Make Fritzbox routers reconnect

If you're using a FritzBox-Router and have UPnP enabled there's a Firefox-Plugin Fox!Box that adds a reconnect option to the rightclick-menu.

Downloading all jars from a jnlp file

$ grep "jar href" Repository.jnlp | awk '{print $2}' | cut -c 7- | awk '{printf "\"http://server:port/rep/%s\n", $1}' | xargs wget

can surely be done using only awk or a text editor...

HTML 5 will save us all

Apparently HTML 5 has some new input element types for date, time, ranges, email-adresses, coordinates from images and other wild stuff. This might put an end to all the javascript-datepickers and some other crutches. Need a colorpicker? <input type="Color">. Done. (Of course Internal Exploder will submit the colorcode as CYMK)

You fight like a cow

Yay! Telltale is putting out 5 episodes of a new Monkey Island game! The first one is scheduled to appear on Jun 7. Now that's change we can believe in.

Creative X-Fi drivers finally out (again)

I've just set up Gentoo on my desktop computer just to find that my super-advanced Creative X-Fi soundcard would just not work. The story seems quite strange. Once upon a time Creative open-sourced the driver but then abandoned it. One can still find tutorials on how to get that artifact running. However I could not get it compiled against my linux-2.6.28-gentoo-r5 kernel.

So I've set a google alert on X-Fi and linux and went to look for a trusty AC97-card...

Well... Takashi Iwai saved the day. See his post on the alsa list.
The next Kernel might very well contain the snd_ctxfi-module :)

The story ends happy. If you want to use the thing now here's what needs to be done:

• get the tarball alsa-driver-unstable linked in Takashi's post
• get a recent kernel, I had to unmask linux-2.6.29-gentoo-r4 to get it compiled. Enable sound support but do not include alsa or oss
  
• (re-compile nvidia-modules *grrrrr*)
• untar alsa-driver-unstable and consult INSTALL in the folder, in short:

• ./configure --with-isapnp=no --with-oss=no --with-cards=ctxfi
  
• make
• make install
• ./snddevices (inserts /dev/dsp - make sure your user is in the audio-group)