Yesterday a friend sent me an article describing the process of how a small band which is currently doing fine on some indie-label gets signed by a major. Interesting read, although a little bit scary. Well, it’s all about the money, and if the bucks are that big (which they are actually not), you can fully understand why there’s a total lack of, well, thinking on the band’s part.

When Against Me! signed to a major some time ago, one opinion I read was as follows: “I don’t need to spend my spare time watching other people working.” Although the last record has been released for some time now, I have yet to listen to it, so I can’t really decide wether or not the switch had negative impact on the music. Besides that, I don’t really care. Assuming those guys are all grown-ups, they probably know what they’re doing, and who am I to judge. And they can’t force me to buy their records anyway.

In all honesty, I guess one of the main reasons that your Punk- or Indie – or whatever “scene” or “undergroud”-listening Jane has such strong feelings about this topic is the fact, that the band will probably be recognized by a much larger audience which will result in Jane not longer being Punk or Indie or whatever. All the lame kids will start listening to it and even MTV puts it on heavy rotation..

At the same time, this elitist behavior of those scenesters is actually killing the scene. Have you been to a hardcore-show recently? All this tough-guy attitude is hardly bearable. If one wasn’t so scared by all those hardcore-hipsters, one would probably have to laugh out loud. If you’re not vegan/straight edge/whatever else those people are into right now, you’re not part of that scene. If you’re not 110% politically correct (which for example can be wearing an Ignite-shirt on a 25-ta-life concert) you’re not part of that scene. If you dare to smile every now and then, you’re not part of that scene. So, who actually wants to be part of that scene? There’s an EP of Dillinger Escape Plan with Mike Patton called “Irony is a Dead Scene”. Point made.

Today I felt the sudden urge to reanimate this place. It has been a while since my last post and that while was well spend, kind of. I went back to school and started studying and moved to the other side of the country. And as far as productivity goes, that was pretty much it. The rest of the time was wasted with music and beer, wine and cigarettes. Besides that I’ve been crawling through dungeons an hostile landscapes for ages in an (in)famous MMO. Honestly, that’s pretty much it. Anyhow, today I updated WP to the latest version and although the layout of my sidebar is a bit mixed up, all essential functions are up an running.

If anyone is actually stopping by, come back anytime soon for there probably will be, well, things and stuff..

If there ever had been such thing, of course. Guess one would first have to deal with Microsoft/Wintendo. Besides that, Linux Torvalds, (involuntary) messiah of the Linux-Community, got behind KDE and referred to Gnome developers as “Interface Nazis” yesterday. Although the facts are not necessarily disagreeable, the way Torvalds makes his points sometimes has a remarkable lack of, err, discretion. Well, but it’s Just For Fun anyway, isn’t it? In any case, this is probably the flame of the year. Funny how all those OSS-fellows just jump in. Well, I for my part will grab some beer, browse the vast expanse of the interwebs and laugh myself silly on all the discussion going on on that topic..

By the way, two weeks ago, Mitch Clem has put the word “Feminazi” in the mouth of some emo-kid.. strange wold.

Yes, it’s back. Somehow OS X is just more convenient on a current PowerBook than Linux:

• Airport Extreme: While the Linux driver is making good progress, it doesn’t seem to support any encryption yet and therefore a no-go for my pseudo-productive environment here. Anyhow, amazing work. As word spreads quickly, every decent news-site is reporting.
  Fiddling around with my bitchy ZyAir-G200 (or the bitchy driver?) is just annoying. It seems to need the ESSID set twice for some reason. Using KNemo and giving the user permissions to use iwconfig/ifconfig without password (sudo) works smoothly. Anyhow: there’s still that stick dangling at the side of my PB.
• Video out. It’s working, but that involves some tweaking, having the video-adaptor plugged in at boot time and is only capable of mirroring the main screen (Or so I read. Correct me if I’m wrong here).
• My left palm gets well done. Somehow the PB is heating up more running Linux as it does running OS X. Still the fans start more often. Checking my process table confirms that there are no processes out of line. Temperature/Fan-Control needs some tweaking?
• Detection of my external hardrive (IEEE1394/FireWire) isn’t reliable. Sometimes I just can’t get that thing to work.
• Suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work because of a lack of specification from NVidia. Seems it’s currently not possible to shake the GPU awake again. Suspend-to-Disk should work, though. But STR is so much nicer.

Nothing one can’t live without, I guess, but at the moment it kind of bothers me. OS X on the other hand runs pretty well out of the box, the only hardware issue being my scanner, a CanoScan N650U, and the main software issue being Finder (guess the moment everything works just like expected, I just disintegrate). So, while setting up OS X properly, creating filters, importing contacts and bookmarks and looking for applications for this and that, I discovered the following:

• Finder is a bad thing. Why, even Wintendo’s Explorer is manifested usability compared to that thing. Or maybe I just don’t get it. Found a MC clone called muCommander, but hell, there has to be a way to use Finder in a sane way!
• With XiphQT there’s finally ogg-vorbis support for current versions of QuickTime/iTunes. Ogg-streams not supported, though.
• If you want to import OPML into Safari, for example to import your RSS-feeds from Akregator, you might want to use this workaround.
• If you want to transfer your bookmarks from Konqueror to Safari, use this one.
• If you went looking for an app that draws functions, you probably came across EdenGraph a very simple tool for that task. If you then look into your Applications/Utilities you’ll find Grapher, a much more powerful application and a buggy one, too. Found that one by accident today. Who would’ve thought such a raw gem is shipping with Tiger?
• There’s no Gaim for OS X and no, although being based on libgaim, Adium can’t compete. At least when it comes to jabber support. Already wrote about jabber-clients for OS X in this post. If push comes to shove, seem that Gaim builds under OS X so if I get really bored, I might try this.
• The driver supplied by Canon for the CanoScan N650U seems to work with PhotoShop(CS) only. Besides that, there’s TWAIN SANE, a SANE implementation for OS X which seems to access my scanner, for it goes through all the motions using GraphicConverter, but never displays an actual preview/scan. Gimp just gives me a message about some png-related symbols that couldn’t be found. Guess I should really consider buying hardware that will actually run out-of-the-box on my systems. Funny thing is the scanner works flawlessly with linux..
• Found a really nice screensaver via powerbook_blog (de): lotsawater. Looks like, well, lots of water.

Nothing ground-breaking but that post is probably just for safekeeping the links to the appropriate apps anyway.

Just export from Konqueror’s Bookmark Editor to Mozilla Bokmarks and them import that file using Safari. Took me ages to figure this out. No, any other format won’t work.