Author Archives: hoover

Both Sides the Tweed

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Listening to “cairdeas” Album “Autumn” again today, I came across the tune “both sides the tweed” which caught my interest, so I grabbed the lyrics off the net and put some chords to it. Lovely song about reconciliation of Scotland and England of all countries, if you can believe it!

Thanks to the original web page, “Dick Gaughans Song Archive” for providing the lyrics.

The chords can be a bit off placement wise depending on your browser font rendering, so please adjust accordingly!

Both Sides The Tweed

std tuning, capo 2nd fret
1)
Am                                                                                     C   F

What’s the spring-breathing jasmine and rose?
C                                                           G    Em

What’s the summer with all its gay train

Am                                               C  F
Or the splendour of autumn to those
Am                G                Am

Who’ve bartered their freedom for gain?


CHORUS

Am       F                                    C    Am

Let the love of our land’s sacred rights
C                                  G         Em

To the love of our people succeed
Am                                 F

Let friendship and honour unite
C              G                                     D / Am

And flourish on both sides the Tweed.


2)

No sweetness the senses can cheer
Which corruption and bribery bind
No brightness that sun can e’er clear
For honour’s the sum of the mind


3)

Let virtue distinguish the brave
Place riches in lowest degree
Think them poorest who can be a slave
Them richest who dare to be free

Brabham BT52 Mod update for rFactor released

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Hi folks,

after months of hard work and preparations, I’m happy to be able to announce the immediate availability of the Brabham Masters Series 2010 download pack. You can download the entire file (490MB) here:

http://www.zitterpalme.de/post/rF_lite_and_bt52_season2010_readme_first_please.rar

The update contains 60+ beautiful car liveries from the bygone glory days of all areas of motorsport, an engine sound update, a car model update and much more.

We hope to welcome you soon on our practise server that’s available 24/7 from the lobby (look for “Brabham Masters Series” at Silverstone88).

A few more screenshots are available here:

http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/1983539/1/bt52?h=04a910

The lights are back on…

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After checking the cables, wall sockets and other stuff, the electrician decided it was safe to turn the electricity on again in the ex-water logged house of my mother in law.

Thanks again to the neighbors Müller and Heitholt for letting us suck their electric juice for four days and nights in a row to power the drying fans inside the building, it’s much appreciated.

The house has already become considerably drier ever since Jens turned the heating back on on christmas eve morning: Going from 3 fills of the condensation catchers a day back to one in 24h is a good sign.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

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Wow! Twenty cm of snow over the weekend, the world looks, smells and feels magic. Just came back from a bit of sleighing down the local hillsides with Hannah, great fun! We went to the Schützenhof where we used to to live a couple of years ago, great times….

And the place where we happen to live now, the “Mozartstrasse”, camera was fighting with the low light a bit:

Back to work tomorrow… 😉

3rd Place at Hockenheim!

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To celebrate sending our long-time admin Matthias Vogt into well-deserved retirement from admin duties, we held a fun race at Hockenheim79 in the DRM Porsche 935 Turbo tonight, wich means I’ll be able to add another “real life” trophy to my growing collection of… one 😉

drm_porsche_70

I ran the #70 Dick Barbour racing Porsche in tonight’s event, which back in the day saw Stommelen, Barbour and Paul Newman as its regulars to take a seat in the cockpit.

Out of twelve drivers, yours truly managed to finish 3rd after 35 laps, Matthias came second and “chief überalien” Bert Pitzke ran away with it as usual. Thanks for all your hard work Matthias, and we’re looking forward to seeing you as a  “regular, mortal” driver again soon when the BT52 Masters season kicks off in January!

Linux Mint 8 Helena: How to fix mintupdate

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A while ago, mintupdate stopped working for me, claiming it was unable to grant execute permissions to the non-admin user. Investigating a bit further, I found that my regular user “hoover” had gone missing (for whatever reason) from the “admin” group; this can be fixed by re-adding your regular user to this group.

Simply open a shell and type

sudo usermod -G admin <your_username>

and mintupdate should work again.

Who (and where, oh where) the heck is Santa rF???

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Another net let-down: Googling up and down the net, scouring usenet and countless forums, I’m still unable to find contact details for the elusive rFactor modder that is “Santa rF”, creator of such excellent mods such as “Miniville” (kids racing game addon for rF) and the powerful beast named “Brabham BT-52”.

The fact that RaceSim Central has been down for a while now (again) isn’t exactly helpful, either.

Should anyone know how to get in touch with this ghost of the intertubes, please comment here, as I need to contact him about a skinset for the bt52 mod… thanks!

3. Platz in Donington (Simracers Revival)!

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Nach einer Pole im Quali und der schnellsten Rennrunde nach 60 Runden in Donington konnte mich nur ein böser Grafikbug, der in Runde 17 zuschlug, um meinen 1. Sieg in der Simracers Revival-Liga bringen. Zehn Sekunden fehlten mir am Ende, nachdem mich der “Screen Freeze” über 30 Sekunden gekostet hatte. Danach war die Grafik im Cockpit dann nicht mehr ganz so schön anzugucken:

Donington N64 style following a gfx freeze in rFactor

Das Rennen hat trotzdem irre Spass gemacht und ich bin froh, dass ich die Geschichte zu Ende gebracht habe (einige Runden mit Hannah auf dem N64 hatten mich gut auf die Grafik vorbereitet ;-))

Google Chrome comes of age, on Linux

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The recent google chrome beta release caught my interest because it seems that extensions are now enabled (one had to jump through burning hoops to enable them in earlier beta builds; ok, ’twas only a command line switch, but still …;-))

I installed the latest beta from the Debian beta channel, and after installing a couple of extensions, I find chrome now offers a much better browsing experience than previous Linux builds. In order of usefulness, I installed

  • adthwart (simple adblocker for chrome with more features on the way)
  • gmail checker
  • rss notifier
  • gpdf (converts pdf links in docs to point to google docs and its conversion tool)
  • Wave notifier (ok, not all that useful, but it’s still nice to have it available)

Using these extensions (available from here), I’m ready to give Chrome another try as my primary browser for a while. The speed sure is 2nd to none (esp. in the JavaScript department), and even Flash based movie playback works better than in my standard Ubuntu Firefox setup.

Extracting the contents (files) from a Debian package

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Today I was forced to manually extract the contents of a debian package which could not be installed the “normal” way using dpkg due to broken dependencies.

Afer some googling, I found the following command line on Vijay’s blog:

dpkg-deb -x {deb-package name} /var/tmp

which extacts the files from “deb-package-name” to a dir of my choosing to /var/tmp.

From there, I could install them by tar pipe (after checking the directory contents first of course, as to not overwrite anything important using

cd /var/tmp/dir; tar -cvpf - . | tar -C / -xpf -

I hope this may help someone stuck in the same hole in the future. Thanks to Vijay for the original posting!

Django Python Web Framework revisited: Wow, just wow!

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A while ago, I played around with Django and liked it so much I created a new admin interface for rF Rank (a simracing ranking site) to ease the task of adding and editing new tracks and cars for rFactor.

Yesterday I finally got around to listen to the FLOSS weekly podcast episode featuring the Django guys, and decided to try a current subversion build of their web framework. To put it mildly, I was blown away. Working through the tutorial took all of 30 minutes, and there’s so many new features in the automated admin site that Django creates as in interface I think it’s high time to give this great project a really long, hard look.

Ironically I’m typing this in a php-based blogging system, who knows, I may develop my own Django based site in a while once I’ve hit the limits with WordPress 8-P

After all, if it’s good enough for Google, it’s good enough for us, right?

“Kirkland” Guitars

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Hannah and I went to a small music store called “Marimba” in Schildesche near Bielefeld today, and in the guitar corner I was pointed out a guitar from the maker “Kirkland” by another customer. Giving the folk instrument a short “test drive” I was amazed how much sound it produced for a relatively moderate price of 290€, definitely a guitar brand to keep an eye or two on.

Sadly, this model had no pickup (which would add another 140€ or so to the bill), but it really had a very nice, full-bodied sound.