Switch from WordPress to Blogger!

I had been playing around with the idea of switching from wordpress to blogger for a while. The main reason is that although I am happy with wordpress.com as a blogging facility, I am even happier with using Google tools on my PCs. As Blogger links directly to my Google account it will be easier for me to keep track of what is going on with my blog, simply because it integrates with all my other Google Gadgets. Therefore you will now find my blog at tzijlstra.blogspot.com. If you did check in here regularly, I hope you are prepared to switch your blogroll, bookmark or whatever else you used to get here! Looking forward to seeing you Tim

Trials and tribulations of a mad man

Swine flu… I have had a cold for two weeks now, will I die? It is not very likely, but I am getting fed up with sniffing, sneezing and coughing. And I am sure I don’t even have the swine flu, it just creates an extra layer of self-pity that so handsomely feeds my Man-Flu symptoms. I am not sure which is worse, I have been moaning about this cold for two weeks now, but I have been doing transcriptions for a good month and more to come. On top of that I quit smoking, no doubt fed by the cough-a-ton that followed each cigarette.

P2P and TalkTalk

This is a rant. It is a rant about ISPs and their bizarre, out of fashion policies.

I switched from British Telecom (Money-Eating-Ex-Government-Mega-Corporation) to TalkTalk (Cheap-and-Cheerful-ISP-with-Limitations). And the switch went remarkably well, no problems at all in fact.

I am even happy with the performance, my Speedtest data shows a significant increase in performance compared to two months ago. So far so good!

When the salesguy came round, I asked him about throttling, and he didn’t know. I took the gamble, knowing about ways to get round it if I really want to. But that is besides the point, it now turns out that he should have known, as it is a TalkTalk policy to cut down P2P (Peer to Peer) traffic to an absurd level. This is fine when P2P means Gnutella, Napster, Torrents or other popular (ex)-means of downloading pirated software, movies and music. But when P2P means BBC iPlayer, Spotify or Ubuntu DVD-downloads, it is a different story.

The fact is that in the recent year P2P has grown up to become a mature and stable platform for distributing data among a large usergroup. Legally! TalkTalk is clearly basing its policy on the 2-5% of users that still use old-fashioned P2P downloads to satisfy their needs, but the fact is that the majority of P2P use these days is completely legit and should not be limited.

Besides that, there are far superior alternatives to getting quality “illegal downloads”! If you happen to work for TalkTalk, read this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/jun/09/games-dvd-music-downloads-piracy

In the mean-time, just make sure my iPlayer and Spotify work again, both services I pay for, or am prepared to pay for!

Craoibh Haven Scottish Weather

Craoibh Haven Scottish Weather, originally uploaded by tzijlstra.

Having set up Flickr properly to share my latest pictures with you I feel it is time to send a few to my blog! This is one of my favourite shots taken in Scotland (Argyll to be more precise, Craoibh Haven to be too precise) I didn’t edit it, it came out of the camera as you see it here. Cool huh! If you have suggestions for editing it somehow, I would like to hear from you!

Time for an update!

Aaarghhh!! The last few months have been complete mayhem, I started several large drafts for this blog, but haven’t been able to finish them, now that I will have some more time soon (hopefully) I will be finishing them and hopefully be of use to the Masters Students community in particular.

Sorry for the inactivity, I don’t suppose there is a real excuse for not posting regularly, so just sue me instead

Made in China

I found this cartoon whilst stumbling the internet. I like it!

Sheffield Earthquake!

The United Kingdom has been hit by a proper earthquake. I assess it must be a proper one because there were bricks on the floor where the BBC camera-crew was filming this morning! Although I can make fun of it now, nearly seven hours later, it was the first earthquake I ever felt. The Netherlands are not known for quakes, we used to get some in Groningen due to the gas that they get out of the ground, but they never did more then 2.3 on Richter’s scale. This one was 5.3! It happening at 01:00 in the morning is also unsettling, I woke up due to a noise I didn’t recognise and all of a sudden the wardrobe started rocking forth and back and I could feel the bed move. My first reaction was a big laugh! Wow! A real earthquake! but then I struggled to get back to sleep cause I was worried there would be another one…

For more info on UK quakes, click on the picture:

The future of online gaming

This article is very much subjective and bares no relevance for those that like pretty graphics and consolegames. But I know for a fact that there are a lot of people out there who couldn’t care less about graphics and are interested in gameplay only. For those people I have a shocking revelation: Cease buying new computersystems, stop working with the bloatware that calls itself Windows and start discovering the hundreds and hundreds of browserbased games out there. All you need is a browser and broadband.

From my own experience I can assure you the following, Ubuntu installs better, performs better and connects to the internet (except wireless) better then Windows ever will be able to. I am talking about Vista here, but even XP drops the ball against Ubuntu.  Take a look yourself, you will find it is clean, smooth and humane: http://www.ubuntu.com. The Humane reference is no coincidence. I think the secret behind Ubuntu is that  it does not have the computer as central theme but the user. It comes with a good selection of programs, but no more then needed. It comes with an excellent application to install more programs, should you need them, without having to pay for them. It looks smart (once you fixed the resolution and refreshrate, I do wish they would consider including proprietary drivers for ATI and GeForce straight away!) and it performs ‘out of the box’. My father in law, who is 80 odd and although enthusiastic also quite cynical about computers, has now installed it, and after I installed the ATI driver he was quite impressed!

This elaboration about Ubuntu is necessary because it proved a difficult decision for me to switch to Ubuntu completely. I am a fanatic gamer, and although all the games I love have no graphic grandeur whatsoever (Football Manager, Civilization and other strategy games) I couldn’t bare leaving them behind because I can’t play them on Linux. Yet now I bit the bullet I don’t miss them that much at all. Basically this is due to the fact that I play browser games now, Tribalwars being the most obvious (I am game-admin so am I really playing???) but I also try my hand at other games, even silly Flash games can be fun every now and then.

This made me think, the future of PC gaming is changing, and the developers are cottoning on to this at an increasing rate. Football Manager will launch a proper online version where you play in leagues against other real life people, finally!  Game publishers are starting to invest in new technologies whereby games get ‘mirrored’ on your computer and you pay for the time that you actualy play instead of a fixed-fee. They are also increasingly investing in browsergames.

So good news for people that are getting fed-up with the cost of playing PC games, things are about to get fairer and you can use Linux from now on to get proper computing!

Hi there odd person!

Don’t be insulted, be odd. It is a way of life apparently!

I hope you enjoy reading the occasional blog here. I keep a blog/social network site up in Dutch and divide attention between the two. I just find that with all the internet-contacts I have, it pays to have an English blog.

Therefore you will find topics here that concern my Netlife. If you are not interested in that, well… tough!