Auf dem Weg nach Hause ist beim Überfahren einer Straßenüberführung die Pedale am Fahrrad gebrochen. Zum Glück ist nichts passiert.

Da Merets bisheriges Fahrrad Probleme in der hinteren Nabe hatte, ist sie in der letzten Zeit immer mit dem Fahrrad gefahren, mit dem sie gelernt hatte. Das ist natürlich für schnelles Fahren viel zu klein. Da trampelt man sich einen Wolf.

Da ihre beste Kindergartenfreunding, die dieses Jahr in die Schule kommt, jetzt auch ein 20er Fahrrad bekommen hat und da Meret für ihr Alter doch eine der Größeren ist, haben wir dann auch das 20er Fahrrad aus dem Keller geholt. Und mit dem Sattel auf tiefstmöglichen Punkt geht das Fahren mit diesem Rad wirklich wunderbar. Wir haben dann heute einen kurzen Fahrradausflug gemacht und bis auf einen etwas kamikaze-artigen ist die “Kurze” richtig schnell geworden.

I’ve been busy the last couple of evenings to install the laptop the way I want it (remove inherited stuff, installing the latest patches, install the main application).

Since the laptop contains a P4, it gets pretty hot, in particular the front left corner, where you left hand rests during typeing. If I would have to do some serious typeing, I would need to connect an external keyboard. Otherwise, the display in particular looks very good.

Well, I also just experienced, that Linux needs to catch up a bit in user friendlieness. I took the photo with the digital camera, plugged the camera into the USB-port of the laptop and uploaded the photo. Ready. Under Linux this would have required to unload the CF-card and put it into the reader or download the the particular picture with gphoto2. And in case of the card reader one still might experience problems, since I’m still seeing problems, when storage USB-devices are repeatedly connected and disconnected. This works not yet as smooth as under Windows. I’ll need to test KDE and Gnome, if it works better in these environments.

At the beginning of this I purchased a Athlon 2800 system to replace my old Duron 1200 powered machine. The Athlon system is dual bootable to boot either Gentoo Linux (which is booted 90% of the time) or the factory installed Window XP. I reinstalled the Duron box with Windows to replace the very old Cerelon 400 system, which the kids have mainly been using. And the Cerelon might replace the very, very old Pentium I 133Mhz as my DSL router and firewall.

Now, the occasion came up, to buy a used laptop from the boyfriend of my wifes sister, who recently invested into a new Toshiba laptop. After some consideration I accepted the offer, since the price of 750 Euro for a year old laptop seemed to be quite good to me. The laptop is a Gericom P4 with 2.5GHz and 512Mb. The downside are a somewhat noisy fan and a keyboard, that simply sounds awfull, when you hit the keys. Otherwise the system is quite ok.

These days, with photos beeing taken by a digital camera, you need something, which can be used to show the photos to your inlaws or you parents. And since I’ve also started to save the pictures in raw format on the CF cards, I need a somewhat faster Windows system, to convert the photos to either tiff or jpeg format.

So, the OS test appears to be right after all.

Fuck, just came up as

Which OS are You?

And this is someone, who’s doing primarily Unix/Linux for nearly 20 years.

I did some experimence with blogging clients on Linux this evening and I must say, I haven’t found anything decent, that works in connection with MovableType. In particular, when I consider, that I sometimes want to post something in german and this requires umlauts most of the time and I don’t want to type the HTML entities each time.

First I tried the files mt.el and weblogger.el, which should provide MovableType clients from within Emacs. However I couldn’t get them to work properly. One reason might be, that I’m using XEmacs instead of GNU Emacs. Either the use of categories was unsatisfactory or the particular client wouldn’t want to post an article containing german umlauts.

Then I tried GTK Blog, which is basically a very fine graphical client, unless you want to insert german umlauts. Typing and preview is still ok, however the ISO-8859-1 umlaut characters ended up as UTF-8 equivalents in the blog entry. Perhaps I need to fiddle with LANG environment variable to get better results, but again not yet a satisfactory experience.

Onto ChronicleLite, which I’ve used with Roller, but doesn’t really support MovableType.

So, in the end I’m back to Firefox and standard HTML textareas, Mozex and XEmacs plugged into Firefox with Mozex and gnuclient.