musings

Happy New Year!

“And The Dragon seperated the virtuous from the sinful. He tore his eyes from his sockets and used them to peer into the souls of those on trial to make a judgement. He knew that with endless knowledge came endless responsibility.”

Some examples of the Dragon Form are Athena (Greek), St. Peter (Christian), and Surya (Indian). The Dragon is associated with the concept of intelligence, the number 5, and the element of wood. His sign is the crescent moon.

As a member of Form 5, you are an intelligent and wise individual. You weigh options by looking at how logical they are and you know that while there may not always be a right or wrong choice, there is always a logical one. People may say you are too indecisive, but it’s only because you want to do what’s right. Dragons are the best friends to have because they’re willing to learn.


Which Mythological Form Are You?
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This is so cool:
BLEEP - Digital Downloads from Warp Records
Warp’s been one of my favourite record labels for a really long time – the home of such greats as Autechre, LFO, Aphex Twin, and Sabres of Paradise, and now they’re offering mp3 downloads! They’re using LAME with ‘–alt-preset standard’ (which is good – I use ‘–preset extreme’, but I’m not feeding my mp3 collection across the web to the rest of the world) to encode their stuff too, which is just grand. And how’s this for a progressive attitude – they’re using mp3 because “We believe that most people like to be treated as customers and not potential criminals – DRM is easily circumvented and just puts obstacles in the way of enjoying music.” How cool is that? Looks like I’ve found another shelter from the storm of idiocy that is DRM. I’ll take this moment to plug EMusic too. Even though they were just bought out, and their download policy has changed (it used to be $15USD/month for unlimited downloads, and now it’s $10USD/month for 40 downloads with $15 and $20 plans at 65 and 90 downloads, respectively) they still are my number one choice for purchasing digital music. Their selection is excellent (no major labels, but I really couldn’t care less) and they use high quality VBR mp3s.

All this readily available (and inexpensive) downloadable music doesn’t stop me from buying music on physical media, but it does give me a way to try out new music without having to risk the $20-$40 bucks (imports are bloody expensive) on a CD, unheard.

Warning: Linux / X technobabble ahead!

So, I was sitting in front of my computer last night, wondering why some of the nicer screen fonts that now ship with XFree86 4.3.xx (the Microsoft core fonts, for the curious) only showed up in stuff that was linked against Freetype1. So, I’d get TrebuchetMS and Verdana in The Gimp but not in GAIM. This had always really irritated me, because those are some really nice screen fonts (give the Devil his due). I had never really looked into the problem though, and last night I finally decided to just start digging. I found the command fc-cache, which rebuilds the font cache, and ran it with the -fv parameters (which forces the program to scan directories with apparently valid caches, and displays status information) and guess what? The directory with the nice core fonts (/usr/lib/X11R6/fonts/truetype) wasn’t being scanned at all. Seems that Freetype2’s base configuration doesn’t specify that directory. Freetype2 stores its directory list in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf – but don’t be modifying that file – it can be overwritten by a subsequent install of a newer version of Freetype2. Instead, modify /etc/fonts/local.conf and add this line here:

<dir>/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/truetype</dir>

in between the <fontconfig> and </fontconfig> tags, and run ‘fc-cache -fv’. You might need to restart X (I didn’t, but your mileage may vary). From that point on, you ought to see those fonts show up in Freetype2-based software. Enjoy!

Damn, this is way cool. I found this link on the DNA Lounge site.
Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music is a complete guide to all the incomprehensible genres of “electronica”, in a family tree, complete with samples and sarcasm.

The Covers Project attempts to make a huge catalog of every cover song. Very cool.

Happy New Year!

I don’t normally get into the whole New Year hype, but last night an old high school / university friend of mine, Dr. William Harper threw a New Year’s party at his house. I had a really great time – I hadn’t seen Will in something like a year and a half, same with a lot of the other people at the party. A lot of our old friends were there, and it was good to spend some time with them again. I didn’t get home ’til half past four – kind of a throwback to the old days, when I was often racing the sun home. ‘Cept that in the dead of winter, the sun doesn’t rise ’til 8am.