Given that my ear canals are on the small side I’ve had troubles finding protection that won’t make my ear canals hurt like h**l after a while (especially inside a helmet). After some research I found a company (EARfoon – Swedish site) which will make molded forms of your ear and produce custom made ear plugs which they then fit with filters specifically made for bikers. About three weeks ago I had my molds made and now they’ve arrived at the shop. Going to pick them up at 11 – happiness! =)

- update -

Oh my, this is some good stuff I’ve gotten my hands on! They fit like a glove on the first try and no more turbulence induced noise in my ears. I’m still able to hear people talk with the plugs in (although at a slightly lower volume) and the engine is still slightly hearable. Sure, you can feel that you’ve got something in your ears, but it’s not nearly as painful as regular plugs. Plus that these plugs won’t move around in your ears (and thus causing noise/acoustic pressure) as the helmet moves on your head (due to road conditions and so forth). Given the fact that these will allow me to keep my hearing even though I’m riding bikes this might be the best investment in the motorcycle equipment department for a long time to come!

If you care for your hearing even the slightest bit – get a set of these!

As it turns out it’s impact was pretty nominal, and might even be detrimental in some cases where software has been installed before the SID is changed. This is a scenario I have experienced myself actually. My intention was to prepare a fully installed BizTalk server which I could clone whenever I needed a new instance of it.

As it turns out the Enterprise Single Sign-On data becomes unavailable after the SID is changed. I’m guessing that the SID is somehow used to encrypt the data, and therefore the decryption fails with the new SID.

To read the specifics about why the tool has been retired head over to Marks own blog where he goes through all the gory details.

Today after a day in the office I noticed that the next backup would take 600 MB. This made me wonder what actually was backed up and why that much data had changed.

After some google searches I found the tool timedog on google code. By using this tool as described on their web you can find out exactly which files were backed up in the last backup and how much space they take up. Using this knowledge I could tune my Time Machine exclusions further.

Small addition though: if your Time Machine is on the network you will first have to have it mounted so that it appears as Time Machine Backup under the Devices node in a Finder windows. This is easiest done by right clicking the Time Machine icon in your menu bar and then selecting Enter Time Machine. This will mount your backup as a device and take you into your Time Machine. When exiting your Time Machine your backup will still be mounted and thus be accessible for use with the timedog tool.

Enjoy.

I’ve collected a few tracks which I think will be good energizers for a friday night, kind of as a preparation for the upcoming dance floors for the night. We’ll see how I manage to dish those tracks out for you. =)

Since my switch from PC to Mac I’ve had to find a new instant messaging program which preferably has support for multiple protocols. The application of choice here seems to be Adium, which I’ve been using since I got my Mac. The main drawback compared compared to Miranda (which I’ve been using on my various PCs) is that it lacks support for IRC.

Until today, that is. Today I found out that the current beta of Adium has support for IRC, and it also supports SSL connections to the server you use (provided that the server supports it too, of course). Being the old school user of IRC that I am I immediately noticed that the layout of group chat windows in Adium didn’t quite fit my mental image of what IRC chat windows should look like. This is where Adiums styles come to the rescue!

The internets provided me with this excellent style: irc 2.0. It also has inverse color schemes for those of you who don’t like the black background.

My life as a happy Mac-user continues.

A little while later I figured I’d take a few pictures of the car I’m currently driving (a loaner while my own is in the shop). A thumbnail and a link to the gallery if you click the thumbnail:

Finally I found the setting which seems to cure this problem, at least if you’re using Thunderbird as your IMAP client. In your preferences dialog under the “General” tab click the button “Config Editor…“. Enter “expunge” In the search field and change the “mail.imap.expunge_after_delete” from “false” to “true“. To be specific this only seems to concern the deletion of e-mails, but it has worked for me when moving e-mails around from folders as well, so I’m happy!

Hope this works for you too, should you need it.

After awhile I found a newer version of Launch2Net which allegedly is Snow Leopard compatible (I need to learn that 10.x releases actually differ quite a lot internally from time to time), so I downloaded that one and installed it. Only problem now was that even though the manual claimed that the software would fire up automatically when the modem was inserted nothing happened! No matter how many times I uninstalled the software, rebooted or removed it with AppCleaner and then re-installed it. No go.

By now I started wondering if the rollback of the first installer hadn’t ended cleanly. Long story short, after learning that drivers aren’t what drivers are in Windows but are rather installed as kernel extensions I began looking for where these extensions are stored, the answer is: /System/Library/Extensions. Well, lo and behold – even after having uninstalled all visible traces of the software there were extensions left (named NMSonyEricsson[...]). After having manually deleted these extensions (which actually are folders containing binaries and other stuff) I rebooted and then installed the latest version of Launch2Net SonyEricsson Edition (the link is specifically for the modem I have (SonyEricsson MD400) which in my case happens to be 1.9.1.0 and then rebooted again.

Now it all works! The software fires up when I plug in the modem and it configures itself according to the network the SIM card belongs to and I’m able to connect. I’ve been listening to Spotify for the past 40 minutes now without a hitch – so I’m happy!

What I’m taking away from this is that I continue to not be surprised by the crappy quality a lot of cell network providers have to live with when distributing hardware for which someone else provides the software. Especially when we’re talking about a niche operating system like Mac OS X.

The best way to explain what I got is to show you this youtube-video:

If all goes well I’ll be a squeeling little boy in that car and I have a feeling that it’s gonna rock my socks off! =)