I was going through some really old stuff and found a picture of my first car. A silver-grey metallic Renault 5 GTL with bright orange upholstery which I bought in The Hague from a friend of a friend for FL 125 Guilders (less than 60 euros). Here is a picture:
My first car: a Renault 5 GTL
I have fond memories of this car. Obviously the freedom it provided. It drove well too except that the engine would always overheat. The car had a temperature meter and it even worked so I knew when to stop which was after about 20km. To get going again I had to release some of the pressure by carefully opening the cap of the cooling system. Since I had little experience with car engines I couldn’t figure out what was causing it. It took me quite a while before I understood that it was a broken pressure valve in that same cap… Nevertheless this didn’t bother me as I had a car that took me places, albeit with some stops on the way.
At some point the water pump decided to pump the water on the street instead of through the system. That really needed fixing so I got a replacement pump at the car junkyard for 10 Guilders (less than 5 euros) and in the midst of winter removed the old pump and installed the new one. At freezing temperatures this wasn’t fun but in the end I succeeded and I was mobile once again.
After about a year of being my partner in crime the elements won. Due to extensive rust the left rear suspension pretty much detached from the chassis and that was the end of it. I remember driving her on a beautiful day to the junkyard where my little Renault met her final resting place.
So Nokia finally announced the N900. It’s an impressive phone already getting positive reviews. Reading the specs I miss two things: FLAC and Ogg support. How is it that a Linux & Maemo based phone does not have support for FLAC and Ogg?! Let’s hope Nokia fixes that in new firmware releases.
The Linux Foundation just released their annual ‘Who Writes Linux’ report. A fascinating read worth your time if you are interested in the numbers behind Linux’ relentless progress. And guess which company is totally absent in the report? Canonical. No suprise there. All I hear from Shuttleworth is rhetoric about how the Community would benefit from synced releases. Yeah right.
Tonight I was updating a laptop to F11, did some tab completion and almost had a heart attack from the way too loud beep that hammered my ears. Obviously this should never happen again so next step was disabling this deafening beep.
In the good ol’ days you disabled the beep from hammering your ears during tab completion by adding or uncommenting “set bell-style none” in /etc/inputrc. Since I don’t know if that still works I figured I might as well prevent the pcspkr module from loading in the first place with:
# echo “blacklist pcspkr” > /etc/modprobe.d/pcspkr.conf
# rmmod pcspkr
Enjoy the peace and quiet!
As announced on FreeSWITCH’s frontpage, version 1.0.4 has been released and now supports Skype, ZRTP, H.323 and MRCP: The FreeSWITCH team is pleased to announce the immediately availability of FreeSWITCH version 1.0.4. (Source tarball available here.) This new version contains many improvements in stability and security as well as some notable additions. More information here and digg it here.