Too bad the vacation is over, but luckily I have taken some pictures. If you’re interested (or really bored), you can see them here.
Orange Hot Spot
The hotel I’m staying at tonight, Ibis Lille Gares, has a wifi hotspot, provided by Orange wifi, who apparently has been installing hotspots all over France during the past months. And since I brought my laptop with the wireless card, that means I can surf the web! If you can read this entry, that means it works…
If you were near a general hotspot, say a train station, you could buy 2h of access within a 24h period for 10 Euros. But if you stay at a hotel, they have a special “Room” rate, which gives you unlimited access between 18:00 and 9:00 the next day. So I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep tonight 
Driving down for Christmas
Today we’re Driving Down for Christmas (as the song goes); to be exact: to Lille today, and Caen tomorrow. Then we plan to make a Daytrip to Cherbourg, known for the movie Parapluies de Cherbourg. It should be nice to spend Christmas in France, with a nicer Christmas atmosphere than in Holland.
Playing Nemo
Got a copy of Finding Nemo today (Thanks, J.!), in AVI format. The two machines running M$ Windows (98 and XP Pro) couldn’t play it, because the proper codec was missing. And trying to download it automatically failed. Typical…
But the two Linux distributions Movix and Knoppix played the movie without any problems. Movix is based on MPlayer, while Knoppix uses Xine. The sound is great, too.
Anyway, I haven’t finished watching the movie, because I like to keep it for the Christmas holidays which start Wednesday the 24th, but the first few minutes look promising. Of course, the images are perfect, as you can expect from something produced by Pixar. (although Dreamworks did a great job, too, with Shrek and Antz).
BTW, I’m typing this while running Knoppix 3.3, which contains a copy of Mozilla 1.4.
Und ich Suse
…Suse Suse Suse im Sauseschritt
(variation on this number 1 song in the 80s)
I got the new SuSE Linux 9.0, with a long detour. My Canadian cousin gave me an Amazon gift voucher for my B-day, then I ordered it from Amazon.UK; a Dutch friend who now lives in Guildford brought it to Delft, and a week(end) later, I got it from there, brought it to Leiden and installed it on my laptop today. Installation was a piece of cake, as we are used to with SuSE.
The only problem (for me) when installing Linuces on laptops is that the special (software-driven) keys to adjust the screen brightness are not supported. I’ve tried two options:
- a toshiba kernel module which should enable Toshiba-specific functions
- an external called toshkeyd (- daemon) I found somewhere.
Unfortunately, none of these packages work on my machine, although I must admit I tried them only briefly, not thoroughly.
Otherwise, this new version of the distribution is great. They kernel it comes with (2.4.21) has also fixed the infamous ‘repeated key’ problem.
A new mobile
Having had my mobile phone for 3 years, and my prepaid SIM card for 4 years, I felt it was time a change, for two reasons:
1 – the prepaid SIM card has always been expensive for calling (35 cents / min), but since I never used the phone much, it was okay.
2 – as I’m staying at my parents house a lot these days, and they have some friends who sometimes like telling very long stories, I wanted to have a phone line of my own.
Unfortunately, KPN telecom, the former state monopolist, doesn’t seem to do second (analog) phone lines anymore…
