xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Pfeeeuw. I can’t wait until 24 returns. Not long folks – we’re almost there! In the mean time enjoy:

Surely eBooks are discussed controversially in the media. On the one side you have the publishers and the authors who are afraid of losing their market. Then of course you have the papers which turnover is declining as time progresses. Nevertheless digital versions of books, papers and magazines are more and more demanded by the public. With new technology such as the Kindle by Amazon and other high-tech gadgets it is also becoming very easy to consume these digitals.

But then you want more. And there it stops. Where to get your new eBook fix? There are a lot of different sites out there. Most of them feature PDA documents optimized for hand helds. With the enforcing of the market you can easily miss good sources.

With friends of mine I started a portal which collects links to interesting offerings on the net. We already started to gather links to commercial and non-profit organizations. We’re just started a few days back and have almost 100 links together. Have a look for yourself on ebook-spot.de!

I just recieved this from a colleague of mine. Hilarious:

Guts or balls – There is a medical distinction.

We’ve all heard about people having guts or balls, but do you really know the difference between them?

In an effort to keep you informed, the definitions are listed below:

GUTS – Is arriving home late after a night out with the guys, being met by your wife with a broom, and having the guts to ask: ‘ Are you still cleaning, or are you flying somewhere?’

BALLS – Is coming home late after a night out with the guys, smelling of perfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife’s butt and saying ‘You’re next, Chubby.’

I hope this clears up any confusion on the definitions.

Medically speaking there is no difference in the outcome.

Both result in death.

Due to my relocation to Switzerland during the last few weeks I didn’t have internet and missed of course the impacts of the Pirate Bay closure. Now with internet back in place I realized that it really had impacted the availability of downloads.

I even started to panic a bit but then I realized that 90% of the torrents were still active but on an other tracker. So with simply removing the Pirate Bay tracker and adding the OpenBitTorrent tracker everything works like a charm again. Really helpful for changing the torrents is TorrentEditor.

Boah. I can’t read it anymore. Starting 1st September the EU prohibited certain light bulbs from sale. Of course all the nature protecting parties are very happy because it safes a lot of power and it is very very very helpful for nature.

Sure. But has anyone of those nature-loving people ever used an energy-saving light bulb and realized that they are really crappy? And did they now that all but one of the available energy-saving light bulbs contain mercury which is quite harmful to the environment? Certainly not.

Still. I mean it is good to have this regulation in the end as it will save the power of four nuclear reactors at the end. But at which costs. I will be very unhappy if the light in my room is not livingly and I don’t want to turn on the light anymore. Of course the nature-guys will say now, you can buy cool led stuff. I have to admit those lights are quite cool as day-driving light in my future car but not in my living room where I want to have a romantic dinner with my girlfriend.

I really hope that the pressure on the vendors will be very high so they create usefull replacements for the legecy light bulb.

My dear old friend and companion. You stayed with me for nearly a year until a terrible accident made an end to our intense relationship. I’ll never forget the hours we spent together on the road. Good by Lucinda.

Okay you might think there was a raid at some strange gang called PSU. You could not be more wrong . I actually fixed my strange RAID problems this weekend by replacing the PSU with a really good one. I chose the Thermal Take Toughpower XT 750. It comes with cable management, a fancy 14cm silent fan and enough power.

The last few days I was desperate to fix my server. A drive was crashed and I ordered new ones to replace the “broken” one but it didn’t work. All new drives were failing too. In my desperation I ended up bugging the RAID vendor but they needed more information during the weekend and that was simply not fast enough for me.

Last friday I decided to replace the crappy old PSU with a fancy new one. And it did good. No more drives failing, due to the nice fan the temperature of the disks kept on falling compared to before. Overall a good result. Finally I can access my precious data again

I just found this strolling through the internet. It seems to reporter started to collect obituaries which are a bit unusual. Now they published a book about them. A collection of the best you can find on Welt Online.

It’s always the same. Your machine/workstation/server is running endlessly without problems. Then when you move and stupidly decide to store your backup drive with all the other stuff at a friends place a hard disk fails and you’re without hope.

Of course exactly this scenario happened to me just last week. So I ordered two new drives for my RAID and if nothing goes wrong can upgrade the overall capacity to 4.6 or even 5.5 TB. And that at home with consumer hardware. I love this world.

Still first I’ve to fix the RAID which is curiously crashing every time one drive fails. But I won’t give up the hope.

A new one. Too bad I still got no internet at the moment. But I’ll won’t keep it from you. The Arctic Monkeys have a new studio album out. This one is produced by Queens of the Stone Age front Josh Homme. Recorded somewhere in the Californian desert it sounds promising. As mentioned before I can’t listen to it yet but we’ll see to that and then you’ll get it straight