Peter's Japan blog

As part of a contest on Danny Choo's website to post THE picture of your otaku room, I'm writing this post with extra photos to go with it. (my room isn't as otaku as many others, but it's just fun to have everybody participate!)
The following picture is the one that I posted in the member news on the site. (click for original pic) It's a 3-piece as my stuff is located in several places in my room and I can't take a 360 degree picture, and even if I could, it wouldn't be practical.

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This weekend I'll be going to CeBIT 2009 in Hannover with a friend who invited me.
CeBIT is the biggest technology and computer fair in Europe. This year it is held from March 3-8. I will be going on the 7th and 8th in the weekend. Hope to take a lot of pictures (if it's allowed, but I think it is ;p). It's the first time I'm going and to see what it is actually like. I have heard that it's actually not possible to see everything in 2 days as it is that big.
Will keep little updates here and post some pictures afterwards.

It's been about one month that since I bought my new laptop: a 15" Apple MacBook Pro. And so far, I'm loving it.

Just before I went on my 3-week week to America, the screen of my old laptop started to act weird. The screen went black after a minute, and turning it off and on by going into standby and on again, helped to get the screen back on. But during the trip, it started to get worse and worse, it took longer and longer to keep the screen on for a long time. After the trip it become the worst, screen went black after a fraction of a second, while turning it on and off 20 times. So I hooked it up to an external monitor, but then it's not really a portable computer anymore, is it.

So it was time for a new laptop, I was going to buy a new one at the end of the year, but it become sooner than expected. Got the cheapest model, as I wasn't prepared for, but I didn't really need a 17" screen, and the difference of the two 15" models was not that important to me.
Almost got 90% of my software that I used on Windows for Mac now, and I still haven't installed Windows yet ;p. But I guess I'll have to it some time, as the development software we use at work is only available for Windows. Got Mono for C# programming, so that's covered. Eclipse for php programming.
There are just 2 programs I really miss: Total Commander and a decent music player like foobar2000.
I'm an avid (and fast) user of Total Commander, and I can't find a good alternative. (I'm that crazy that I'm writing my own alternative in Mono C# ^^ But it's a slow process...)
Same goes for a decent song player with multiple playlists. The only one that comes close is Cog, which only have 1 playlist but gives me about the same feel as foobar2000.

Since my old mail server here at home started to get short on disk space and wanted a more quiet one to put in my room, I got hold of a new one. The new one is a Pentium 3 450MHz, while the old one was a Dual Pentium 2 @ 233MHz each. The new one has a passive cooling which makes it very quiet. Put the new Fedora 8 on it and it works fine. Setting up Courrier IMAP was less pain than the previous time. It's now ready to be put into the closet, but I'm gonna put in more hard disk space in the future though to use it as a file server as well.

It just happens to be this week that my old trusty SMC router practically died on me. Need to reboot it everyday or the WAN connection drops at the end of the day. So I installed a temporary router that I still had lying around so everything is okay, that when I'm going to Japan in 10 days, that I can check my email on my server.

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