When we speak of a new year beginning, we usually speak of our resolutions for that year, which can often be described as being mostly unattainable, unrealistic and self comforting goals (Yet surprisingly every year some people might (will actually) come and bug you about what good (or not ) resolutions you have for that year )

Well for my part i usually just reply 1440 x 900. i mean, hell, that just makes sense since i don’t intend changing my monitor anytime soon .

(if its someone more technical asking the question and if i’m in a joking mood i might reply something more along the lines of “resolution? what resolution? you mistook me for a dns server or what?” though, but that’s another story )

(ps, la culture c’est de la confiture: Lussion (yeah, i’ll just whip myself for having dared to tempt that crappy frenglish pun and crappy image mod ))

Anyways, yet, as strange as it may seem, i still have my set of objectives to meet for this year
conquering the universe and destroying the earth would be the top priority normally, but since i seem to be locked here for more time than originally planned, well, that will have to wait some more time…

So here is my compiled list (i just love lists o_O), one week into 2009:
In 2009, Kyu will attempt to (and probably fail miserably xD)

• adopt more “normal” sleep patterns (if you want an idea am going to sleep after posting this xD)
• keep a low profile @ uni (xD)
• NOT drop kyusphere
• continue to bug people with my intelligently stupid sense of humour
• reduce time spent procrastinating on QALC, xkcd, phd comics, questionable content (its SFW don’t worry lol), onemanga, newgrounds and the like
• Stop getting infatuated with lists xD
• conquering the universe and destroying the earth

so, nice plan right?

So then what are your resolutions for 2009? (See? i told you you would definitely be asked that at least once! )

There are very few things worse than finding a kinda cool game just at the end of holidays.
even worse is when said game is fun and addictive. That’s why, being my usual megalomaniac
and almost sadistic geeky self, i decided to introduce you dear readers to a flash game i recently found
thanks to my friend David from uni

So what is chronotron? well its basically a little flash game which can become quite addictive and headache inducing after some levels xD
Basically, you need to unlock your time machine using a spare part found in the game area itself.

problem is, since you can’t be everywhere at the same time. fortunately though, the time machine can bring you back to the beginning of the current level, and with the help of your past selves, you’ll hopefully be able to complete the level

What i find cool about this thingy is that it requires thinking in advance, and some of the levels are really mind scorching
so if ever you’re in procrastination mood, just test out this game xD

ps. This year started quite well i must say, first i learn that i won the Best Blogger award for the most original blog (It was for fun afaik but its still real cool to know people like my blog xD) and then i unexpectedly also win CarrotMadman6’s new year giveaway, erf, should have bought lottery tickets me xD

pps. Am bored of this theme, and off to design a new one (i know i know, it’s been ages since i said that, this time’s for real )

ppps. damn, almost forgot the link for the game xD Here it is

et pis bah, et pis c’est tout hein
^_^

Hello there readers! First of all happy new year! may this year be full of joy, happiness etc etc


Well, you might be wondering about the title of this post… in fact, it is that after some intense reflexion (and asking advice from my humanoid banana friend) i have painfully decided that given the low rate of posts during the last year, and the fact that it will probably worsen from now on, i should really close this blog… so that’s it i will still leave all the posts on though, as it still may help some, and i’ve updated the contact form to point to my new email address in case you need to contact me. thank you all for the past 3 years (phew time really flies huh?), so goodbye everyone… :,(

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~Kyu - Signing Off…

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Well, i believe the above is probably along the lines of what i would have said if i really wanted to close kyusphere, right?
but i won’t of course xD

I have been driven to wonder why i had lost my blogging drive some time ago. well i guess it was a mix of circumstances.
with the cyberdeath of some blogger friends, it didn’t feel quite the same at all, + my first semester at uni didn’t actually motivate me xD
so yeah, you could say it was a lack of motivation and inspiration

and yeah, btw, I am now following a course in Web Technologies at the University of Technology (AKA the factory or “l’usine” )
you’d think that was predictable, but surprisingly i decided myself at the very last minute actually anyways, that would be one of
the major hindrances in my blogging patterns in the future (though then blogging will be my new procrastination engine right? )

Anyways yeah, am back (muahahahaha ) and will try to remain on the surface now

ps., ah yeah, happy new year, may your life be full of joy, happiness and coconuts
pps. huh? why coconuts? i’ve got no frakking idea o_O

Hello world! well, first i’d like to apologise for my interrupted blogging pace, actually am designing a new theme for the blog (so that i get aquainted again with css / php / xhtml ) i will try to post more regularly though

Now, you might be wondering about the title right? no? well doesn’t matter, i’ll tell you anyway xD
OverClocked Remix is a site where users can post their arrangements or “remixes” of soundtracks from video games. Well i know, put like this it sounds somewhat banal,
but i really like this site because the remixes are often not simple enhancements to the original tracks but complete reinterpretations of said tracks in a completely different genre.

Being a geek from the NES (or its pirate little brother the “family game” ) generation, and then having owned a SNES and Megadrive, rediscovering those soundtracks which represent a large part of my childhood (ok ok, early teens, its all the same anyways ) was really cool (nostalgia etc, fans of final fantasy / chrono trigger will understand what i mean )

by the way, speaking of chrono trigger, one of the best arrangements i’ve heard on OCRemix come from this game, Magus’ theme
, the saturated guitar just adds something to this soundtrack, excellent

Also of interest is This version of “materia junkie” (FF7), or the battle theme’s remix

this compilation of arrangements from FF7 is also excellent. am not specially a fan of all those soundtracks, but i must admit there’s some excellent work put into that o_O some tracks are even much better than the original, <3 :D

After quickly going through the “games” category, i must say i was impressed by the variety of games (pc / console) they had. it varies from 1988 Nes games to 2006 ps2
games (up to where i’ve browsed)

a word of warning though, if you get to see games that you like, you might be tempted to download all the related soundtracks

[Rant post] Since Megaupload changed its algorithms recently making it almost impossible for us to download anything without their toolbar (they attempted to that is ) i thought i had had my share of “evil” sites which indiscriminately block off a geographical region from using their services. I thus did not expect anything of the sort from the sites i usually visit. well, it was without counting veoh in,

I can already imagine some of you scratching your head and trying to figure what the hell that Veoh site or whatever is about. so as am not really in the mood to promote them right now, let’s just say it’s kind of a youtube like service, and that there are LOTS of anime series hosted there in medium quality (way better than what you find on youtube and the non HD dailymotion videos.) By that description only, you should have guessed that it was very high on my resources list. i truly considered that site like a successor to stage6.

But here comes the fun part, after a week of abstinence ( ) today i wanted to watch the next part of shining tears x wind, and major turn off

oooh riiiiiiight! ~_~”
Anyway, geek’s reaction, google, and from wikipedia we get that

Countless users from said countries are complaining about this decision on their official forums and also the fact that they were blocked out without any prior notice. Gaude Paez, a spokesperson told NewTeeVee.com “The markets we are exiting collectively represent less than 10 percent of our viewer base.” She maintained that the decision was “not about saving resources but rather re-focusing those resources.

ok, now am getting more and more pissed off as i write this, “The markets we are exiting collectively represent less than 10 percent of our viewer base”—->thus we just f**k those ~9%, we’ve got our user base already… what a damned stupid excuse they are giving!

and “re-focussing resources”, my foot yeah… [/rant post]

enfin, on the other side, it may be a good thing, with this now i’ve got less risks of exceeding Orange capping limits and be subject to FUP

(moi? pessimiste? pas du tout je vous assure )

Anyways i guess i’ll have to find an alternative or try my luck with obscure (i.e. not very well known) anonymous proxy servers… (or go and flood their official forums to death, IP banning is uneffective on us \o/ )

by the way there seems to be a way to bypass their blocking, but i’ll try that later i guess, i’m just dead right now

Aujourd’hui je vais vous presenter un groupe de rock Anglais, malheureusement tres peu connu et qui tristement n’existe plus (comment ca je detruis le suspens des la premiere phrase? ) bref, découverte d’un coup de coeur musical

Le groupe est (était, erf T_T) composé de quatre membres:
Stuart Jones - Guitare / voix
Owen Richards - Guitar / voix
Matt Lunn - Batterie
Thom Craigen - Basse

Selon les critiques, leur style peut etre comparé a du muse / placebo / radiohead, mais selon moi c’est a la fois tout ca et un truc completement different, presque comme un OMNI quoi (comprendra qui pourra ).

Le groupe n’ayant pas fait long feu (Il suffit de jeter un oeil sur leur site officiel pour comprendre…), on trouve tres peu d’infos sur eux via notre ami google. De plus, leur opus est super rare / introuvable (et quasi instroumphfable mais bon ), tellement que j’ai du commander leur EP, Single et leur album depuis 3 magasins differents (Japon / allemagne / angleterre, vive ebay )
le pire etant que malgre cela je n’ai pas toutes leurs chansons (certaines etant dispo uniquement en vinyl o_O):P

(Pochette de leur album)

Bon bon je vous vois venir, “Tu nous fatigues avec ton fichu groupe, nous on veut voir ce que ca donne leur musique namého!”
(de plus en plus éxigeants ces lecteurs de nos jours, non mais je vous jure! xD)

bref trève de blabla en effet, voyons ce que ca donne

(1) Candles

Peut etre pas une de mes chansons préférées mais bon je l’aime bien quand meme
Ecouter Candles sur Esnips

(2) The exile

Deja un peu plus energetique, genial je trouve
Ecouter The exile sur Esnips

ou alors en acoustique, ca le fait aussi…

(3) Images of you

Alors celle la, quoi qu’on en dise elle dechire bien (meme en acoustique et un simple djembé comme percussion, testé personellement )

Ecouter Images of you sur Esnips

(4) The Company Wont Colour Me

Magnifique, tout simplement.

Ecouter Colour of fire sur Esnips

il y a aussi quelques videos sur youtube, et quelques autres chansons dispo sur Esnips mais bon, meme moi avec un single, un EP et un album je n’ai pas toutes leurs chansons… m’enfin voila pour la découverte du mardi soir (ou mercredi matin, c’est vous qui voyez )

et a tous ceux qui me demanderont si c’est une heure pour poster je leur répondrais tout simplement “bah apparament ouais” xD

EDIT: The site is temporarily (or not) down atm. this post thus remains irrelevant until they are back online (if ever) and if they haven’t changed anything to the site (which i doubt though.. damn, they were quick on that one :/ …)

Have you heard about Musiquey?
If not, well, this site’s concept is quite similar to Skreemr. You can search for a song / artist then listen to the song, really cool

But hey, aren’t there download links for the songs on that screenshot?!

Well actually that’s almost right, except that they do not yet “officially” allow people to download songs.

This however does not change the fact that

Viewable media = downloadable media

:P furthermore, with a little tweaking you can even embed a song to your blog post / web page

well ready for the double tutorial? then ikuzo dattebayo!

I will show you how to:
(1) Embed a song from Musiquey on your blog / site
(2) Downloading songs from musiquey

Embedding a song on your webpage

Well this one is very simple in fact. Firstly you need to find the song or artist you want on the site.
For this tuto i will search for the band Colour of fire* as shown in the screenshot above

When you find the song you want to embed, click on “listen”. a window containing a flash player should pop up and you can listen to your song

Now you need the source of this page. just right click in the window (not on the image or flash player) and then on “view source” (or a similar option if not available)

you should obtain something like this:

<center><img src=”images/oplayer.jpg”>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js
“></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”player.swf
” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=”
player.swf“>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06-497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3″>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object></center>

well the trick to embedding this particular player with the song is to modify this code in order to replace the relative links to the script and player (i underlined those above) by direct links. for instance,

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js”></script>

should become

<script language=”JavaScript” src=”http://musiquey.com/audio-player.js”></script>

Also, the first img tag can be removed

after editing all the relative links to point to musiquey.com, your source should look like the following:

<script language=”JavaScript” src=“http://musiquey.com/audio-player.js”></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”http://musiquey.com/player.swf” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=“http://musiquey.com/player.swf”>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06-497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3″>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object>

(Again the links that have been modified are underlined here.)

And here goes with this piece of code you can embed any song from musiquey in here now we can get to the second part of the tuto, that is

Downloading from musiquey

Here it gets really easy

Similarly to the above procedures for embedding the player, when you find the song you want to download, click on “listen”. a window containing a flash player should pop up and you can listen to your song

Now you need the source of this page. just right click in the window (not on the image or flash player) and then on “view source” (or a similar option if not available)

you should obtain something like this:

<center><img src=”images/oplayer.jpg”>
<script language=”JavaScript” src=”audio-player.js
“></script>
<object type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” data=”player.swf
” id=”audioplayer1″ height=”24″ width=”290″>
<param name=”movie” value=”
player.swf“>
<param name=”FlashVars” value=”playerID=1&soundFile=http://www.esnips.com/nsdoc/ee7a9b1c-aa06-497e-993e-bee60fe837b9/ts_id/1210673168753/ns_flash/file1.mp3“>
<param name=”quality” value=”high”>
<param name=”menu” value=”false”>
<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”>
</object></center>

Notice the url i underlined up there? notice how it points directly to a mp3 file? what could that mp3 file be? now you should be able to save this file by pointing your browser to that address. you should also be able to do it via a download manager, although i haven’t tested it personally

Thats it for this tutorial enjoy xD

And oh btw, musical discovery to end this post,

Colour of fire, Just too bad they are so unknown and that band split up…
(But i bought their (very rare) album and EP from japan \o/ )

One of the (minor) recurrent problems i ever had with linux involves special characters such as é, è, à, ç and so on using my QWERTY keyboard. Indeed, as someone who must very often type in french, these characters are almost vital!

Having been raised the windows way of doing this (alt + 130 power! ) I was totally lost on how to do this in linux. after almost a year though, i finally discovered there was a rather quick and easy way to do this: the Compose key.

First of all I will try to explain the concept of this compose key. To put it simply, It’s a key that you can use to combine symbols and create special or accented characters that are not on your keyboard.

For instance, on my keyboard, the left winkey is set as compose key. thus by pressing [winkey] then ['] and [e], i get an é. similarly, [winkey] [=] [e] gives the euro sign €.

please Note that these keys are to be pressed one after the other (unlike the traditional ctrl+alt+delete for example )

Now, ready to set that compose key? let’s go, i promise that will be real quick

First open your terminal and open your xorg.conf

$ Sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Please feel free to use any text editor (graphical or otherwise) here, i just chose nano to be more accessible irrespective of specific WMs

This should open your xorg.conf file, which contains configurations for most graphics related operations as well as your mouse and keyboard.

To set your compose key you should look for the section on keyboard within this file. in my case it looks like this:

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Keyboard0″
Driver “keyboard”
Option “CoreKeyboard”
Option “XkbRules” “xfree86″
Option “XkbModel” “pc105″
Option “XkbLayout” “us”
EndSection

Here, you just have to add a new line

Option “XkbOptions” “compose:lwin”

just before the endsection. (i have chosen the lwin key personally. you can replace it with anything like lalt, lctrl rctrl etc )

if your xorg.conf already contains a line starting with “Option “XkbOptions” ” (for example “Option “XkbOptions” “lv3:ralt_switch”) all you have to do is to add a comma and the mapping for the compose key inside the second double quotes (which in my example would give something like “Option “XkbOptions” “lv3:ralt_switch, compose:lwin”) i don’t know if i’m being clear here, just ask in the comments if you do not understand

here we go now just save the file, restart x, and your compose key should be up and running

And oh, before i forget, here you can find a list of key sequences with the compose key

enjoy, and if there are any queries, the comment form is here

“Hey, have you heard the news? kyu started blogging again!”
“No way! i thought he abandoned his blog to pursue a career in proscrastination?”
“well that may be but he’s really back!”

:D hello again everyone, and sorry to have abandoned the blogosphere for some two months (actually i was there sometimes, lurking ) the main reason for my prolonged absence lies in the fact that my pc got down several times, (even now i’m hanging on to a dreamlinux live cd to blog this) but i felt that if i didn’t start to blog again now, i probably wouldn’t at all

Anyways, i still wish you happy 240 days till 2009

I would have thought my long absence would cause some readers to go away, but my feedburner stats show that i’ve got some new readers subscribed to my feed, so welcome you all, and thanks for following kyusphere

Well, i’ll be back soon with some new tips / hacks, (if those do not get obsolete by that time i mean lol ) anyway, maybe it will be hard to regain the momentum i had before, and achieve a post rate as “high” but i will try to be here often

By the way, if any of you remember this post, well guess what? yeah, got it (when i say “definitely” i often really mean it ) well, actually mine looks more like this (i love black way much better anyways ) and the usb connectivity is just, well, fantastic am not even thinking about buying separate effects pedals now lol If anyone in Mauritius is interested, this guitar (behringer iaxe624) is available at Philanne music shop at p.louis ^_^ (damn it, am even advertising freely for them now )

And yeah, results will be here soon, wish me luck (but having to repeat that one as well won’t be as much a problem as in 2006 ^_^)

so see ya soon

(@ carrotmadman, haven’t forgotten you i’ll perform my duties asap )

Salut a tous! bon, petit billet en Francais car en ce moment je fais un maximum d`efforts pour etre bilingue a 100% pour mes examens :grinnod:

Enfin bref, le but de ce billet est de vous informer qu`a partir de la semaine prochaine les examens commencent officiellement, et que je vais tenter de ne pas me connecter (genre deconnexion du cable ethernet (ou pire, j`enleve direct la carte, et je jette le tournevis, comme ca plus d`excuse du genre `le cable s`est remis tout seul ))

Sinon, certains d`entre vous ont pu lire sur le blog de waz que je pense faire une bd live inspiree des siennes. et bien oui, c`est totalement vrai sauf que ce n`est pas pour maintenant vu que je suis en pleine revision la,

Du coup je vous fait a tous un grand salut!

(ps., je bloggues depuis un an et neuf jours! je ne m`en etais meme pas rendu compte! )