For people needing the convenience of the great Clipperz password manager I wrote about earlier but have the paranoia threshold set further up, you’ll be happy to hear the server side is also available, under the GNU AGPL (haven’t actually looked at it yet). So now you can run the storage server yourself too.

I’ve had a very expensive evening yesterday. My macbook pro locked up (well dead samba shares stalled Finder) and Linda was impatient to watch a DVD, so I pushed the power button for 5 seconds like I do from time to time. That was the last time the machine booted.

I have so much junk harware, but nooo, the fastest machine has to kick the bucket. I spent like an hour trying to find a purchase proof. Epic Fail.

After some googling it looks like the most expensive bit is hosed, the whole logic board. And since the repair is going to cost a like a US mbp, I may just use it as a table for 4 years until some broken screen machines show up on ebay. He died too young. I will miss him.

Update! Luckily thanks to the remaining week of my world-wide guarantee, the nice folks at MacServis have replaced the faulty logic board and I have a breathing machine again.

Hey Daniel – I happen to have been working on OPML and RSS icons this eveni^W morning, so this one came out for free. Not that I think the symbol is meaningful. It’s really just a coincidence I’ve had this open in Inkscape and bumped into your blog entry.

At Novell, we take everything from Redmond as the Holy Grail.

Outline mode enables to work on complex artwork.

Here’s some advice on how to avoid putting Inkscape to a halt:

• Switch to outline mode when zooming in to fix shapes. It is unfortunate, but Inkscape will re-render all filters at the display resolution when you zoom in. If you used a lot of blurs this can get nasty, even if Inkscape renderer is interruptable (in theory . Notebook-unfriendly Ctrl+5 on the Numpad to toggle the rendering modes.
• Avoid using linked offsets. Very neat feature one can use to offset strokes of shapes. Sadly this is a very CPU intensive operation.You can destructively convert this into a regular shape with Path>Object to Path. Too bad, because I like using linked-offset to work around the fact that you cannot recolor clones (so that the linked offset follows the shape changes of its parent object, but you don’t have to have the parent have unset fill/stroke properties). Also you don’t seem to be able to do the conversion on a large scale by selecting all your objects and converting at once.

I really like how you can enter a group and individual objects within that group become selectable. Maybe there could be a toggle to only render objects within that group, so that it works like blender’s local mode (Numpad /)?

So after finally getting the FLAC version of Ghost, I wondered if Banshee’s transparent transcoding would keep all the metadata intact and I could enjoy the album on my ipod too.

Sadly the codec situation did have to ruin my out-of-the-box euphoria. So to be of some aid to my fellow openSUSEists, here’s how.

openSUSE 10.3 doesn’t include the LAME mp3 encoder plugin in gstreamer010-plugins-ugly like other distros seem to. You need to grab the package from Packman. If you want to cover all your codec bases, you can actually do the install with one click (Pure marketing speak, it does sound better than 9 clicks + 72 popups; KDE folks get served here).

You can bring up the device properties from the sidebar context menu to access transcoding properties.

If you’re like the cool kids and use the lightning fast red carpet, however, you can –

rug sa http://ftp.skynet.be/pub/packman/suse/10.3/ packman && \
rug in packman:gstreamer010-plugins-ugly

It will actually pull its own gstreamer and replace the default one, but it did not seem to break anything for me.

After this, you can check out for presence of the magical LAME encoder with gst-inspect | grep mp3. If all went fine, you can simply drag and drop the flac files onto your ipod and Banshee will do the transcoding. And yes, the metadata is all fine.

Wow, reznor rocks on. Not so their servers. While the payment goes through, I’m struggling grabbing the 600MB FLAC download. I guess he’s right about bittorrent…

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I (2008)

This torrent is an official upload from Nine Inch Nails.

We’re very proud to present a new collection of instrumental music, Ghosts I-IV.
Almost two hours of music recorded over an intense ten week period last fall, Ghosts I-IV sprawls Nine Inch Nails across a variety of new terrain.

Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.

We encourage you to share the music of Ghosts I with your friends, post it on your website, play it on your podcast, use it for video projects, etc. It’s licensed for all non-commercial use under Creative Commons.

We’ve also made a 40 page PDF book to accompany the album. If you’d like to download it for free, visit http://ghosts.nin.com/main/pdf

Ghosts I is the first part of the 36 track collection Ghosts I-IV. Undoubtedly you’ll be able to find the complete collection on the same torrent network you found this file, but if you’re interested in the release, we encourage you to check it out at ghosts.nin.com, where the complete Ghosts I-IV is available directly from us in a variety of DRM-free digital formats, including FLAC lossless, for only $5. You can also order it on CD, or as a deluxe package with multitrack audio files, high definition audio on Blu-ray disc, and a large hard-bound book.

We genuinely appreciate your support, and hope you enjoy the new music. Thanks for listening.

http://ghosts.nin.com

The price is just right, maybe I’d charge a bit more for FLAC. The only downside is that my vacation videos will now have a rather dark soundtrack (haven’t actually heard a single track yet, but I expect the classic reznor experience).