Helvensteijn.com

I’m going away to the camping site in the German Eifel for a while. Don’t know when I’ll be back yet. When I get bored, I guess.

Maybe I’ll leave a post or two, if I happen to find an Internet cafe or so. Otherwise, I’ll see you all when I get back.

Please try not to mutilate this site. I’d like to find it as I left it when I get back.

Today, I received a new hard disk drive for my MacBook. It’s a 2.5″ Western Digital Scorpio SATA drive, spinning at 5400 RPM, with 8 MB cache, and — here it comes — a dazzling 250 GB of storage capacity. Now that I’ve seen it up close (I’d never seen a naked 2.5″ hard disk drive), I have no idea how in the world they could possibly fit 250 GB on such a small thing, but apparently, this is only the beginning of PMR.

To give you an idea of how small it actually is, here’s a comparison with a run-of-the-mill lighter.

Western Digital Scorpio

I am now copying all my data from the external drive to my MacBook. Once that’s done, I can finally shut the former down.

Since a week or two ago my 20 GB 4th generation iPod died, I needed something else. As temporary substitute my phone (a Nokia N73) did nice, but a phone just isn’t designed to be an MP3 player. An iPod is. It just sounds better (with proper ear pieces).

Back in late 2004, when I bought my previous iPod, my music collection was about 3.5 GiB, so that left me with the choice of going for an iPod mini with 4 GB, or 3.81 GiB, which would barely hold all my music, or to go for the 20 GB iPod. I decided on the latter.

Now, my collection has grown by a little more than 2 GiB, totaling 5.85 GiB. So now I didn’t have to go for a bulky large iPod with a screen that’s far too big (I have my Palm T|X to watch movies on the go). The black iPod nano comes with 8 GB, or 7.45 GiB.

That leaves me with almost 2 GiB of growing space. Looking at the expansion of my collection the past 3 years, that means another year or 2. After that, we’ll see what happens.

Oh, and it’s definitely worth the name “nano”. Boy is it small. Here’s a comparison with my Apple Remote:

Apple iPod and Apple remote

The new white earbuds are still of inferior quality. They don’t even come close to actually utilizing the full potential of an iPods capabilities. But that’s easily remedied with some quality earbuds from Sennheiser, the MXL51 Street.

It’s been raining on and off all day already, but suddenly I noticed it getting dark. Darker than usual. Really dark. Kinda spooky actually.

Here’s a photo:

Dark cloud coverage

Up untill now, it looks worse than it is. But I’ve learned never to say never…

Update 18:43: Well, it still looks worse than it actually was. At least here, that is. Somewhere in the east of The Netherlands, a few old ladies were hit by lightning while hiking. Fortunately there were no deadly casualties, though two of them were hospitalized with burns.

I’ve added the possibility to this site to post comments using your OpenID URI — not that a lot of people leave comments here, but I like OpenID, and so I like others to be able to use it, too.

So if you want to comment using your OpenID URI, just enter it in the Web site field and leave the Name and E-mail fields empty.

When you submit your comment you are, as usual, redirected to your OpenID provider for confirmation, and when you come back, your comment is there.

The first comment on this post is from me, added using my own OpenID URI.

So what is this OpenID anyway?
OpenID is a decentralized online identity framework. It enables people to log into all sites and services that support it, using one single username, which is a reqular URI. Mine, for instance, is simply the URI of this web site: helvensteijn.com.

So, whenever people log in (or leave a comment) using an OpenID URI on a web site that supports it, they are redirected to their OpenID provider, who will ask them whether the site they came from may use the information it requests (usally name, e-mail address, that sort of things) and if they approve, they’re redirected back to where they came from, logged in and well (or with their comment posted).

This approval only needs to happen once for every site. If someone comes back later to a site he/she has already approved, logging in or posting a comment with an OpenID URI will seem no different than the old fashioned username & password way, aside from a minor delay perhaps.

To learn more, I suggest visiting the OpenID web site and if you like it, you can get your own.

Update August 7, 2008: Since virtually nobody was actually using this, and the plugin wasn’t behaving very well, I decided to no longer offer this feature for now. Might be back sometime in the future.

Now that I have ample time available, I’ve looked at some issues that I still had with this web site.

First of all, the page navigation on the left was somewhat buggy. When one was somewhere inside the blog, the “Blog” item in the menu would not be highlighted. That’s been fixed.

Secondly, the page titles were inconsistent. Static pages were OK, but in the blog, somtimes there was a page title (when inside archives or posts), but for example on the main blog page, it simply said “helvensteijn.com”, without any page title. Not very nice. Now, whenever one is somewhere inside the blog, the title will reflect that correctly. On the main blog page, it now sais “helvensteijn.com » Blog” and deeper inside the blog, it will tell you where you are.

The third issue was that one could not post any comment while logged in. Since I’m the only user and I have user registration disabled, this actually only concerned me. But still it was annoying (there’s some top-secret password-protected pages on this site where I use comments to keep track of certain things concerning this site, like bugs to squash ). That was probably due to some stupid mistake that I made earlier when prepping this site for initial launch. It took me a while to trace it back to it’s origin, but now I’m finally able to comment on myself while logged in.
Then, I tweaked the home page to always be /home/ instead of / for more clarity. Whenever someone tries to access / on this site, he or she is silently redirected to /home/ to reflect that in their browser.

And finally, to the outside world probably the most visible change, the home page now lists the three most recent posts from my blog.