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..

I have two sound-cards in my XPC, one ICH5 onboard solution and a Terratec Aureon 5.1 PCI card. I have both enabled using the onboard solution for my headset and the Aureon for line-in/out. ALSA seems to assign the cards randomly (depending on the sequence the modules are loaded?) which results in having my audio-player’s ouput on my headset sometimes while I actually want it on line-out of my PCI-card. The ALSA FAQ to the rescue! Adding the index parameter to the options of the appropriate module within /etc/modprobe.d/options seems to do the trick:

options snd_cmipci index=0
options snd_intel8x0 index=1