Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 2)

So, finally I got some spare time to write the rest of the Ireland series and the photos are all uploaded now, too.
The Historical Walking Tour started at the front of Trinity College. After walking through the front gates we had a look at the wonderful courtyard and the

A part of the Trinity College courtyard*

He told us some interesting stuff about the college's history, but I can't remember anymore, too bad!
Here is some nice photo of the Library Square:

Libary Square*

Trinity College had a lot of famous students, like Oscar Wilde, and also is - from what I understood - much involved in the Irish history and the history of dublin. For more details, have a look at Wikipedia.
Walking back to the front gate, you can find the Irish Houses of Parliament, which now inherits the Bank of Ireland.

Ireland day 1: Dublin (part 1)

So here I am now, in Dublin.
Flight was relatively relaxed, only few turbolences. I was a bit nervous before departure that I have forgotten something important so I would be taken off the plane in the last minutes, but everything went fine.
Isa recommended the three days ticket by DublinBus, the local public transport company, because I'll move to her tomorrow. I had some issues with the ticket's RFID chip, it was damaged so it could not be read. Luckily the bus from the airport(line 747) has its first stop at O'Connell Street, directly on the opposite side of Dublinbus headquarters and exchange was quite easily.
You have the possibility to get a "Freedom of Dublin" ticket for 24 € for adults and 13 or 14 euros for Students. With that ticket you can go on the dublinbus sightseeing and normal bus lines and drop off at any place you like. However, all desired places can also be reached by foot easily, so in my eyes you should think about it twice. As the ticket is valid for 3 days like mine (I paid 13.50 €  without the sightseeing feature) it is only worth if you either want sightseeing by bus or go to the outer regions.
After arrival I went to "The Times Hostel", which is a footstep away from Trinity College. On my way there I passed the O'Connel Bridge, which is wider than it is large.

Holidays in Ireland

Readings free time at University Dortmund is nearly over, it ends on 10th of October, but I still had to take some of the holidays from work, so I decided to spend part of the time into a one-week-trip to Dublin and Leixlip, a small town in County Kildare, Ireland.

Let me mention I never made such a trip before. Of course I've been traveling by plane a few times, but always with friends or family. Now I'm flying alone the first time, to a country I rarely know except from the news or wikipedia. I'm not scared, in contrary! I'm exptremly curious what I will experience and a bit nervous, to be honest.
So, I'll take the plane from Frankfurt Hahn Airport here in Germany to Dublin at 29th September and come back on 5th October. I'll stay one day at a hostel somewhere there,for approx. 15-20 € a night. I only once slept in a hostel before (in Munich) and I guess this will be interesting ;)

From Thursday on Isa, an Au-pair and good friend which I know from my old school, invited me to spend the rest of the days at her. She is a really kind, funny and lovely person(you know, that kind you can phone with five or more hours at a time and never get enough) so I'm very happy that we will finally meet again after 2.5 years :)


I don't really know what exactly will expect me either in Dublin or in Leixlip at Isa, so I'm very curious about all this holiday thing.
From what I guess Isa and me will have a lot of fun, because we have a lot of things in common, so I am very glad we have contact again since a few weeks.
We will see :)

Well a few things I know fore sure: In Leixlip it will be about 10-15°C outside temperature, with wind and rain, Guinness beer(I can't get enough of this wonderful stuff!) and the mysteries of different kinds of whiskey which will reqire some personal research, including an intensive case study...

Hopefully I get the opportunity to post some pictures and experiences omy f trip in here, so hang on!

Cheers,
Tobi

Going AdSense-free

Hello everybody,
some of the best ideas you can get by just cycling.
So while cycling home, I thought about my blog, what to write and about the adverts, too.
When I started blogging, I thought it would be a good idea if people can show they like my blog by clicking one of the adverts. The point is, this did (expectedly) not work out for me and to be honest, I like your personal feedback more than any money.
Plus, I discovered AdSense and Google Friend Connect lets the page load in about 6 seconds and I hate nothing more than slow web pages.
So, to protect your privacy and improving your reading experience I removed all adverts from the page. Now it takes 3 seconds with Firefox and 0.5 with Chromium.
If you love my blog, just feel free to leave me a message or comment, you'd make me very happy by doing so. Nevertheless if you think you cannot be thankful enough, just feel free to have a look at my whishlist on Amazon :)

Hopefully you are now able to really enjoy reading this blog, plus I have a little candy for you: You will not have to wait much longer for the next post, only a couple of days maybe!
So just have a visit here from time to time or directly grab the RSS feed from the right column :)

Upgrading to KDE SC 4.5

Recently KDE SC 4.5 came out and as I always try live on the cutting edge of software, I tried to update it which first ran me into the fact KPackageKit wouldn't update half of the whole KDE.
I found out by some googling(shame this became a verb! Forestling should become one...) that the reason is that the kubuntu-ppa might contain older packages than kubuntu backports, so the solution was to just disable all source which were no kubuntu archives.
For upgrading just add
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu lucid main
into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubuntu-backports-ppa using your favourite editor or KPackageKit and run sudo update apt-get update (KPackageKit does that for you automatically).

If you are lucky you just have to run
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
If this does not work for you, just try alternating those two, eventually with the -f parameter until everything is installed and then reboot.

I discovered today that the ibus package wasn't installed, too so I installed it and run ibus-setup. We will see what that brings :)
KDE SC 4.5 runs a bit smoother, but sometimes it consumes peaks of 20% of the 1.8 GHz CPU of my T42p (which is still a good laptop :) ).
Have fun!

On a short word: Printing using an LPT port over network

Recently I damaged the JetDirect card of my HP LaserJet 4050, because I accidentally drawed the network cable in the wrong direction, so the plastic cap an the card holding the cap broke off.
As a new card costs about 20-30 Euro, which I as a poor student simply do not have, I had to solve the problem otherwise. I discovered that my desktop computer doesn't have a LPT port anymore, but the laptop does. So I alwas printed using that laptop.
Now I thought, why don't access the printer via network, as the laptop is running all the time? So, to do it as easy as possible I simply installed samba, uncommented some lines in /etc/samba/smb.conf, hacked some 'restart smbd' in the terminal (the Samba start script was switched to upstart) and just selected the now shared printer on my desktop pc (which runs on Win 7 again -.-).
Plus now I can easily exchange files between laptop and desktop pc. Horray!

Upgrading the T42p to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS)

A week or so ago I upgraded my IBM ThinkPad T42p(which is a very good laptop for a (now) very fair price of ~400 Euro on ebay) to Ubuntu Lucid.
Upgrade ran quite easily although the upgrade application had some visual bugs, but everything harmless. I hadn't enough space left on the first try, so it was time to delete some "garbage" applications (a good moment to do so :)). A big minus was that you cannot leave the installation unattended because sometimes windows pop up asking regarding this or that package. Okay in a way this makes sense, but why isn't the installations first simulated? The user could be asked for decisions which are then remembered to go through the upgrade process silently...

Well, after everything was done, I rebooted. I counted from splash screen on and didn't came to 10 until the login screen showed up.

First thing I discovered was that the backlight was dark and if setting to maximum via function keys, it went dark again after a while. Luckily I'm not the only one with this issue. Found a temporary fix on some ubuntu forum and everything is fine again now :) I also removed the PPA version of Firefox and Thunderbird to install the stable ones(much better regarding Firefox - I once had to use Opera for 3 weeks!) and everything is running fine again :)
I even discovered that Rhythmbox is a very good and nice replacement for Wine + Foobar 2000 (which runs nicely but has no "from system to playlist" file drag & drop). One thing it lacks of is silence skipping.
In foobar there is a plugin where pieces of a track are skipped if they are below a volume level (e.g. -48 dB) for a certian time, which is really useful for tinier DJ-ing. You can put a 10 seconds crossfade and a 3 Second silence detection for below said -48 dB and foobar could become a good replacement of a hundred bucks audio software for smaller parties.

Next thing to do is to extend the home partition on LVM, it is running out of space with no chance to save some any more....