Twitter is addictive

As it turns out Twitter is quite nice. It also removes the need/urge to post to this blog. Do follow me on twitter for more frequent updates on what's going on.

Oh, my FriendFeed might be of even more interest since it in addition to tweets also will include other activities. On my part it will probably mostly be shared Google Reader items and Flickr activity.

This blog will not be updated nearly as often.

Testing Twitter

As you can see on the right, I've added a twitter box. I've been reading a lot about the service during the past year or so in the blogosphere, but haven't tried it out myself. But when I read the post "Twitter is like sex" I decided to give it a go.

Many say twitter is the new facebook (which I tried, but didn't use for long), but I'm not convinced. We'll see.

Replacement of Guitar Hero III disks in Europe

Activision, you've got to be kidding me. The process for getting a replacement disk for Guitar Hero III is atrociously bad. The Aussies got a different deal, and in the US you got a pre-paid envelope. Here in Europe?

• You register your shipping address on a web page
• Wait for an email (with a sender you can't reply to)
  
• Go to another web page as stated in just received email
  
• Print out a label to put on an envelope (you have a printer, don't you?)
  
• Get a bubble envelope and put your disc in (because you probably have nothing better to do than go shopping for an envelope)
  
• Send it off to Activision
  
• Wait (unclear for how long) with no possibility to play Guitar Hero in the meantime
• Get a replacement disk shipped to you

You would think Activision would have improved the replacement process after having tried it in both US and Australia, but this one seems like the worst yet.

All companies make mistakes, but good companies handle them in a good way and turn the customer support experience into something positive.

This is not a positive experience.

Update: Activision's complete response to my request for an improved process:

Hi,

Unfortunately there is no alternative if you would like the remastered disc.

Got MacBook?

As I mentioned a while back I was getting a MacBook. I've had it for a while now, and I'm loving it. There's still bugs in OS X of course (exhibit A and B), but it feels much more solid and polished than XP and Vista. And even though the MacBook is the entry laptop made of plastic the build still feels solid. I got the middle version and upgraded to a 250G HD, which made it identical to the black MacBook but 800 SEK ($140) cheaper.

After a couple of days I had most of the system in place. This is most of the software I've installed that I felt lacking from the beginning:

• Transmission, a bittorrent client
  
• Mactex, a LaTeX distribution
• Aquamacs, an editor (I also tried Carbon Emacs, but Aquamacs felt better integrated)
  
• NeoOffice, an office suite (the OpenOffice OS X version is really terrible, don't bother trying it)
• iSquint, a video converter to convert video to mp4
• Firefox 3 beta 5, a web browser. Safari is actually quite nice and speedy too, but lacks the plugin support that Firefox has. I'm currently mostly addicted to Piclens (not yet available for Safari 3.1) and Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers.
• SqueezeCenter, a music server for my SqueezeBox. Also added the lazy search plugin which is truly excellent.
• Skype, a chat program
• VLC, a media player
  

After having transfered all my music and images to the MacBook that was pretty much it. I've been using iPhoto quite a lot of the software that came with the computer. I tested the Aperture trial download, but decided it was not for me. I don't want to mess around that much with my images.

I've remapped Caps Lock to Cmd and F5 to Spaces and added two finger tap for right-click, but left most other settings unchanged. Oh, I put the touchpad acceleration at max as well.

The two finger scroll (in both directions) is beautiful and I find myself doing that on my work PC laptop as well. What I'm still getting to grips with is the different keyboard shortcuts. Using e.g. cmd+Backspace for delete, Fn+right arrow for page down and Fn+down arrow for end of page takes some getting used to. Finding the backslash (Alt+Shift+7) and other not so common characters we're also tricky and not the same as on a PC. But I'm getting there.

All in all I'm very pleased with the MacBook and OS X. Highly recommended.

Getting mininova RSS feeds and uTorrent to play nice

uTorrent has an excellent built in RSS feed parser, but it does not work properly with mininova's RSS feeds (which only supplies URL:s to the torrent's web pages and not the torrents themselves) without some sort of kludge. RSSatellite has been quite popular, but then you either need to find someone who has set it up for sharing or install a local web server.

Enter direct option. You simply pass it on to a mininova RSS URL, just as any other URL option by tacking on "&direct" (without quotes) after the original URL. It is described on mininova's blog, but that post doesn't show up when searching on Google for solutions to this problem. I'm doubting this will either, but at least I have a placeholder for future reference for myself.

Nice

Facade, originally uploaded by morberg.

Went to Nice this past weekend and it was really nice. Check out flickr for more images I took in Nice.

Nothing on but reruns

Windows update decided that the graphics driver on my HTPC needed updating. It probably did. However, as I've mentioned before that driver is bundled with the HDMI sound driver. Which meant that sound over HDMI stopped working. Again. Way to go, Vista!

First I was pussled and tried switching HDMI ports on the TV. Of course that didn't work and then I remembered I've had a similar problem before. So I went to Fujitsu Siemens support page, but the sound driver there wasn't possible to install. Yay, Fujitsu!

Then I headed over to Intel's driver page and tried updating to the latest driver (which Vista probably already graciously installed for me), but that didn't do any good. As expected. Perhaps I could reinstall the old driver? I probably could, but Intel didn't have any old drivers listed on their web page. (Fujitsu actually have old drivers, so perhaps that could be an option next time.) Hurray Intel!

Luckily I had saved the driver I downloaded in October, which I could use and now I have sound working again over HDMI. It only took five reboots and an hour and a half of my time. No West Wing tonight.

Now I've turned off automatic updates in Vista. The next time something stops working I'll probably start from the bottom and update the BIOS and then all drivers one by one. Here's hoping it doesn't have to come to that.

Did I mention I ordered a MacBook this past weekend? From now on I will throw as little money as possible Microsoft's way. Go me!