The Daily Madman

Now there are some more information about EU:s new proposal about to make tobacco with certain flavors illegal, something which alot of people thought was a total prohibition to snuff. According to John Dalli (EU:s commission for e.g. health) the proposal is about to do what it says, ban certain flavors (e.g. menthol, cocoa and licorice). And that would apply to ANY kind of tobacco, not only snuff.

The purpose with this should pretty obvious, and a good way of attacking a cause for health problems. The final goal is that people wont use tobacco at all, but at the same time it’s impossible to just make it illegal from one day to another. Thus, they start to ban “initial products”, i.e. tobacco products which are easier for someone who is not used to tobacco to use. Young people for example. After all, that’s when people usually starts to use tobacco, I suppose it’s very unusual that one start using it after they turned 30.

It’s easy to understand that the tobacco companies doesn’t like this proposal at all, because it makes it harder for them to gain new customers. “To bad…” .

It’s somewhat harder to understand why some of our more prominent politicians are just as negative about it. Our Prime Minister for example, says that Sweden will do whatever it takes to keep the snuff companies, and the he also will try to make it possible for us to sell it abroad. To use a slight understatement, he probably have at least one million more important tasks…

I have spent a considerable amount of time, thinking about how to best fit a speaker into my bathroom. After all, I never sing as good as when I take a shower, and it would probably be even more fun if I had some music to sing to. But the space is pretty limited, espacially when I don’t want to drill any new holes tiles for a wall-mounted shelf. There are actually only one free area, between one of the walls and the washing machine. This area is approximately 15*38 cm.

Have been looking for a shelf which could fit there for a long time, without any success. Shelves doesn’t seem to be made with those measures. Last week, when I visited Ikea for a few other things, I watched carefully for anything which could work as a shelf. When I almost had given up, I found the cupboard inset “Variera”. Two bigs ones and two smaller looked like a perfect combination. You wait and see… But first, I want to show some (if you ask me) pretty good cable installations (For me, Ikea automatically redirects to swedish, please tell if it doesn’t redirect to your language!)

Objects whichs isn’t heavy enough to stand steady have to be attached to the foundation in some way. Here I used Velcro tape to attach the multiple socket to the shelf:

Then I bundled the main for the subwoofer. Please notice the cableway on the outside of the subwoofer…

Speaking about cableways, I use them alot, so here is a picture of how one look. The back of it is covered by some sticky strip, so you can just puch to where it should be fitted.

Used a couple of this at the back of the shelf to run the cable from the subwoofer to the satellite. For me, it was easiest to open the cable ways before attaching them to the shelf, otherwise you might accidently remove them when opening them.

The satellite where it should be, and the cableways closed:

And since I added this multiple socket, I thought I could have my electric razor at this shelf as well. Used to have it on the floor of my living room, hidden behind a curtain. I attached the charger with velcro tape (just as with the multiple socket) and added cableways for the main.

Finished! Just put the shelf to the wall, and add other necessyties:

Again, really satisfied with this Feel free to try it on your own!

120831: At least someone seemed to think that this was a good project!

I kind of attacked Chris Cornell a few weeks ago. During an interview with Pulse of radio, I thought he said a lot of pretty stupid things. Still think so, but the world isn’t just black and white. When Todd Martens from LA Times made an interview with him recently. Chris had a very good statement which I thought could be worth to mention:

“In terms of giving away the song for free, Cornell said the Web has overall had a positive effect on the music business. For one, less money is wasted.

People have had to figure out how to go back into their garages and make a record without having to spend a half of a million dollars,” Cornell said. “That was never necessary, anyway, and everyone is figuring that out now. It’s similar to shooting a video. The last big-budget video I did was for $1 million, and that was in Audioslave. It didn’t look like it needed to cost that much.”

Reading such things certainly make you think that the record companies bitching about how hard it is to make profitable business with the internet around is kind of hard to take seriously. I mean, it seems like there might be a few things which can be made more efficient, to use a slight understatement… There can’t be anyone who really think that Audioslave would have sold less albums if that certain video costed $0.5 million dollars instead?

Anyway, on the other hand, Chris might still consider about his aversion against using modern equipment (like a smartphone) when going back into the garage. Why should it be worse to use an iPhone instead of a traditional 4-track taperecorder? (Check my old post again).

And, one should of course never make to much of what you can read that someone said in an interview. I guess there are very few people out there, including myself of course, who certainly doesn’t speak without making any strange sayings sometimes.

Used a couple of hours this weekend to configure a new (well, a pretty old and used) HTPC. Don’t run a lot of applications, a an 6-7 year old laptop with Windows XP. Use it mostly to watch movies and for that purpose, VLC is my number one choice. There are probably alot of players which have much nicer looking GUI, but VLC are just so good and stable that I wouldn’t consider anything else.

Except from VLC, Spotify is installed. And Ultrastar. To those of you who never heard about it, it’s a (completly free) PC version of Sony’s very popular game Singstar. Ultrastar is available for Windows, Linux and Mac. I haven’t played the original Singstar for a while, but I think you would have a hard time to distinguish between that and Ultrastar if you didn’t know which one you where playing. And at the top of that, it’s possible to connect the original Singstar microphones to your PC, via the USB connector.

Anyway, I’ve installed Ultrastar on a couple of computers during the year, and never had any problems at all. Download, install, add songs and start to play. But not this time… When I tried to start Ultrastar I got the following error message:

“the application failed to initialize properly (0xc0150002)”

I don’t have to tell about all the smart and not so smart things I did while trying to solve this. It took a while… But finally I actually manage to figure out how to solve it. I downloaded Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package (x86) and installed.

After that everything worked like a charm.

Please let me know if you had the same problem, and this didn’t help!