Actually, I’m already here. I nearly managed to let two years pass since my last entry. I don’t know why I even bother. Anyway, my pursuit of a bachelor degree led me to Bath. For the next five weeks I will perform acoustic model measurements at the local university under the wings of a well credited acoustician. We will see how that goes.

The trip Oldenburg – Bremen – Stansted – London – Bath was pleasantly uneventful (ignoring the delay of my flight and my alarm shooing me out of my snugly bed at 5 o’clock) and despite the rumors relating to the obscurity of London’s tubes, everything went smooth. Not considering the waiting periods for planes and trains, the trip was considerably faster than a travel to visit friends and family in the south of Germany.

For some reason I can’t recall why I always assumed that GB and Germany share the same timezone. Instead I gained an hour today. Surprise! Not a day goes by without learning something new.

Not freshly learned but painfully confirmed is my prejudice about student accommodations. It will have to do. It just will.. the fridges are not very trustworthy, there doesn’t seem to be a spare set of dishes, the overall impression is rather bleak. Well. I’m going out for something to eat and a beer.

There will probably be more updates on this. Maybe.

Some weeks ago my external HDD died and took most of my re-digitalized audio-collection with it. This was actually a very cleansing occurrence and I decided to put music back to where it belongs. And I do not mean the heading-straight-towards-terabyte wide opens of current harddisks, which do a very successful job in robbing music of what it’s supposed to be, making it arbitrary and the listener indifferent due to the pure amount of accessible sound. No, what I had in mind was a rack. Filled with records. Those big vinyly things. To get back in touch with the music, handling a record, putting it on the turntable, carefully lifting the arm on the record.. and listen.

So I got myself a turntable on ebay, a solid Technics SL-Q2, nothing fancy. After some issues with a broken stylus and waiting for a new cartridge it is up and running. Sounds very warm. The only remaining problem is that the replacement-cartridge seems to have a very low output, requiring to crank up my amp pretty far. It does not sound too linear and slightly distorted up there. Anyway, it will have to do for now while I take my time to figure out what new cartridge to get or if I just get a replacement-stylus for the original system, an EPC-207C.

I also bought my first record (post ~1995), Brant Bjork’s Tres Dias, at a local second hand record store. Besides that I got myself a used copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon which includes both posters, kind of rare, or so I’ve been told. I can’t wait to slowly but steadily build a fine collection of records, rediscovering music in the process.

Sometimes, there’s still good news in these bleak times.

Having used Opera on Windows for quite some time now, there’s a lot of login data saved in Opera’s wand.dat. Unfortunately, it can’t be accessed out-of-the-box. Three ways to get your passwords back:

• Use an appropriate bookmarklet to display all passwords on the current page
• Use the shareware google reveals when searching for the obvious ‘opera password‘. Never tried this piece of software, though.
• Find a little tool called unwand. It can export all data stored in wand.dat to a text-file for further processing. Runs with Wine, too.

Just had to change some boot options on my PowerBook to get rid off a borked ubuntu-bootsplash (namely adding video=offb:off video=nvidiafb). When I updated yaboot in the process, I got the following:

liquid:~$ sudo ybin -v
[..]
ybin: Setting attributes on ofboot…
ybin: Setting attributes on yaboot…
ybin: Setting attributes on yaboot.conf…
ybin: Blessing /dev/hda2 with Holy Penguin Pee…
ybin: Updating OpenFirmware boot-device variable in nvram…

Well, if it helps..