimming the manuals of the case and the motherboard, and then started taking the case apart to prepare for installation. I had to remove the top cover, obviously, and also add and remove some of the internal cables according to my needs.

All the parts in one pile!

This is what the case looks like on the inside. Note the power supply, or actually just the distribution-point. The powersupply is actually that transformer-brick next to the case there. There is a 24-pin atx, 4pin 12v extra power, cables for floppy, molex, and sata, which are fairly modular, i.e. you can chose not to connect the molex cables if you don’t need them, like me. The case has a rubber-padded spot for the hard drive, on the bottom left in the picture. This should (and did) eliminate most of the vibration caused by the movement. The case also has front panel audio, usb and firewire, as well as a memory card reader. Sadly, the motherboard i got only had one internal usb, so it was a choice between the two front panel usb ports, or the memory card reader. I chose the usb ports, because it’s a handy way to hook up external hard drives and media players. Ofcourse, one can just switch the cable, and use one of the external usb ports to hook up the memory-card reader.

Cables for power and hdd led, as well as the power-switch are also included. Cable management turned out to be a bit hard: the 24-pin atx power cable is very very thick and stiff and needs to be forced down quite a lot to get the top cover back on.

The case, opened

The "Power Supply"

After this, it was time to put in the Asus motherboard, the hard drive, and hook up all the necessary cables. I forgot to take a pic of the innards with all the parts connected, but i’ll do that today. Here’s a picture of the motherboard, pretty handy-looking huh?

The Asus Motherboard

So when everything was connected, it was time to put the case back together, and prepare for installation. The plan is to install Ubuntu 9.10, with XBMC 9.11.  A few more pics of the ready build. Note the fucking awesome blue led, without which, this build would be like, less cool.

Done!

A view from the top

I finally got off my lazy ass and ordered the parts for my HTPC. The build itself, is inspired by Anteuz’ build, which i had the pleasure of fiddling with last weekend. The build was very convincing visually, as well as performance-wise.

I’ll document the entire process of building, installing and configuring on this blog. The first part: The Buy

The Buy

The first task in any computer project is deciding what you want the build to do. I set some goals for this build:

• Has to be visually appealing, and suitable for my livingroom (that means, slim, silent and black)
• Has to be able to play 1080p media (and anything below that of course)
• Has to be usable with a cordless keyboard & mouse and/or remote control
• Has to be able to run Linux
• Has to not cost me an arm and a leg!
• Hast to have some form of expandability, say if i want a Bluray drive later!

Setting out with these goals in mind, the only reasonably priced hardware that does all this is based on the Nvidia ION chipset. The build Anteuz has is a:

• Asus AT3N7A-I Motherboard
  • Atom 330 dual core processor
  • Nvidia ION chipset
  • Gbit Ethernet
  • 8GB RAM (DDR2) max.
  • DVI/VGA/HDMI/SPDIF etc. outputs
• 2 x 1GB DDR2 RAM
• Hard drive
• Silverstone Lascala SST-LC19S-R with 120W passively cooled powersupply

I ended up ordering pretty much the same set:

• Asus AT3N7A-I Motherboard (126€ @ Jimm’s Pc-Store)
• 2 x 1GB DDR2 (800MHZ) (44€ @ Verkkokauppa)
• Silverstone Lascala SST-LC19S-R (160€ @ Jimm’s Pc-Store)

But as for storage i ended up with a slightly different solution:

• SATA -> Compact Flash adapter (22€ @ Verkkokauppa)
• 4 or 8 GB Compact Flash card from Sandisk, the Extreme III model (with ~30MB/s read and write) (34 – 51 € @ Verkkokauppa and elsewhere)

What i’m going to be doing is, putting Ubuntu on the Compact Flash card (which is completely quiet, low power, and physically small). I don’t need a lot of space for Ubuntu, since it’ll be a barebones install, with the XBMC media center application on top, it’ll hardly take more than 2 GB.

I’m not going to store any media on the HTPC, but instead, stream it over the network from my fileserver. With Gbit Ethernet, i’ll be able to stream 1080p content with no problems. The network “backbone” is an HP Procurve 1400-8G, which has more than enough throughput and oomph for my small network.

The total price for the build is 386€ with the 4GB Sandisk Extreme III (add 20 bucks for the 8GB version). For less than 400€, i will therefore have a build that can stream HD media from my network.

A future expansion will be a slim blu-ray drive, which runs at around 150€ right now, which is not a bad price. The hardware is more than capable of playing blu-ray discs in their full 1080p,  surround sound glory. And that’s cheaper than a Playstation 3, which has no games anyway

Next up, when i get the parts: Pictures and The Build. After that, it’s time for The Install and then The Conclusion.

Clever readers will notice the Seinfeld reference. Anyway, on to the topic.

Everyone is writing about the iPad, so as not to arouse suspicion, so will I. The iPad was released a while (a week? two?) back by Apple. Using the standard hypewords “awesome”, “fantastic”, “amazing”, “fabulous” etc. Jobs hailed the device as a whole new class of devices (which it is, more on this later), and quote: “The best web browsing experience you’ve ever had!”.

Let’s first look at the specs. The device has an Apple designed A4 processor (though rumors are, they bought the silicon from some other company), 9.7″ multi touch screen (with IPS panel), 16 -> 64 gigs SSD storage. What it does not have is:

• Exchangeable battery
• No expandable memory (no sd slot, no usb slot, no nothing)
• No usb ports (use apples propietary 30 pin cable, with adapters)
• No multitasking in the OS
• No phone functionality
• No 3g in the standard version (pay $130 extra for that in any size class)
• No camera
• No flash!

That seems like a long list. Which is probably because it is. There are a number of shortcomings in the iPad, and with a 499 pricetag, that’s pretty unacceptable. To my eyes, this is a total fucking rip-off product, with no real killer app or usage scenarios. I’m thinking this could be used by say, medical institutions or perhaps, as a device for visitors to a museum or something. But multitasking becomes an issue here as well.

Who is going to use an office suite, without multitasking? Enjoy writing your diary, without surfing or doing anything else at the same time. Enjoy not being able to surf the web while taking notes.

This is a deliberately defective product. According to sources, the parts in the iPad cost apple 300 dollars. Which means, for the cheapest shit-ass model, they are raking in a huge 200 dollar profit. Even if they just sell one for each apple fanatic, they’ll still make enough money to be happy.

Again, this isn’t that they couldn’t have included all of those things, they did so because they decided. This way, they can make the 2nd generation iPad, which has all of the clearly missing features, and everyone will go fucking apeshit about their genious device. But let’s get real here. A device with more features existed 7 years ago, in the form of an HP tablet computer. This is just highway robbery on Apple’s part, and i don’t like it.

Why did Jobs call this the best web browsing experience you’ve ever had? I wonder why their product pages had blatant lies on them at the time of the release? They showed video and images of iPads visiting Flash based websites, until some keen-eyed humans found the lie, and Apple had to quietly take it down. The fact of the matter is, it does not run flash, and probably never will. Jobs says it’s because “Adobe could be making an awesome product, but they choose not to.”

Why not stop lying and tell them the real reason, huh? The real reason is: through flash, people could be watching online video and skipping quicktime. Through flash, people could start creating and distributing games and applications that would circumvent the Apple store, which they want to keep strictly controlled. We all remember the dictionary app that wasn’t allowed because it allowed translation of naughty words. Sure, flash is not perfect, but devices since Symbian S60 have had flash. This is the year 2010 and Apple comes out with a product without Flash? Get with the program! Through process separation, flash could be made perfectly safe, so i’m not seeing the problem. Jobs keeps talking about HTML5 which brings video support (can be tried out on youtube, with certain browsers), but let’s get real. 70% of all online video and most modern sites and portals use Flash. Without it, you’ll get a lesser experience, or miss out on some content altogether.

What is the use for this thing, seriously? What could you possibly want to do with this iPhone XL? Give me some suggestions. Meanwhile, i’ll keep thinking, and i’d rather spend my money on the 58 tons of sand i could buy with the 499 i saved by not getting the maxiPad.

Don’t buy the iPad. It’s a complete fucking ripoff, and you’ll regret it in a year when they come out with a revolutionary product that has a camera *and* 3G built in!!!1one.

So here’s my uh.. long-awaited review of the Samsung N140 netbook. This is a fairly recent model that was released i think some time late last year (and early this year in Finland). It’s basically an upgraded model of the acclaimed N120 (won tests in both Mikrobitti and MikroPC magazines here in Finland).

Let’s get a few things straight right off the bat. This is a netbook. Don’t come crying to me that it’s low powered, because i know. That’s why i got it. Yes, your calculator may have more power than this, but i don’t give a shit. Anyway, on to the review.

What’s in the box

The laptop costs somewhere below 400 euro in Finland. I bought mine from Anttila for 399 + shipping. The box is a very minimalistic (ecological, i suppose) box, with very little graphics or glossy print. Inside the box you’ll find the netbook inside it’s protective bag and set in some foam. An accessory box is next to that, which contain the installation guide, warranty information, declaration of ROHS compliance, and other assorted papers. Also included is a black samsung “second skin”, with zipper for the laptop.

I wasn’t aware of this, so i went out and bought a Tucano Second Skin from Verkkokauppa for 12 euro, but in hindsight, this was a good idea. The included black case is very very thin, and because of this the quality feels a bit cheap. I guess it protects from scratches and such, but i’d prefer something thicker, like the Tucano.

Also included of course, is the power brick, which is very small. Like a small mobile phone, only a bit thicker. A 2 meter power cable is included. Note well that this laptop can also work as a usb charger for a device such as a mobile phone, ipod etc, even when the laptop is powered off!

Specifications

The specifications of the netbook are as follows:

Processor: Intel Atom N270 (1.6ghz, hyperthreading)
Memory: 1 GB 533 MHz DDR2 (upgradable to 2GB, trying this later)
Hard-drive: 250 GB (2.5″, 5400RPM)
Graphics: Chipset is an Intel 945, with Intel GMA950 graphics that uses shared memory from the RAM.
Screen: 10.1″ LED backlit, resolution 1024×600 pixels
Optical drive: NO
USB: 3xUSB 2.0
SD-memory card reader (supports SDHC)
VGA out, Audio in/out, Ethernet, Wireless and Bluetooth 2.1EDR

Physique

The laptop itself is a very solid build, which was a great surprise after having tried some other netbooks, such as early Eee-pc’s. (701 i believe?). It does not flex at all when holding it from a corner, and there are no uncomfortable squeaks or inconsistencies.

The top of the laptop is very shiny glossy plastic, that will retain any memory of any physical object (may apply also to ghosts and spectres) touching it. This means fingerprints, scratches and other scuffs will be visible for all eternity. It’s also easy to clean because it’s so slick, but bear in mind: any rough cloth or dirt on it will leave scratches if you wipe with it. This applies to most samsung products, TV’s etc.

Inside it’s matte, but with a shiny chrome border circling around the keyboard. I’m not sure what the function is of this, i think it just looks cheap.

The touchpad is a decent size for a netbook, and very comfortable to use. The button is a one-piece, two-button affair, which feels a bit fidgetty, but you learn to use it pretty quick. Just hit the left or the right side for the desired button.

I would call the keyboard Thinkpad-esque. It’s bloody awesome. The size takes up the whole width of the netbook, and has very nice feedback and a generally i give it high marks. Includes function and windows button. Functions behind the fn key are: sleep, battery, the euro sign, external/internal screen, brightness, mute, volume+ and -, “turbo mode”, wireless, touchpad on/off, home, end and num- and scroll lock.

Memory is easily accessible under a one-screw hatch in the bottom. This is also a feature that most netbooks don’t have. There is a single slot, that is occupied by a Samsung brand 1GB stick, 533mhz.

Battery is removable, and there are rumors of a new more powerful battery, but i haven’t seen it yet.

Software

Comes bundled with Windows 7 Starter (32-bit). The bundle is quite horrible, as it includes every damn thing under the sun, most of which are limited time trials, offer very limited benefits for the user. Some of the “highlights” are:

• Office 2007 (1 year trial)
• McAfee Anti Virus + Firewall + Doohickies
• Samsung Backup solution (only thing i’ve actually liked, more on this later)
• Various small farming-related games, such as Dairy Dash.. (wtf?)

The Office 2007 trial didn’t work, as it just offered a 60 day trial, or an option to buy it for a very affordable 600 euro (more than the machine).  Uninstalled that fucker right off the bat. McAfee, slow as molasses, and didn’t activate. Uninstalled. Games. Uninstalled.

The Samsung backup utility makes a full disk restore image when you first start the netbook, and it’s apparently stored on the 15 GB recovery partition that’s configured on the drive. This came in very handy, as i was able to bluescreen the bitch right away, after installing newer drivers for the touchpad. So uh, don’t do that. I booted the thing, and hit F4 to access the recovery image. Full restore (10GB) took about 20 minutes. After that i had to re-uninstall everything, but now i’m cool.After this, i created another backup image, this time of the customized operating system, so i wouldn’t have to do this all over again.

Updated the BIOS to the latest version, dated 10.1.2010. Nothing notable, no changelog on Samsung’s site. There’s a program called Samsung  Update which takes care of updating the drivers (however messing up with the touchpad driver). Drivers can ofcourse be downloaded manually too.

Performance

I did some simple tests to compare the performance of the Samsung N140, with my previous “netbook”, the IBM Thinkpad X41. Specs of the thinkpad are: 1.6GHz single core Centrino, 2GB DDR2, 1.8″ 40GB Hard Drive, Intel 845 chipset.

Here are the results, which i won’t analyze other than to say that the results were largely expected. The Atom is low powered, but the hard drive kicks ass.

• HyperPI (calculates decimals of PI):

1 million digits:

Thinkpad: 48 seconds
Samsung: 1 minute 57 seconds (running 2 threads), 1 minute 36 seconds (running 1 thread)

2 million digits:

Thinkpad: 1 minute 57 seconds
Samsung: 4 minutes 22 seconds (2 threads), 3 minutes 37 seconds (1 thread)

• HDTach 3 (measures hard drive performance)

Thinkpad: Burst 90,2 MB/s, Random Access 19.7ms, Average Read: 17.2 MB/s, Sequential reads: 20 -> 14 MB/s
Samsung: Burst 118.2 MB/s, Random Access 19.6ms, Average Read 71.4 MB/s, Sequential reads 89-43 MB/s

I was unable to run PCMark05 due to (maybe?) the resolution of the Samsung (below the required 1024×768).

Windows Experience Index scores are: 2.1 for the Samsung, and 1 for the Thinkpad. Biggest differences were CPU (thinkpad wins hands down), and HD (Samsung wipes the floor). I’m not sure what the net difference is, when you account for all the differences in performance, but the Samsung is a netbook.

Overall impressions

So far, i’ve had it for about 24 hours, and i’m very happy with it, despite the small hickup with Windows 7.

Pro’s

• Good bang for the buck
• Build quality
• Visually appealing (mostly)
• At least some upgradability

Con’s

• Bundled software doesn’t work or sucks
• Windows 7 starter…
• Glossy edge around the keyboard

I purposefully left out performance from the con’s section, because you can’t expect performance from a sub 400 e netbook. You get it for the battery life and the portability. If you’re looking to do more than surf the web, read your mails or sit on IRC, i recommend a computer.

Future projects

I have this idea of putting a Sandisk Extreme III SD card in to the SD slot, and installing some netbook linux, and seeing if that is any faster. The 8GB variant of this card comes at around 40 € here in Finland, which isn’t all that bad. The question remains, what bus is the SD card hooked to?

The memory will also be upgraded to 2GB, though i’m not expecting much difference in performance here.

So it’s been a long while since i last wrote anything. So what’s been happening lately. Well, a few things.

Dorsia has been replaced by a “slightly” less powerful machine, namely an old P3 rig. Dorsia is my shell machine that i’ve used to hand out shells to people i know. Nothing really special here, it does the same job as before, but with less overhead. The previous Dorsia machine was a G4p HP Proliant, with dual Xeon’s, so it’s best off doing something else. In this case, something else is installing VMware ESXi on it, and using it as a test bench for numerous virtual machines. It’s better suited for that task. This project is stil pending, but, the server hardware is compatible with ESXi, and i should get on that with P at some point. Our plan is to build a kind of virtual lab environment, where we can have different server operating systems, such as Windows 2003 and 2008, among others, and then run a hostile machine,perhaps with the recently released Backtrack 4 final. As soon as we have time..

I’ve ordered a netbook. So yeah, i became yet another sheep and got myself a netbook. Yes, i’m aware they are very slow etc. etc, but i’m just interested in surfing the web and writing stuff down, and for that, i think it’ll be just fine. The one i got was a Samsung N140, which is a 10″ netbook, with a 1.6GHz Atom 270 processor, 2 gigs of memory, a 320 gig hard drive (5400rpm), and various other parts of lesser interest. There are a few things that are of concern. 1) Is the machine powerful enough to run some flash content? I’m not talking about some multimedia extravaganza, but simply youtube and such? 2) The resolution is small, and i know this. But, it has a VGA out, and where i’ll be using it “proper”, i’ll have an external screen to hook up to it.

Basically, i’m not expecting much, but it’ll be interesting to see how it compares with my previous “netbook”, my Thinkpad X41, which has developed some problems with the battery and charging. This puppy has a 1.6 GHz Centrino,  with 2 gigs of memory. I’ll be running some benchmarks to see how the Atom fares against this 5 year old machine. Should be interesting, as there aren’t a lot of benchmarks that compare older hardware with netbooks, and as M pointed out, there are so many different architechtures; comparison becomes difficult on a larger scale. I’ll be reporting on this as soon as i get the machine, which should be next week.

I’m also trying to find out what the perfect linux distro would be to install on this. I’m taking suggestions, if you have them.

Adobe presented me with an interesting perdicamen this week at work. I was fiddling around with trying to get the Adobe PDF printer working under Windows 7. This proved to be a bitch. After countless hours of testing, i found out that Adobe Acrobat version 7, works just fine under windows 7. This is an old old version, from like 2003, which doesn’t even have support for Vista, let alone Windows 7. Adobe 8, which was used in this particular case, just didn’t work, not even with the latest patches. It installed the printer, but you were unable to use it, as Acrobat claimed the product was unactivated (it worked otherwise just fine, so i think that’s just a bogus error message). Again, version 9, the latest version (patch 9.3 released 14th of January) has official Windows 7 support as of 9.2, and that worked fine from the get go.

So Adobe, why doesn’t version 8 work, when the older technology of version 7 works just fine? You wouldn’t be out to get Windows 7 users to buy Acrobat 9 now would you? Tsk tsk.

Glamorama, the recent book by author Bret Easton Ellis (notably of American Psycho-fame), is what i’m reading next. Hopefully, even today. It was shipped out from Jersey, at play.com last week, so i should be getting it either today or tomorrow.I hope it’s as good as American Psycho! I think i’ll be reading his entire bibliography, since i very much like his topics (glamour,  yuppies, decadence and horror), and his writing style.

Ham radio. Me and B decided we were going to become ham radio operators during the year of 2010. We haven’t started yet, but i’m definately going through with this. I have a few ham friends who i’ll be talking to about where to take the exam and so on. The basic level exam isn’t too hard, plus i was in the signals battalion during my one-year army stint, so this shouldn’t really be a problem by any stretch of the imagination.

So it’s time for another story time with uncle grelbar. This time, i’m going to deal with.. well, car dealerships. This is a story on how they’ll try to fuck you over, but how you can, at least in my case, walk out as a winner.

My story begins with a standard annual service for my 2003 Nissan Primera station wagon. I bought it from Autokeskus Konala (Finnish Nissan/Dodge/BMW/Mini dealer) a few years ago, and i’ve been servicing it there as well, to maintain a good service record. So far, i’ve gotten excellent service, from the very start of our relationship. But this time was different.

I paid for my service on the 14th of September, got my keys, and went out to get my car from the lot. I was rather surprised that the key (which had been working flawlessly for two years), now suddenly would not open the doors. I went a bit closer, and the same thing: the doors wouldn’t unlock. So, i open the door with the actual physical key (shit, i can’t remember when i’ve last done that with a car!), and got in. Put the key in to the ignition. No start. Not even a peep out of the engine or ignition. No blinking red light in the dash (to indicate car is not running, etc.). Notice the lights are on, and that the battery is dead due to this.

At this point i’m starting to realize that i’ve been fucked over. I’ve just paid several hundred for my service, and my car is dead in the dealership parking lot. Not nice. I walk back in to the place, and ask what the hell is up. The guy, one guy, looks a bit tired, it’s probably the end of his shift. He asks for my license place and checks for what was done with my car. He instantly says “Nope, nothing in here explains a broken key. We don’t really have anyone working here who can help you at this hour (a bit before closing). Maybe the battery is dead?”. So, i mutter some obscure Norwegian curses, and head for the spare-parts section.

I buy a new battery, of the typ 2025, for 1,80€. Pay for the battery. Go out. At this point it starts to rain. Car still does not open with the remote control. I’m getting increasingly pissed off. I call my dad, who comes and helps me with starter-cables (since nobody at the fucking dealership offered their help), and the car starts right up. Key is still dead. I walk back in to notify the service guy that i’d be contacting them about this fuckup later).

Drive home. Try our spare key, which works fine. Call the dealership the following day, telling them that i had some problems with my previous service, and that i needed to talk to someone. Nobody was apparently available, so i left a message, with a request to call me. Three days pass, nobody calls me.

I send email to the head of the service department. Wait 10 days for a reply. Guy says that the coding of my key might have gotten scrambled when the battery was drained by some incompetent fuck who left the lights on. Seemed like a good explanation, except, why would my spare key work? The dead battery in the car somehow remotely broke the other key? Okay. He told me to bring it in on the first of October, to have it looked at.

Bring the car over in the morning of the 1st. Get a call in a few hours by some asshat who tells me “The key is broken”. No fucking shit. Also he tells me, that my spare key, which works fine, “also is working a bit badly”. Horse shit. Okay, next he throws the bomb. “A new key is 111 euro. Would you like to order it?”. I told him that this isn’t the way it goes, and that i’d contact his superiors.

I e-mail the same head of the service department who tells me that “The re-encoding which we promised, did not work, so the key is otherwise broken, and we are not liable.”. I complain, and he graciously offers to take the price down to 75 euro for a new key. I tell him that i won’t pay them a dime, since the key broke in their custody.

At this point, i also e-mail the head of customer relations at Autokeskus Konala, and the head of customer relations for the entire company, with the head of service as CC. A day passes. I get a new e-mail stating that the key would be replaced for no cost.

Lessons learned

So, when things fail, complain, and keep complaining up the ladder until you get what you want. But be sure you are right, and that they are wrong.

A car dealership can’t be like the coat-check, where they take no responsibility for anything left with them. When i bring in a car for service, i expect that it comes back in the same, err.. improved condition from the original. What i do not expect, is that my car is dead in the lot, and that my key has been broken by some asshat. Or that management gives me the fucking dick when i ask to fix what they broke.

Autokeskus Konala was on the Kuningaskuluttaja (“King Consumer”, a program about consumer rights) program, about ripping off some other consumer. I guess the fault in this one lay with Nissan, but in any case, this isn’t something we should just swallow and complement the taste. Consumers are being fucked over everywhere, by unscrupulous businessmen who know that if they push a consumer far enough, they’ll give up, because litigation, in many countries, is too expensive, or not an option.

But what we can do, is talk about it. Write a few blog posts, maybe e-mail your correspondence to a few news outlets. Talk to your friends. Sure, a blogpost, in the big scheme of things, is meaningless, unless you run a huge site. But at least you can raise some awareness. If two people learn something out of this, it’s been a good day.

Just don’t give in to unreasonable demands, and keep your eyes open when people are slapping you around with a wet cock. Too many people can just be intimidated, by an authoritative voice, to doing whatever they want you to.

So i got Pidgin 2.6.1 at the literal order of my good friend Anteuz. It’s not in th official repo’s yet, so you can either add a repo where it can be found (link here), or download the source and compile on your own.

I opted for the repository, because it just felt like the easiest way?

Anyway. 2.6.0 brings video and audio support for gmail users (the XMPP protocol), which is very cool. Windows user have had this for ages, using either the gmail flash client, or then the gtalk client. Other IM clients of course have supported video and audio for ages. I remember using MSN messenger (yeah, the folly of youth..) to do voice chats back when it was a novel and cool idea. You got chicks that way. Okay, i am lying.

So 2.6.1 is the latest version that you can download, i guess 2.6.2 is the latest “testing” version or source version. Anyway. Installation went fine, and it got some of the necessary Gstreamer plugins to enable video and audio. No problems, Help -> About shows that Audio and Video is enabled.

But then, when i tried to initiate a video conversation with Anteuz, it failed. The File menu has the new Media entry, which has the options for audio, video and audio and video. All fine so far, except the options are greyed out. Not my side apparently. Turns out the windows 2.6.1 does not have audio and video support, which sucks major ass. So no testing of that nifty feature, since my dear friend is a rooted windows user (no pun intended?). But he’s a gamer, so i understand.

So what does it take? Well, you both need to be using gmail (xmpp protocol), have 2.6.1 or later installed with video support either precompiled or compiled in. And running linux. Wohoo. Not many of my friends on that fucking list eh.

So another thing we found is that pidgin-encryption 3.0 stopped working. It would’t get the other party’s key when it tried the exchange. The error was something in the order of “cannot find buddy!”, when we looked at the debug window. I’m not a developer so the massive debug output didn’t say too much, but the end result was that key exchange wasn’t happening, ergo no encryption. Blah. Now the NSA can read all of my dirty blabberings.

We’re gonna look at some of the plugins i like for Firefox today. This is not a long list, i’m not plugin addicted like certain people i know, but there are certain plugins that make living easier.

Ad-Block Plus with Easylist & Viltteri + Element Hiding Helper
This here is a classic. It’s been around for ages. It basically operates on a filterlist (easylist and viltteri are such lists), that filter your web content so you don’t have to see all those pesky ads for shit you would never buy anyway. Easylist is one of the lists that are offered when you’ve installed ad-block, and it seems to work fairly well. For Finland, there is a list called viltteri (a mutation of the word filter), which can be found here. You can submit sites to be indexed by viltteri, or send in a false positive, which is always a good thing, and can’t be said for all lists. (*cough* the sensorship list…)

With Element Hiding Helper, henceforth EHH, you can block *any* item on a webpage. Sometimes these ad-toting motherfuckers become crafty, and put out ads that you can’t easily block using ad-block. With EHH, you can click Ctrl-K, and then select the element, be it a paragraph, a div, whatever, and block that. Some people have found ways around that, using completely dynamic element names, which are kind of hard to block, since they can’t even be wildcarded without fucking up the entire site layout.

Xmarks

This is good for people who have multiple computers that they use on a regular basis. I operate my desktop, my laptop and my work desktop. I want to have my bookmarks, for without them, life is moot. With Xmarks, you can synchronize your bookmarks, either using their server, or even your own server. They offer encryption for the entire transaction, so it should be fairly safe. You can also sync saved passwords, but since i really don’t practice such stuff, i have left that untouched. Synchronization options are: keep local, discard server, keep server discard local and some third option. You can set it to sync manually, or every time you close the browser. Works magic for my needs. Even keeps the layout.

MultiRowBookmarks

Allows you to create a multirow bookmark toolbar, to accomodate a large amount of links. If you’re like me, you don’t like the bookmarks menu, and you want your regulars in the toolbar, which isn’t big enough by default. Before this came out, you had to do a manual edit of some configuration files to achieve it.

Reliby

Reliby allows you to place a button in the toolbar, that when clicked, reloads all your RSS feeds. You don’t have to click each one, and select reload anymore! Great if you keep the browser open for long periods of time, like i do, and follow a lot of feeds.

NoScript

A savior. You can block javascript and other scripting languages so they don’t execute funny stuff on your machine. Hinders a lot of web based exploits.

Stylish

Allows you to add custom CSS styles for specific webpages, and provides a cool framework for managing these. There are tons of cool styles out there, and for sites like.. Say muropaketti that i follow, it’s a real saver. The default forum layout looks like ass, so with a stylish style, i can just transform it in to something much more usable. This is the style i use for muropaketti, thanks to Lifeless.

Any other good suggestions are welcome!

I’m in the process of installing Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 2 server on a test machine. I’ll let you know more tomorrow when i get to actually use the system. Installation is not the graphical one, as has been the way for Ubuntu server versions forever. I’m pretty sure you could use the graphical installer, but like.. who needs it?

The system i am installing it on is called mother, and is a 2.4 GHz P4, with 1.5 gigs ram, and 320 HD, Nvidia Vanta graphics card. Just a rig i threw together off of some spare parts i had laying around here.