Slashdot today had a cool entry on real walking in virtual reality.  Looks like an important component of the upcoming holodeck I’ll have in the basement of the house we might buy one day… they had hidden a video on the site (http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/):

http://www.cyberwalk-project.org/img/Media/CyberCarpet.mpg

More videos of the thing available here (warning site in Germlish):

http://www.amm.mw.tum.de/index.php?id=250

It’s just a shame it’s so big…

Apparently not much…

10 Writing code to pay for beer and unhealthy food

15 Eating unhealthy food and drinking beer

20 Going to the gym to get rid of the beer belly

30 sleep

40 GOTO 10 (more…)

Got a bit inspired by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/w00kie/sets/180637/

So I had to have a go myself, since it is Friday at work and stuff, unfortunately Torstein ruined the whole picture.

So the Del Sol is for sale, it’s a bit sad, but it’s time for something newer and bigger. It runs well and is great here in the city center, no parking slot too small

If you are interested, go to http://finn.no/finn/car/object?finnkode=11236835 and have a look.

We just bought some surround sound for our living room, so I wanted to get surround sound out of my Amilo laptop - digitally. My motivation was to play avi (XviD/DivX) files with AC3 sound. Ofcourse that took about a day of hard work, so to spare other people from the trouble, here is my recipe for success:

1. The S/PDIF output is hidden inside the 3.5 headphone port. It is optical, get one of these: http://www.biltema.no/products/product.asp?iSecId=535&iItemId=89253  and a toslink cable or one of these:
http://www.elfa.se/elfa-bin/dyndok.pl?dok=9375.htm, or get one of those I got (from Siba), which is either in both ends (but they break VERY easily!)

2. Open your sound card configuration, on my Amilo laptop, that is a blue icon with some sound waves on in in the taskbar. In the S/PDIF-out tab, select  ”Output digital only” to enable optical S/PDIF output.

3.  Install AC3Filter from here: http://ac3filter.net/ and the other video codecs you need to play the file.

4. Get Windows Media Player (from M$), I could not make it work in any other player, not even Media Player Classic, my favourite, for some reason.

5. Now onto the part that took me all evening - Open up the AC3Filter codec’s configuration menu, select your speaker configuration under “Output Format”, and check the “S/PDIF” checkbox. Then under the ”System” tab, choose ”Use Wave Out by default“. I got no idea why, got it from a forum somewhere… Maybe someone can explain this to me?

6. Open the file in Windows Media Player, and you should have digital surround output,  given that the video file
you open have multiple channels wrapped in AC3. Note that it is quite common with 2-channel AC3 audio on avi-files,
and that is not what you want.

Did it with Lasse’s plain powerball as mine makes too much noise for the Windows Mobile department across the hall. Check out my Akis-face! So I won the Symbian dept 12K RPM Powerball challenge… the 13K challenge is on, LASSE!

I had never heard about the band Clutch before when I bought a ticket to their concert in Gothenburg. Then I downloaded a few MP3s (legally ofcourse) and listened to them. They were a bit boring I thought. Anyway, last weekend I went there with 16 other guys, and it was great!

We departed Oslo in one van with 7 guys in it. I had to drive, because I was drinking the least the day before.

U see, Clutch had a concert in Oslo Friday, then in Gothenburg Saturday. In Moss, we met up with 10 more guys who took the ferry over from Horten.

I said to the other guys I would only drive to Moss. Suddenly I was driving to Gothenburgh and the rest of the bus had been drinking. Wohoo!

We arrived in Gothenburg after 10 pee-stops. Luckily the driver of the other van, Police-Roger had a navigation system, so we took the shortest route* to the hotel.

 We rushed to pickup the tickets, had a few beers and eventually went to the concert. And it was great! Clutch is one of the bands I don’t think I’ll buy their album, but I would definately go to a concert with them again if I can.

Unfortunately, 3 of the party did not make it past the bouncers at the concert door, if it was due too too high alcohol consumption or the bouncers being wankers, I don’t know. My guess 40/60.

The next day, we left the upset hotel management, picked up some Swedish meat at the border and made it back to Norway, all in one piece, except maybe for one, who was puking out the window of the other mini-van all the way to Norway.

For more photos, see under posted items on my Facebook profile

*not really…

For a while I’ve been receiving annoying Facebook spam which I’ve flagged as spam so it silently disappeared into M2’s spam filter.

Saturday I spent the whole day reading books and doing Chinese homework in the St Hanshaugen park. As the weather was great, it got more and more crowded, and it was impossible not to hear what people was talking about … FACEBOOK. Damn nerds.. I was talking about the weather, hot dogs and beer with Tommy.

In the back of my mind together with images of viagra and cialis offers, I saw my Facebook spam mails. So when I got home, I logged onto Facebook, and found out the whole world was there! How did that happen without me noticing? I work for Opera for fuck sake!

So now, two days later I got 15 friends and a profile picture and wonder what the hell am I doing. It’s scary the amount of info Facebook sits on… who knows who and how… and anyway it’s quite cool since there’s so many people on there, so if you know me, look me up - if you can spell my full name

So, the gallery is back up and the pictures on the blog are back. The old entries in the eZ publish blog are not available yet, but I will try and make them available asap with comments disabled in some kind of read-only form

So quick catchup…

Rally Norway was cool:

Bought a Wii.

Kororinpa rocks!

Started learning chinese every Thursday

Oh… and global warming became reality, so now I must sell my car and buy an environmental friendly one…

I am currently updating my blog. It has moved from being hosted at HIBU to being hosted at a dedicated server driven by Mr Espen Eklosoft. The old blog entries will be locked and available at www.old.magne.info. It is currently unavailable thanks to eZ publish not supporting PHP 5. I hope this can be worked around shortly.

Also the pictures are offline at the moment, I am working on getting them back up, but there are symlinks for each picture, and after moving servers, all these symlinks are wrong. I will try and make some perl script to fix this…

in the meantime, visit www.spitzy.net and mix some cocktails