Johannes Heesters, an entertainer born in Amersfoort, who felt unwell just a few weeks ago, died on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2012, aged 108.
Johannes Heesters passed away
Google Music Integration into Ubuntu
About a month ago I posted about Google Music cloud music storage service opening for public (which is still officially available in the US only).
Uploading 130 GB of music to the cloud has completed in about four days, so now I can enjoy the whole collection online from anywhere—although with some shortcomings (which are perhaps to be eliminated once the service goes out of the beta).
Johannes Heesters
Singer and actor Johannes Heesters, who was born in Amersfoort, is again in local news.
He turns 108 on the coming Monday, December 5, which he wanted to celebrate by singing operetta. However about a week ago he got fever and felt unwell, so he is in the hospital now. His 80 year old daughter Wiesje Herold commented: “In his 108 Jopie is no longer the youngest. But he is a jack.”
Bus conductors
The outcome of a poll just held on BBC says that 81% of the British would be willing to pay 25% more for the ticket, if they could see conductors in buses again.
Amersfog
An ear for music
And—here we go: at last long-suffering long-awaited Google Music went public—the thing I’ve been eagerly waiting for so long! I’d be happy to send my 130 GB of music up in the cloud. I perfectly fit into the free limit of twenty thousand files.
In Vino Veritas
One of the things that make me wonder is comparison of prices for alcohol in Holland and Russia, and especially their relationship with the quality.
Alex Exler considers 1000 rubles (€ 25) for a bottle of decent wine in Moscow is a good deal. Here in Holland you would usually buy a collection item for this price, and definitely not Chateau Tour 2006. Even taking into account local alcohol prices are substantially higher than, say, in Germany.
Storm Alert
Штормовое предупреждение (Russian for Storm Alert) is a prelude to Ураган (“Hurricane”). This track was composed and recorded by Igor Abakumov and me back in 2002–2003.
Ubuntu/GNOME 3 random wallpaper script
This bash script picks up a random image file (.jpg, .jpeg or .png) from the predefined directory and sets it as wallpaper.
The previous version of the script worked fine with GNOME 2 and Ubuntu 11.04 (and earlier), but after GConf backend was changed to dconf in GNOME 3, it stopped working.
Minority report
In the groaning and moaning on Steve Jobs’ passing minority opinions coming from the dissentients get eminent.
Ryan Tate wrote a lengthy article What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs for Gawker. Its primary message is:
iMac: Mac OS X Lion + Ubuntu
Upgrading Mac OS X to Lion
A while ago I made up my mind to upgrade my Apple iMac 27" from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to 10.7 Lion. Not that I’ve been actively using it, but did it rather out of curiosity: I heard many positive reactions about it.
My main system on this machine has always been Ubuntu.
In theory, upgrading should not be a big pain. All you need is to buy Mac OS X Lion in Apple’s AppStore:
iSad
What this man has done in his not-so-long lifetime has undoubtedly changed the world for better.