Random Notes

To me, Bo Kasper (Bo Sundström) is the J. Karjalainen of Sweden. Maybe that's a blasphemous statement to some, but I find many parallels between them. At the very least I enjoy listening to both of them equally. Bo Kaspers Orkester have consistently upped themselves through the years, creating some awesome jazz, rock and pop songs. Personally I have enjoyed each record more than the last one, culminating in Du borde tycka om mig.

A huge name in Finnish rock music, he is also a very prolific singer-songwriter that has covered rock, blues, country and other genres with success. Some of the most memorably tunes in Finnish music have come from his inventive mind. He has a very recognizable singing voice and deals with all kinds of different themes in his songs. Personally I enjoy the big variety of his discography and his signature harmonica sound, which can be heard in many songs.

EDIT 2015-11-17: I decided to split these up to different posts for easier referencing and easier updating later. See the tag music-i-like to view them all.

Since this is a blog about stuff I want to tell people, I thought I'd make a series of posts about something I love: music. These posts will also serve as a reference for the odd occasion that I tell someone what I like to listen to. My taste in music is somewhat varied and my music library has a lot of stuff in it. That's why I will only cover some of the the artists I like listening to most. One could kind of approximate it from my last.fm statistics, but I tend to listen using "Shuffle All" nearly all the time, so the stats will be skewed in favor of artists with lots of tracks (such as 植松伸夫). For each artist I will tell something about them and then add a couple of examples from YouTube. The artists I post about are not in any particular order.

Leevi and the Leavings (1978–2003)

This may be somewhat strange for the international crowd. A very prolific Finnish rock/pop band that released album after another. They were pretty popular in Finland and many of their songs are still very popular in the radio, even though they disbanded after the death of the band's lead, Gösta Sundqvist, in 2003. A couple of noteworthy facts: every single one of their songs was composed, written and arranged by Gösta, and the band never officially did a single live concert. Their songs are very Finnish in their content, usually dealing with the daily struggles of ordinary "little people". Personally I like Gösta's lyrics that often highlight things you don't think about in a tragicomic way, and his catchy melodies in many songs.

** UPDATE: ** I wrote a new post with newer and faster benchmarks.

After the Snowden revelations, I personally started looking more into encrypting my online activities and making sure sites that ran on my server were (relatively) secure. Eventually I put this blog behind HTTPS as well, not really for any security benefit, since I'm not talking government secrets and the blog has no admin panel, but rather for learning about TLS and how to set it up properly. Problem was, it seems I did not read about things properly. This blog post describes one result of that ignorance.

So I went and ordered myself a new server. My old one was a VPS from Linode with 1 core, 1 GB of RAM and a 24 GB disk. The new one is a dedicated server from online.net with 8 cores, 8 GB of RAM and 1 TB of hard disk space. At the same time it is only slightly more expensive so I jumped at the opportunity. How reliable it actually is will only be shown with time, but I like living on the bleeding edge. So I thought I would write a blog post about all the stuff I run into when setting up the new server. Note: This post is meant for reference only, not as a guide. Be sure look for recommendations from people wiser than myself regarding any security settings.

Whatever you think of Internet scammers, they sure are inventive. They keep figuring out new ways to scam people for clicks, money, or whatever it is they want. Today I noticed a new type of auto-sharing spam page that was unwittingly shared by a Facebook friend of mine. It takes form as a regular looking clickbait page that lures you in with its title, but when you go to the page, it fools the user into sharing it on their own page.

For some reason, while browsing the Interwebs, I stumbled upon Carolina Eyck, a German theremin player. The theremin is a fascinating electronic instrument played by moving hands in front of the instrument, without touching it. It has a very unique space-y kind of sound. Even though I am not musical in any way, after seeing a few videos, I suddenly had a great urge to get myself one and learn to play it. To save everyone's ears, I won't be doing that, but will just settle for listing some fun videos.

Last night, when I was supposed to go to bed early, I instead decided "I'll just quickly code that one thing". Way too many hours later it was ready: Mebe now has RSS feed support. There are two types of feeds, one for all posts in general and another for tag feeds.

This means you can now follow this blog with your RSS reader too. Just subscribe to /feed. Or, if you want to follow a certain tag, subscribe to /tag/tagname/feed.

PS.: RFC 822 dates are stupid. Just look at this abomination I came up with.

I host IRC shells (user accounts with SSH access for IRC usage) for several of my friends. Some of them that run inferior OSes use PuTTY to connect. Last week, I got word that one of them was unable to connect to my server, getting no error on their end (just seemed to never connect).

If there's one thing I miss from the old pre-touchscreen phones we used to have, it's physical keyboards. Physical QWERTY keyboards, to be exact. From the Nokia 6800 series, to the Communicators, the E70 and all the way to the N900, I've always loved their typing speed and power, especially with regards to terminal usage where special characters are essential. Sadly, after Nokia's betrayal and the subsequent flop with the N950, the market wasn't looking that good. There were mostly a couple of Android phones, but I've never been a fan of the OS.