Har Nevo by The Black Heart Rebellion

A few months ago I first heard a song by The Black Heart Rebellion, called Animalesque, and I started browsing YouTube to find out more about this band and possibly learn about other songs. It was there that I discovered their new album "Har Nevo", and I've been wanting to buy it ever since.

It's been a week now since this album was delivered at my doorstep, and it still hasn't left my CD player let alone my mind. Over the past years I've bought many CDs, but it has been a long time since I've discovered an album this good.

De Zwaarste Lijst 2013 (on Studio Brussel)

A year has passed, and so it is finally time for the "heaviest list" again - a show presented on Studio Brussel by Alex Agnew. Due to circumstances I had to miss most of the list, unfortunately, but Studio Brussel has been so kind to put the entire show online so I can listen to it while I'm at work!

By now it's becoming a bit of a yearly tradition for me to post the list on my blog, so here it is - enjoy!

Media Player Classic stuck in fullscreen

Media Player Classic has been my favourite movie player ever since I first encountered it, and it has done very little wrong during those years.

All of a sudden, though, it started playing movies in fullscreen - without being told to do so. As soon as a movie opens, the player starts in fullscreen mode, and pretty much the only thing you can do after that, is pause the movie, or exit the software. Fortunately, there is a solution...

No Stone Unturned: the Stones of Barenziah

Ever since I first played Daggerfall (the second episode of the Elder Scrolls series), I've been hooked on the series, so when I heard Skyrim would be released I immediately preordered the game on Game Webshop (a highly recommendable webshop, by the way!). As soon as the game was released I was ready to play, and by now I've reached the happy side of 300 hours of play.

During those hours of play, I've played through the main quest twice (once on each side), and I've finished just about any quest that can be done in Skyrim - each one of them more enjoyable than the next, except maybe for one "little" quest: No Stone Unturned...

Session expired while answering security questions on the Apple iPad

As soon as it was available, I updated my Apple iPad to iOS6, and I've been a happy camper since the update. That is to say, until I tried to download a new app from the AppStore today.

After I entered my password for my Apple ID, I was greeted with a new screen, prompting me to select three security questions, answers, and a backup mail address in case it all goes pear-shaped. And unfortunately, it did...

How to find out which version of IIS is installed

Last week I confiscated an unused dust-gathering desktop in order to install a small, development MySQL database on it. Skip forward a few days, when I received a request to set up a small website on that same box, using the already installed IIS. No problem so far.

But after browsing through the website and testing its features a bit, a colleague asked me which version of IIS I had been using. To be honest, I didn't have a clue: yes, I had set up the box, but I'm only familiar with IIS on a need-to-know-basis, and I had to look up the version myself - which turned out to be quite a task.

Project Underground by Psxmod

One day while browsing through the music section of Spotnet, I noticed a post called Project Underground made by a user called Psxmod. After downloading the spot it turned out to be a set by a DJ who goes by the same name.

After listening to this particular set for a few minutes, I immediately returned to Spotnet to look for the other volumes of this series (as Psxmod has already released 12 of these mixes). By now I've downloaded them all, and even though I'm only halfway through them, I can highly recommend these to anyone looking for good techno mixes.

Goodbye Onslow - actor Geoffrey Hughes dies aged 68

Sad news, as British actor Geoffrey Hughes lost his battle against cancer today. Back in 1996, when he was playing Onslow, Hughes was diagnosed with prostate cancer yet he made a full recovery in 2009.

Alas, the cancer returned in 2010. Doctors said that he died peacefully in his sleep, after a long and brave fight as stated by his family.

The Album Top 100

Real life has been keeping me very busy lately, which explains the lack of updates for over more than a year! Fortunately there's one thing I seem to be able to combine with whatever it is I'm doing at the time, and that is music.

So when Studio Brussel broadcasted the Album Top 100 (a list of one hundred albums combined by the listeners), I tuned in and listened to as much of the tracks as I could.

De Zwaarste Lijst 2012 (on Studio Brussel)

Once again, Alex Agnew presented the "heaviest list" on Studio Brussel (also known as "De Zwaarste Lijst" for those of us who speak Dutch).

Always a fan of both heavy metal and musical lists, I've taken the liberty to post the list on my website - here it is!

John Higgins versus Judd Trump (World Championship Snooker 2011)

After watching the BetFred.com World Championship snooker final yesterday evening, it was a bit too late to post an article, but what an epic final it was: I've enjoyed every single minute of it!

For the past two weeks I have tried to follow every frame & match I was able to see (time permitting), slowly living up to the final. Given that I'm a big fan of John Higgins, you can imagine I was quite happy to see him reach the final.

Meanwhile, Judd Trump (a player I did not know that much about, I even had to look up his nickname!) had been playing some brilliant snooker to reach the other available final spot, but I had some doubts about his chances in the final. Man, was I mistaken!

De Zwaarste Lijst 2011 (on Studio Brussel)

It's been quite some time since I last found the time to write an article, mostly because of real life taking its toll on me. Besides work and the usual day-to-day stuff, I've kept myself quite busy with a few projects of my own, which I'll add to my projects section as soon as the time is right.

But that wasn't the subject of this article now, was it? Studio Brussel has once again counted upon their listeners to compile a new list of heavy metal gems, better known as the heaviest list (or De Zwaarste Lijst as it is known here in Belgium).

D*Note - Shed My Skin

YouTube - evergrowing database of small, online movies - has something to offer for just about everyone connected to the internet, myself being no exception. I don't watch that many videos on YouTube, but when I do I tend not to watch one particular thing, I like switching from one video to the next, spanning various subjects and topics.

So when I was hopping from one video to the next yesterday night, I stumbled upon this little gem: the videoclip for Shed My Skin by D*Note, a track which became one of my favourite tracks years ago, when I first heard it. And now, years later, this little video still manages to amaze me.

Belle replaced by Medusa

After nearly six years of faithful service, I've decided to replace Belle, my current development machine with a more powerful version.

It took me quite some time to install everything (mainly because I decided to rewire all the cabling from the other machines during the setup as well), but Medusa is finally up and running.

A complete list of all HTML escape characters

From time to time you need to escape a character in a web page, but most of us don't know all the character codes by heart. Some of them, the ones you use most, tend to stick in the mind, but all of them? Besides, a good programmer is a lazy programmer - there's no need to memorize tables and tables of boring data when all you have to do is look them up!

In order to have my very own cheat-sheet at the ready wherever I am, I took the liberty of putting the entire list on my website. Feel free to bookmark this page, in case you ever need to find the correct escape code for that dodgy character.