On the edge of real and Cyberspace there is one place you can go. The Knightcast media channel. Featuring a weekly podcast "The Knightcast" and a web Tv show "KW-Tv" Both deal with the everyday adventures of a modern day technofile, filled with tips, tricks, manuals and how-to's on how to tune technology into your everyday life and let tech work for you. All this and more using Windows, Linux, and Mac computers, Web2.0 sites, services and more to upgrade from geek to cyber-citizen. Real Technology for Real life.
Ok , by now the podcast should have been up, but hardcore Knightcast fans have to be a little more patient. I’ve been down and out with a nice bronchitis last week. So this weekend i’ll be sure to have a new episode up. BUT ! More important things have also been on the agenda. It is with great pride and joy that we unveil one of our secret projects we have been working on for the last few months. A secret project that required a lot of preparation and also .. a little bit of cloak and dagger secrecy. So time to pull back the curtain and unveil .... Our marriage !
Cloak and Dagger
Yep , On July 8th Nyana and me will cease to be engaged and will seal our vowels in the town Hall of Hasselt. Together with a select crowd of friends and family we’ll be up and about at the crack of dawn to start of the big day. We will be keeping you posted , and in true Knightwise.com tradition there will be a rather large digital coverage of the event. So hang on for video material, Digital photos and a sound-seeing tour (might even do a special podcast of the event). Instead of a wedding photographer we are proud to announce that we have a wedding cartoonist. Len from Jawboneradio.com provided us with this official wedding cartoon for which we are eternally grateful. Check out his work on www.jawboneradio.com . As we are off to shop for some wedding - outfit somewhere I leave you with this great cartoon :) See you soon !
This week marked the final episode of the Spacemusic.nl podcast. A show I loved and enjoyed .. Its time to step up and salute its creator.
Beaming out to eternity.
Time rushes by in an ever fasting moving world. We are always busy , always have so much to do , so much stress. As the technological progress beats its ever faster sounding drum, its sometimes hard to keep up. Yet amid this valley of fast talking people, of series of events that dance through the hurricane of progress... there is a eerie silent vortex. As I slam my buds deeper into my ears to drown out the savage society I live in.. My hand reaches out for my Ipod and I breathe in deeply before pressing the button.And then it comes. Like a wonderful ocean of peace that silently scatters the seconds into a blissful eternity. Sounds and chill-out atmospheres shatter my worries and as I peer into the remains of reality ... the world slows down. Like tele-porting yourself from the heart of Beijing to a remote iceberg near patagonia .. Reality , stress , rush .. it just stops. A few seconds later I hear the sound of his voice. A voice that is warm, soothing and wonderfully at ease in this ever racing world. A voice that was strange at first , then became familiar .. and that has become the voice of one of my friends. As his carefully selected music flows through my reality the world is sugar coated with this beautiful soundtrack. And somehow my deepest thoughts and emotions greet the light of day after a dark and raging storm.As i toss pebbles into the ocean of my own consciousness , I think back to the very first time I heard this voice. Somewhere in October 2004. As music flowed around me and wrenched me from the grip of everyday life.. The voice spoke about walking through the snow. As I heard the crunching ice beneath his feet I could imagine i was there. Amid a hectic day in my life , he offered me an opportunity to step out into the virgin snow.
The first episode.
Ever since that episode, I have been hooked, addicted, in need of my next fix. Countless times his music, his voice and I chased through busy traffic, dark nights on the freeway, dull tasks at the office. But thanx to the protective chill-out screen , nothing could touch me.. Wherever I was , I chilled out and embraced the eternity between 2 seconds to contemplate what where my deepest thoughts.Or on day-trips, that me and my fiance took in the Belgian ardennes. Spacemusic would be playing as we floated through reality. Between forests, highways, slumbering towns .. The music covered it with .. .Magic. On these long drives we hardly spoke. We learned what it was to be silent , to contemplate .. to enjoy. It didn’t matter where we went.. As long as we had plenty of time to listen to TC’s tunes and appreciate the magic of the world around us.
The honor and the privilege.
I have the honor and the privilege to know the man behind the magic, I have the greater honor of calling him my friend. So today I stand between feelings , just like his music perches me on the edge of realities. I’m happy because I have faith in what the future brings. Faith in the fact that Tc’s creativity will evolve into something different.. that it will move onto greater things. But also I find sadness in the part that there will be no more trips to neverneverland, no more emergency beam-outs to chilloutland, No more spacemusic.But i understand and support the wizzard behind the curtain. I wish him the best of luck , I raise my sword in silent salute.. But most importantly .. I thank him.For the hours and hours of time he poured into this project. For the love , the passion , the joy and the emotion that flowed through these unspoken words. I thank him for the many magical moments I have experienced while listening to the music. The way he could transform a lonely commute through a rainy night , into a flight between the stars. I have and will always enjoy .. spacemusic.
Thank you Tc , you are the best .. and knowing you .. i know that whatever path you take .. you will always be.. the best.
Very soon we will see a culture shift, A change how people interact on the computer scene. My prophecy is nothing less then the end of the almost religious ‘ OS- Wars ‘. From newbie to web-lord, we have all played the paralympic game of ‘ what’s the better OS’ Wether in forums, in chatrooms, in endless slashdot threads or even in the comfort of our own pub : We’ve all been there. Wether Xp is better then 2000, Why Mac Os is better then Windows , and we’ll never forget the face of our local Linux Guru foaming at the mouth after he had to endure your proclamation that Windows ME was the best operating system ever written. ( And he never spoke to you again. ) But very soon the question “What’s your operating system” will be replaced by “ What’s your Primary Os ?”. Any computer with a processor speed over 1.5 gigahertz is quite frankly a waste of money. You don’t see a specific speed increase when you buy a 3 gigahertz or more . Ok , Windows will boot faster , but that does not mean YOU can work any faster. I mean , the processor is not the bottleneck of the system. The question is : What to do with all this extra operating system power ... More eye-candy ? Perhaps Vista will be more then happy to gobble up a few million cycles just for Balmers personal pleasure. OR .. we can make the cycles pay off by jumping on the virtualisation train.
All aboard ?
What do you do when you have one OS running , but your computer can carry twice the load ? Well , lets install ANOTHER operating system. I’m not talking Dual Booting here, I’m talking Virtualisation. Running a second Os , INSIDE the first one. The “Base OS” is the main operating system you are running, The “ Guest OS is a virtual version of an operating system neatly compressed into one file.
Why ?
I know what you are saying. But why “ma cher Knightwise” would i do this ? Here is why.
Perfect testing : The virtual machine you installed is just ONE FILE. After you install it , make a backup and start fumbling around. Messed up the Guest OS ? Just drag your copy back and you are good to go. You can easily install all kinds of operating systems without having to worry about partitioning.- Space and energy saver : Who said you had to stop with running just one Guest OS . Instead of bricking up your bedroom with countless pc towers you can now have them running as virtual machines on one machine. Needless to say you save money by just owning one pc, you save power cause you only have one power supply to feed and save valuable bedroom time with your space because she doesn’t have to be mad at you all the time for junking up the house with your old ‘test machines”.
Switchers trouble : I have seen people by a PC or a Mac just for that one task. I’ve seen people buy an extra pc for their on-line banking. I’ve seen switchers go back because they could not get a certain application working on a certain platform. Well, There is an end to switchers trouble and you have all walked through the gates of Sliders heaven (Sliders = cross platform users). Personally I wanted to switch my main machine to linux because I could not get MSN messenger running webcam sessions. (Microsoft does not want to clear the code ) So .. I installed Ubuntu, ran Windows XP as a virtual machine and did the impossible, ran the two Os’es at once and did my Webcam stuff without any trouble. I run Xp on my mac for consulting purposes (when i need to get into a Windows network) and I run Ubuntu in my Xp for testing everything out before I make changes to my ubuntu server.
Servers dream : The crappy thing about running multiple servers at home is the fact that they eat power. Now you can run several ‘virtual’ servers on the same machine and just have one power supply to feed.
And how do i Do that ? Before we start : Be sure you have enough memory in your Base Operating system. Each guest operating system requires a chunk of ram. The bigger the chunk, the better the speed. Also see that you have enough storagespace. Not only so the Guest OS can grow to its full potential (About 4 gig”s will do) you also want to make backup copy’s of every clean installed os that you have. Wether you want to run Linux in Xp or Xp in Linux , you need the free vmware player . This is a free application that lets you use pre-built images of virtual machines. So you cant ‘build’ your own virtual machine , just use one that has been pre-built. Now this ‘building’ of a virtual machine tells the virtual machine how to act. Luckily I found THIS site where you can download FREE virtual machine configuration files for just about any operating system you wish. All you need are the installation cd’s of that OS and you are on your way. I’ll be playing with virtual machine more as the week progresses and keep you posted on the results. Meanwhile my “ Piece de resistance “ is a screenshot of an msn webcam session in Windows XP , running as a virtual machine on my Ubuntu (base) workstation. Sliders .. the end of our troubles is in side and we are virtually saved.
A few days ago, it was discovered that the Windows Genuine Advantage program (that little tool that checks if you have a real or pirated version of Windows) actually 'phoned home' to Microsoft. Although this was far from a big surprise , it still caused a bit of an uproar in the cyber community. On the techpodcasts mailing list we were talking about this subject , so I thought , I would give you my take on all of this. ( Source )
Et Phone Hooome.
Windows Gen. Adv phones home ? What a surprise. I didn't like the program in the first place. Don't get me wrong, i'm not one of these 'if its MS : Kick-it' kind of people. Thanx to uncle Bills and Grandpa Steve's software I make a living (i'm an IT consultant). BUT .. I think WGA ( win.gen.adv) is flawed in two ways :
First of all : What it does. : If you don't have a legit version of windows, it won't let you upgrade. An unprotected (legal or illegal) copy of XP connected to the internet catches some horrible virus faster then you can say 'WillyWonka" and before you know it this little unprotected machine is becoming another oompa-loompa drone for virusmakers who just love to turn it onto a little Zombie Pc to make sure a virus like for example the BLASTER virus will be around for years to come. (if they don't select your unprotected machine to become a viagra-promo spreading spam-canon). So no genuine windows ? Sorry dude .. you'll get hacked. Now I would not mind that if the machine just died then and there , its because of these unpatched zombie pc's we get even MORE viruses out there. (and more spam)
And second of all : I don't like WGA for what its does not do ! Shut your Windows down for-good if you don't have a legitimate version. I mean : If you can write a peace of code that can see wether or not an operating system has been copied illegally .. why in hells bells leave that operating system running in the first place. I mean .. if somebody walks by my house and steals my garden gnome.. I'll run after him .. i'll catch him .. And then i'll put a pink sticker on his back saying : This man stole my garden gnome.. and send him on his merry way. If Microsoft was TRUELY serious about pirate control they would let WGA shut the illegal copy of Windows down right away.
Shut it down !
But they don't .. Why ? Because if they have to subtract the number of illegal copied versions of Windows from their total market share they would NOT be having 90 percent of the market anymore. They would have shutdown 40 percent (and i'm being mild here) of all the Windows versions out there and would FORCE people to pay for their product. And that is where the fun begins. At that moment people have to choose. 200 euros forjust XP , 85 euro's for macOSX, and any distro of Linux .. for free. Sure they would have some adaptation problems switching to the other os'es but actually having to PAY for xp would make them give it serious thought. So instead of going the full mile and shutting down the non genuine xp's , WGA just leaves them running.. unpatched and annoying the rest of us.. And they leave WGA running.. just to phone home as-well.. You never know what they could use the info for.
Just great ! One day of hot and steamy weather and guess what ? I have a cold. A cold ? yep ! My voice sounds like Barry White the morning after his bachelor party. My throat feels like the inside of a death star trash compactor in full swing and my eyes feel like they can just about destroy a small passenger plane when they will pop out.
Yep , A combination of warm weather, happily switching between cold air conditioned rooms and hot sweaty NON air conditioned rooms and having an air conditioner in the car and not knowing how to deal with it ... has left me in this petty full state. Just proves that too much integration of technology in your life (and poor climate control in using it) can be a bad thing. So unless you want a one hour podcast of the headless-hoarse man ( haha , get it ? Hoarse-man..) i am going to have to pass on doing a show this week. But no worries mate (as Dave sais)
There will be plenty to talk about on the next show as I'm momentarily preparing 2 more shows full off yummy good content. Meanwhile if I look at the over cluttered living room table ( Bless you for putting up with me Nyana) and the Satanic Six are staring back at me. Nono, I haven't gotten a devils spawn on the day of the beast. These are just 6 final essays that I have to rate and grade by next week Thursday. (i'm in the Jury). So I've been digging down in them pretty hard (lotsa pictures makes for fast reading) and understand why in MY college days jury’s where begging students to keep papers as light as possible .. And despise students who want to impress jury's with endless 'paper-filling'. ( Page size screenshots of error messages, useless banter etc).
Techroundtable and more.
On a Final note (and preview on the next show) I'm fighting with a Ubuntu 6.06 install and must say : "Aaaiii - Candeyyyy " (go suck on that). Surprise surprise it does need LESS mega’s of ram then the Vista beta two (hogging up to a gig for starters) but still looks pretty slick and pretty fine. After install Ubuntu looks like a beautiful Nigerian-exchange student girlfriend popped up on the edge of your bed. Indeed indeed : Dapper drake looks mighty fine.
BUT ! I have good news. Be sure to check out the techroundtable webcast next saturday on the "techpodcast network ' where you might just hear a very familiar voice.
Ok , its gulp-down coffee, dash off to work crunch time again... Darn.. its too darn hot.
On the edge of real and cyberspace, time is sometimes an issue. If we want it or not .. we all grow a day older every time the earth does its little pirouette. And everytime we make a homerun around the sun , another year goes by.
So too for our lovely Nyana , who is having her 29th birthday tomorrow. So if you wanna give her a shoutout , suck up to her .. or express your deepest condolences because she has to live with me 24 hours a day.. Let yoursellf go.
Shoot her an email via the 'CONTACT US form ' or call out a voicemessage trough the 'send a voicemail' link on the side. Meanwhile .. I just wanna say from all of us here : Happy Birthday Nyana.
As a slider ( somebody who moves swiftly between operating systems like Windows, Mac and Linux ) I am often confronted with the question : What tool do I use for what ? There are of course plenty of ‘switcher tips” out there to help people out who decide to jump from one OS to the other. These ‘switch-lists’ are composed of tables representing a certain application in one operating system , and its counterpart on the other side of the fence. For example : Microsoft Office on Windows has Open-office as its counterpart in Linux (and also in Mac OS). Some applications are called cross-platform , these are of course the ideal ones. An exactly identical version exists in all operating systems. For example : Firefox , or Thunderbird. All versions look and feel exactly the same no matter what OS you are on. But sometimes you have to look for stuff that “looks” or “behaves just like” the original version in one operating system. Classic example here is the Switchers nightmare MSN Messenger. Unfortunately insanely popular among Windows Users here in Europe. But : Microsoft clings to this little peace of software like there is no tomorrow. Deliberately setting back the versions that are brought out on other operating systems (like for example on Mac OSx) and not disclosing any code to the open source community so their IM clients would be able to interact with MSN Messenger. The result is the entire thing has to be reverse engineered to make it work.
What about MSN ? A question often asked is : What do I use instead of MSN on other systems. Now there are some viable alternatives out there, but the one most commonly found on both Mac and Linux systems is AMSN . This noble attempt at Msn messenger ‘approximation’ has been running strong for quite some years now. Their main concern was to be able to crack the hard nut of enabling cross platform msn audio and video-chat. A noble cause since Microsoft does shield that box of tricks very well to the outside world. Now the AMSN people said they cracked it. They had gotten in working. Onto the labs dear friends ! My first test ( video chat between my powerbook and my girlfriends Ibook) worked just fine .. behind the firewall. But once I tried to talk or send files to the outside world ? No go.. Amsn does not deal with NAT translation very well. ( Well , it can’t cope with it at all). Making matters worse : Amsn runs on the Mac like a rhinoceros on a valiumtrip. Slow and jerky to respond and not at all reliable. So i’m back to my ‘non video chat’ enabled alternative ADIUM. A great, highly customizable, well supported alternative. The downside ? No video-chat (file transfer works excellent) AND only available on Mac. As for a Linux alternative to MSN i’ve stuck with GAIM for being the better product.
A loss. Too bad actually , I mean , these guys over at msn have a quite good cross platform product and are able to crack a fantastic nut in getting video-chat to work .. But then they get stuck on this simple thing like Nat transgression. Perhaps its time for all these ‘alternative messenger clients” to start working together and produce one kick-ass open source Messenger alternative and overcome one of the final pitfalls for users switching to a non Microsoft OS.
Just got up and running this morning and only 5 seconds into my morning surf-wave when already found my little snippet of news that kind of makes my day. Google has just released a firefox extension called 'browsersync' that lets you synchronies your bookmarks between several different browsers (at work, at home etc). This is not such big news , cause services like this existed before ( you had the bookmarks in your google toolbar , you had del.icio.us ).. Plenty of places to store your bookmarks... but not very convenient. What if you already HAD an extensive list of bookmarks, you had to order them , categorize them and so on. Not a very easy thing to do. And I don’t really like third party places where you have to manage your bookmarks. All in the comfort of my own home please. Now Google has come up with a cool FIREFOX extension that lets you sync UP your websites tot the Google servers, and Sync them down again as you logon to a different computer. Meanwhile the bookmarks are stored localy on both computers... And a copy is stored on the Google servers.
Whats your flavor .. tell me whats your flavor.
What a great marketing trick. Google now exactly knows what your ‘favorites’ are and can use this to send you targeted adds and searches. Their motto is “ Do no Evil” and so far , Google has been a pretty good boy .. But what if all that information that Google has ( favourites, Gmail, search information) is ever put to “not so good use”. Google is sure as hell gaining a lot of information this way , and for convenience sake we are quite willing to give up some privacy. But on the other hand : What if this leeds to targeted adding ? It would be a bad thing , but also a good thing. What if the spam you get in your inbox anyway .. is more directed at your interests. Instead of college diploma”s and .. lets call them “ego-enlargements” ... you would get spam about tech stuff, Barbie dolls, or when your favorite rerun of Family Ties is on TV. It just shows that information can be used in different ways and that good and bad ... depends on where you stand. Before I start sounding like Obi One Kenoby .. I better sign off !
Home 
Beaming out to eternity.
I have the honor and the privilege to know the man behind the magic, I have the greater honor of calling him my friend. So today I stand between feelings , just like his music perches me on the edge of realities. I’m happy because I have faith in what the future brings. Faith in the fact that Tc’s creativity will evolve into something different.. that it will move onto greater things. But also I find sadness in the part that there will be no more trips to neverneverland, no more emergency beam-outs to chilloutland, No more spacemusic.But i understand and support the wizzard behind the curtain. I wish him the best of luck , I raise my sword in silent salute.. But most importantly .. I thank him.For the hours and hours of time he poured into this project. For the love , the passion , the joy and the emotion that flowed through these unspoken words. I thank him for the many magical moments I have experienced while listening to the music. The way he could transform a lonely commute through a rainy night , into a flight between the stars. I have and will always enjoy .. spacemusic.
gious ‘ OS- Wars ‘. From newbie to web-lord, we have all played the paralympic game of ‘ what’s the better OS’ Wether in forums, in chatrooms, in endless slashdot threads or even in the comfort of our own pub : We’ve all been there. Wether Xp is better then 2000, Why Mac Os is better then Windows , and we’ll never forget the face of our local Linux Guru foaming at the mouth after he had to endure your proclamation that Windows ME was the best operating system ever written. ( And he never spoke to you again. ) But very soon the question “What’s your operating system” will be replaced by “ What’s your Primary Os ?”. Any computer with a processor speed over 1.5 gigahertz is quite frankly a waste of money. You don’t see a specific speed increase when you buy a 3 gigahertz or more . Ok , Windows will boot faster , but that does not mean YOU can work any faster. I mean , the processor is not the bottleneck of the system. The question is : What to do with all this extra operating system power ... More eye-candy ? Perhaps Vista will be more then happy to gobble up a few million cycles just for Balmers personal pleasure. OR .. we can make the cycles pay off by jumping on the virtualisation train.
First of all : What it does. : If you don't have a legit version of windows, it won't let you upgrade. An unprotected (legal or illegal) copy of XP connected to the internet catches some horrible virus faster then you can say 'WillyWonka" and before you know it this little unprotected machine is becoming another oompa-loompa drone for virusmakers who just love to turn it onto a little Zombie Pc to make sure a virus like for example the BLASTER virus will be around for years to come. (if they don't select your unprotected machine to become a viagra-promo spreading spam-canon). So no genuine windows ? Sorry dude .. you'll get hacked. Now I would not mind that if the machine just died then and there , its because of these unpatched zombie pc's we get even MORE viruses out there. (and more spam)
There will be plenty to talk about on the next show as I'm momentarily preparing 2 more shows full off yummy good content. Meanwhile if I look at the over cluttered living room table ( Bless you for putting up with me Nyana) and the Satanic Six are staring back at me. Nono, I haven't gotten a devils spawn on the day of the beast. These are just 6 final essays that I have to rate and grade by next week Thursday. (i'm in the Jury). So I've been digging down in them pretty hard (lotsa pictures makes for fast reading) and understand why in MY college days jury’s where begging students to keep papers as light as possible .. And despise students who want to impress jury's with endless 'paper-filling'. ( Page size screenshots of error messages, useless banter etc). 
What about MSN ? 
Just got up and running this morning and only 5 seconds into my morning surf-wave when already found my little snippet of news that kind of makes my day. Google has just released a