2007

Thu, Dec 20

<19:12 EEST> Last night's viewing of Emir Kusturica's Underground exemplifies a nice feature of the town library's DVD collection. Most of the films there that catch my interest are not quite classics, not quite mainstream, but not very quirky either. It's a good thing they don't have much of the bleeding edge Hollywood shite, it helps keep you civilized (in the meaning of sivistys/Bildung that English unfortunately lacks).

A particular attraction of Underground to me was the kind of music, and the way in which it was used. Mostly it was a rather Dogmatic setting with a brass band playing as a part of the scene. Background music was mostly restricted to the interluding documentary scenes. Having those scenes gives a hint of an enormous, historical movie, there are so many themes interwoven in this piece of comedic drama.

School is pretty much finished for the year. This week I did a teaching gig at the local polytechnic, while struggling with a feverless coughing flu that's lasted almost two weeks now. The condition turned out especially annoying last night, as I watched a monologue by Juha Hurme at Vakiopaine.

Today's gadgetry involves a plain old telephone handset I bought second hand, connected into my Wippies Homebox for VoIP. Works fine after rebooting the box.

Thu, Dec 13

<14:25 EEST> Yesterday I joined the wireless hippies. It had caught my interest in the summer, but until recently the box was limited to a NATted connection that didn't suit my purposes. The new beta firmware allows bridging, to every daemon's delight.

<14:47 EEST> To clarify, I got the actual Homebox yesterday. It's running fine, as long as propped up a little to ensure cooling. The overheating problem is often repeated in the forum so there's probably not much else I could do, except wait for the new sleek black version :-P

Actually the box is not terribly useful for me as such. I'm mainly interested in hacking myself a light server, and my currently unused Linksys WAG354G is a potential victim while the Wippies box is under the 12-month service contract.

As for studies, the holiday season is starting to set in, with most of the urgent work completed. Last week in particular was dedicated to festivities, including but not limited to the JYT preXmas party.