News

New iPod

After four years of service, my old 40GB iPod had gotten full, so I was secretly waiting for an opportunity to upgrade. That moment arrived unexpectedly last month after I realized that I had lost the thing somewhere on a recent business trip. I phoned some hotels and airlines, but to no avail. It is worth shopping around for these things. My old one was bought in Singapore. My new one one is from Hawaii. Maybe Apple can make the shopping experience more convenient next time. [Read more]

2007-12-07 | Tags: gadgets apple ipod 160gb

Bookie restored

I have dusted off and put back online my vintage 1999 `bookie' web application. It has retained the old-style `Web 1.0' look-and-feel, except that the response times are faster. You can now once again browse through the opening book that blik(C) is using on FICS and ICC. [Link]

2007-11-27 | Tags: chess openings bookie retro projects

Note to self

Note to self: Next time when booking my connecting domestic flight separately from my international flight, first check if that internatioal flight hasn't just crossed the International Date Line. [Read more]

2007-11-27 | Tags: notetoself travel dateline hawaii

School protests

Maybe some of the news stories from Taiwan seem odd in Western eyes, but the Netherlands are not excused. Read this Link :

Thousands of Dutch school pupils walked out of lessons on Friday in wildcat protests organised online against lesson times. [...] [S]everal cars were damaged. Giant chess pieces from the Max Euweplein were thrown at trams and into shops. Three pupils were arrested [...] for vandalising a bus.

[Read more]

2007-11-26 | Tags: netherlands news huhwhat cultureshock

[update] Hanban: Lesson 15 added

Tonight I have entered the words for lesson 15 ("Please suggest some dishes to us") into my flashcard word learning tool. The total number of words from Practical Audio-Visual Chinese Book 1 is now 531. [Project]

2007-11-25 | Tags: chinese hanban update projects

Happy "Camisole Day"!

A Taiwanese lingerie company encouraged all its female office staff to go to work in their undies for the day. The Audrey Underwear company in Taizhong city named November 21 Camisole Day to celebrate record sales. All 500 women working in the firm's headquarters were encouraged to wear only camisoles and knickers - much to the excitement of their male colleagues. [Links]

2007-11-25 | Tags: taiwan news huhwhat

PNG hacking

Yesterday I wanted to create a small PNG image to replace the crude textual version of the 'dragon' logo ... [Read more]

2007-11-22 | Tags: graphics png logo zlib programming

Xkcd's ball pit

I was thinking of getting a couch or something for my room, somewhere for guests to lounge around. [...] F*ck new couches. I now have a ball pit in my room.

Genius... this guy deserves a Nobel Prize. [Full article]

2007-11-19 | Tags: xkcd huhwhat ballpit brilliant blogs

Eee PC

This little thing rocks. I grabbed one for 11,500 NTD (245 EUR) in the department store. The manual didn't explain how to switch to an English user interface, but the Internet helped out. This is a complete PC with everything needed: browser, wireless networking, webcam, Skype, games, Open Office. The thing runs Linux in 512MB with a 4GB flash drive. All that for half the price of my phone and so much more fun. Thank you ASUS. Next year there will be better models, I'm already planning to buy another one then. [Read more]

2007-11-18 | Tags: gadgets eeepc asus linux

Hinet ADSL problems

[Read more]

2007-11-10 | Tags: hinet isp adsl proxies