Some facts to start off – the Abyssus is a wired USB laser mouse that can run at 800, 1600 or 3200 DPI (I really like that they put in a switch for the different DPIs at the bottom of the mouse – I hate accidentally hitting a button beneath the scrolling wheel that will fuck up my aim). It’s ambidextrous, so it works for both left- and right-handed people. There are only three buttons – left, right and middle (mouse wheel), no thumb button or anything like that. It’s very light-weight – the lightest mouse I’ve tried yet.

The mouse is very responsive and very accurate. It can stop working somewhat randomly with my mousepad if I don’t clean it often enough, but that’s not a big minus for the mouse. The buttons feel good – I’d like the mouse wheel button to be a bit easier to press down, but it’s OK. The left and right buttons had a tendency to double-click when I didn’t want them to when the mouse was new, but that seems to have gone away with time. Maybe it’s something that got fixed with wear or my fingers adjusted to whatever they have to do to avoid that behaviour, I’m not sure.

The light weight and low profile makes it ideal for RTSes like StarCraft. The shape is also comfortable for a palm grip, so using it for FPSes has also been a success for me. The only thing I’d say is a direct drawback is that the feet are really small, which means it’s a tiny bit wobbly on hard surfaces. I’m also not sure how well most glidz fit onto them – I haven’t dared try. The feet are quite smooth, but I would still prefer to stick some teflone tape on without having to worry too much.

All in all, I’d definitely recommend this mouse for someone who wants a simple, robust mouse that works well for all genres. This obviously isn’t the mice you’ll want to get if you need 10 buttons to bind macros to, but that’s clearly not who Razer was aiming at with this one.

Blackjazz is hard to describe. Saying it’s black metal with jazz elements (or the other way around) is dumbing it down too much. It’s like Shining took the two genres, merged them, and the result was something completely different from anything I can really relate to. There’s been metal bands messing with jazz – Atheist, Cynic, Meshuggah – but this takes it to a whole new level. The closest thing to this I know of has to be Fredrik Thordendal’s Special Defects – Sol Niger Within, which is a really big compliment to Blackjazz.

I think there are three defining features about this album that makes it so fascinating. The first is the wide array of instruments and effects being showcased. Every instrument (vocals, guitar, bass, drums, sax, keyboard) gets their moments to show off during the album, but they also complement each other in constantly new and really creative ways as you listen your way through. It sounds a tiny bit like some of Devin Townsend’s stuff, just taken to an extreme level with a more serious face.

It’s hard to describe this album, or even put words as to why I hope you’ll give it a listen. Shining has taken bits of jazz, metal and their own pure creativity and forged something completely original. All the pieces are familiar but make up something unknown and different. The sheer ingenuity showcased in Blackjazz is stunning, and I hope people will listen to it, be confused as hell, and then give it repeated listenings out of sheer curiosity until they “get” it and fall totally in love with it.

If you read my review of their last album, you know that I wasn’t too impressed. This time around they captivate me much more. In the heavy songs, their signature “fast, but slow” riffs are back and creates great contrasts with their high-tempo parts. Also unique to this album is that the band chose to make every other track a short ambient interlude to lead up to the heavier songs. This works well – Revelations of the Black Flame had a lot of good atmospheric ambient stuff, and that experience shows off in these new tracks.

Compared to their first three albums, the tempo has still been downpaced, though. This isn’t necessarily bad, but the thing I really enjoyed about 1349 was the way they could throw tremolo riffs at me non-stop without sounding monotonic or repetitive. I wouldn’t say their new approach is dumbed down, but it seems like when their music alternates between ambient and heavy riffing, it creates an excuse to not be as creative in your riff-writing. The sound is still distinctly 1349, just less so – even the guitar sound itself sounds less crisp than before, so even when there are some interesting riffs, it’s somewhat hard to hear them as anything else than constant churning.

While I think Demonoir is a step up from Revelations of the Black flame, I still think the weaknesses remain. The tonality and rhythm isn’t as challenging anymore, and while this hopefully can draw more people into this great band, I just don’t think 1349 is focusing enough on their strong points.

Burzum is probably the most controversial black metal artist in existence – in Norway, he most certainly is. Having spent nearly 16 years in prison for murder, this is his first album in 11 years, and first black metal album in 14 years.

I grew up too late to really care about the things Varg Vikernes (the sole member of Burzum) has done, but I’ve never been a very big Burzum fan, although his music is quite good. It’s not been quite my style, I suppose. However, Belus is a really, really convincing album on its own. The style can without a doubt be called classic and old-school as far as black metal goes, but there is certainly a lot of originality to be found here.

I’m not sure if I can explain this one. I have a weak spot for music that sticks to the bare basics of music-making but still manages to transcend into something more than that. That type of music is a very good reminder that you don’t need a lot of special effects and your own unique distortion to stick out, even in today’s broad array of metal music.

This album is one of those albums. With very little use of other things than the basic building blocks of metal – drums, distorted guitars and vocals – Burzum have created something new that will appeal to old-school black metal enthusiasts. This album sounds like it might as well have been made 15 years ago – that’s something that’s very rare today.

Belus very successfully creates an enchanting soundscape of droning guitars, as well as mixing in some parts that have memorable, even catchy melodies or rhythms to them. The blend is an atmospheric and sinister metal album that stands very well on its own.

I don’t think the appeal of Burzum is going to broaden with this album. In fact, it’s quite amazing how unchanged this guy’s style has remained for the past 14 years. If you’re not into black metal, this album probably won’t sell you on the genre – but if you’re into other old-school bands like Immortal, Emperor or Mayhem but haven’t checked out Burzum yet, this album should be a very good introduction.

For any metal fan whatsoever, this album is worth a listen just to marvel at how old-school yet fresh it’s possible to be in the year of 2010. I, for one, hope it inspires other bands to try the same path.

I do consider myself a metalhead – a very picky one, at that, and more a fan of the 90s than the past 10 years, but on the other hand I think there’s been a lot of good music this decade, so I thought I’d put up some of the bands/albums that really stuck out for me as good. These are in alphabetical order, by band name – anyone hoping for a top 10 will have to look elsewhere!

Enslaved. Norwegian progressive black metal, as I usually call it. They started out as “just another” black metal band in the mid-90s, but have become increasingly unique and distinct as time passed on. Their 1998 album Blodhemn started marking their new sound, which has grown and developed since then. While I didn’t really like their latest album (Vertebrae, 2008), Isa (2004) and RUUN (2006) are real masterpieces and a true testiment to the fact that black metal is anything but boring, mind-numbing and grinding music.

Gojira – From Mars to Sirius. This album is one of the very few that I can’t really put in any specific subgenre of metal. It sounds like a mix of doom, black and death metal, which is quite unique. It succeeds very well in creating lots of different soundscapes and still relying mostly on the standard instrument lineup. I also think these guys have to be commended for creating metal that should be very accessible for people new to metal as well as something that can please the more old-school fans.

Immortal – Damned in Black and Sons of Northern Darkness. Immortal, being one of the old and classic black metal bands still around, went into the 2000s unlike any other band I know. While many were watering out their sound, adding clean vocals and synths (mostly in the vein of Dimmu Borgir), and others were just doing the same stuff over and over again without any sense of originality, Immortal surprised me with two absolutely brilliant albums that I would easily cite as their best. Triumph, the opening track to Damned in Black is my absolute favourite. Damned in Black really did perfect their sound in my opinion, while Sons of Northern Darkness created something new that really works in its own way. I didn’t think all that much of All Shall Fall, but that doesn’t stop me from including these two masterpieces on this list.

Megadeth – or just Dave Mustaine. He is one of those 80s metal heroes who really have succeeded in continuing to put out good albums. Not great – nothing that could ever compare to Megadeth’s older albums, in my opinion, but still good. I can’t say that for any other 80s metal bands, really. An inclusion on this list for a solid, true to his roots performance by Dave Mustaine.

Nile and Behemoth. I had to put them both on the list and on the same spot because these two bands introduced me into the realms of brutal death metal in 2007 when Nile released Ithyphallic and Behemoth released The Apostasy. In my opinion, these albums took brutal death metal to a new, more epic level. Maybe it could be considered a bit of a sellout, but if you don’t think their recent albums are brutal enough, then you’re probably having problems finding music that’s brutal enough anyway. I also have to mention that while I think Behemoth improved with Evangelion, Nile’s Those Whom the Gods Detest wasn’t as impressive as the previous album. In any case, these two bands get a spot on my list.

Strapping Young Lad – or Devin Townsend. Much like Gojira, SYL has made music that’s more mainstream than most of what I listen to, but it’s still great music. I’m not sure what it is, but it might be some perfect mix between brutality and emotion in their music that sells it for me. I don’t know what else to write, I’d just like to point you to my favourite song of theirs: Love? (if you can, get the CD, Alien – this is one of those albums where you really need the extra sound quality, in my opinion.)

That should just about do it. There are a few omissions I should probably mention – Opeth, my favourite band, produced my favourite album, Blackwater Park, in 2001, but I feel they should best be complimented as a band as the best thing to come out of the past 20 years. This list is too puny for them! Tool could probably be on the list, making two incredibly great albums this decade, but I don’t really consider them metal, so I left them out. Wintersun could be complimented for creating just about the only power metal album I like, Arcturus could be mentioned for creating the absolutely amazing and 100% unique Sham Mirrors, and Katatonia could be included for Night is the New Day, one of the few doom metal albums I actually like (which says a lot, if you ask me) – but those felt more like personal things, not so much things to be put on a best-of list for the decade.

EDIT: I should also mention Emperor’s Prometheus – The Discipline of Fire and Demise (2001), which is another favourite album of mine, but it wasn’t included mostly because Emperor disbanded right after releasing it. So in many ways, it feels to me more of a bookend to the 90s than a 2000s album. Doesn’t make it any less awesome, though!

So let’s hear it from you. What defined this decade in metal for you? Is there something I should have included? Is there something I shouldn’t have included? Let’s hear it.

The good things: It’s very comfortable – maybe not for people with small hands, but it’s the most comfortable grip I’ve ever experienced. Because of this, it’s great to use – it’s easy to get a feel for. Overall, it’s simply a great mouse in regards to grip and aim with. It’s quite heavy, though, and you can’t really get it light enough to play RTS games with all that well, even though there are different weights.

The bad things: There are a lot of them, but somehow they don’t nearly outweigh the good parts. First of all, the mouse wheel. It’s very weird, it’s almost stepless, but not quite. It’s not very good. Also, it’s near impossible to click the mouse wheel without scrolling up or down – you have to be very specific and use a lot of pressure, which is a bitch when trying to open links in a new tab, for example. Mine also broke some months after I bought it – the wheel seemed to simply detach from the bit that made scrolling possible. I’ve heard a lot of other people have had the same issue, so it’s kinda bad. The drivers are also very weird. For some reason, if I put my update rate to 1000Hz, my cursor would occasionally skip to the left before skipping back to the right. I also had similar problems when turning TCU on, so I had no idea what that actually did, which isn’t exactly good considering it’s one of the advertised features. The mouse worked more than fine at 500Hz without TCU, though, but it was still annoying.

So, can I recommend it? Yes and no. It’s probably the best mouse for shooters I’ve ever used, but the drivers might be holding back some of the fine-tuned performance. The crappy mouse wheel is also an issue for whenever you’d like to browse the web or if you’d like to use it in whatever game you’re playing. I was able to look past those issues, but I’m a very patient and excusing man. Most people won’t tolerate that. So I probably can’t recommend it. But it’s damn good anyway.

I think there’s one idea that will stick around and probably make an impact on the regular OSes, though – and that’s the idea of integrating the web browser into the OS. In Chromium, it’s taken one step further, of course, the web browser being the OS. But let’s say Linux took this idea and made it so that you actually could browse the web and it would look like in Chromium, but you could at the same time switch to your “regular” desktop. I mean, look at the picture of Chromium’s UI. At least I would love to have the option of having it look like that when I’m browsing the web on my Linux laptop or Windows desktop. It looks gorgeous!

Many people use several desktops in Linux. What if one of them was a designated browser desktop?

Not to mention, Google is right on about more and more people using their browser and the internet for more and more these days. This idea is tapping into a completely new market, and it would only seem natural for Linux, Microsoft and Apple to follow after. I doubt they’ll be willing to just leave this market alone, after all – and I also doubt they’ll be willing to build their version of this could-OS completely from scratch. Integrating the browser(s) more into the OS, both UI-wise and performance-wise, seems like a natural progression.

This might be a bit hard to do, considering there are several different web browsers out there, but if it’s possible, it would be absolutely awesome. And of course, Windows and Apple would have a much easier time integrating their proprietary browsers into their OSes. It would be a bit of a letdown for those of us who prefer using better browsers, but let’s face it – we’re not a huge chunk of the PC market, and we’d be fine with our favorite browser still running in an old-fashioned window.

I hope I’m not completely off on this idea being realistic, because it would be really cool.

First, I’ll say that I’ve had this problem on the same laptop before, using Ubuntu 8.10 (I think, might have been a later version), but I remember being able to fix it back then by clicking random stuff in the sound settings. In 9.10, however, they seem to have stripped the sound settings window, probably in an attempt to simplify the UI. I don’t really oppose that, but I think they ought to consider adding some kind of “additional settings” checkbox for the more experienced users who, like me, like clicking on things to see if it makes other things work.

The problem was, simply, that the sound would distort and become way too loud as soon as the in-built Ubuntu volume control went over 15% or something like that. No huge problem, I could simply have stayed within those 15%, but it was annoying, especially considering I wouldn’t be able to do fine volume control with my laptop’s in-built volume buttons, which seem to increase/decrease the volume by 5%. I remembered the command for the standard Ubuntu sound mixer, so I opened the terminal and accessed it to see if I could get some useful information out of it:

alsamixer

There, I could see that as soon as the “PCM” channel went above 47%, that’s where the distortion would come in. I’m not sure what PCM is, but I assume it’s the sound card’s amplifier, or whatever. At 47%, it was a 0dB gain, right where it was supposed to be. However, the Ubuntu volume control insisted that it could be cranked all the way up to 100. I wanted it to stay at 47, then the volume control could just control the “Master” channel, which could be turned all the way up with no distortion.

Some googling revealed the possibility of un-checking the PCM channel in the sound preferences, under “Default mixer tracks”. This, however, was nowhere to be found. I assume it’s been stripped away. So, I spent a few hours looking for a config file I could edit, and eureka:

sudo gedit /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-output.conf.common

In the file, look for something like this:

[Element PCM]
switch = mute
volume = merge

The documentation in the same file tells me that “merge” means “merge it into the device volume slider”. This sounds like what I don’t want it to do, so I change it to “ignore” instead. Then I open alsamixer again, put the PCM slider at 47%, and reboot – and voila! It works. The volume slider seems a bit uneven, so you have to turn it quite far up to get proper volume, but I can’t really be bothered with trying to fix that.

I might as well start this review with a disclaimer: Immortal is, without a doubt, one of the greatest black metal bands ever – and in my mind, they are the best there ever has been, and probably ever will be. Every single album they’ve released have stood out as something unique and special to me, and while someone who isn’t into the genre might quickly dismiss it all as noise, the black metal connoisseur will be able to tell the eerie sound in Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism from the brutal, raw, tight feel of Battles in the North, or the wide, panoramic mood set by Sons of Northern Darkness. My personal favourite is actually Damned in Black, which I feel is kinda weird, because both the title of the album and the timing of its release seems really odd, but I still love the way they managed to mix the sinister sound of black metal with the groove of… well, I don’t know what it is, but it certainly is groovy. And it’s not often you feel like complementing a black metal album with that word, is there?

So that’s my feelings about Immortal, and it should come as no surprise that I got up early the day their new album, All Shall Fall, was released, so I could take the trip down to my local metal store and grab a copy. My expectations were modest – Sons of Northern Darkness was their previous album, released as much as 7 years ago, and it’s not been that long since they reunited. Still, I was excited to hear what this new release would bring to the table.

I wasn’t very much surprised by what I heard. The Immortal I know definitely hasn’t changed, and despite the fact that the album sounds a lot like it’s simply building on Sons of Northern Darkness, it has a distinct feel to it which is hard to pin-point. There’s much more reverb added to the mix, and the sound in general is a lot fuller than anything I’ve heard from this band before. Of course, that can be good or bad, but Immortal has been doing perfectly well with a very convoluted sound before, so you might have a hard time shaking off the feeling that they’re compensating for something.

There are several drawbacks. The most important one is probably that there aren’t many memorable parts of the album. The acoustic bit in Norden on Fire stands out somewhat, but we’ve heard it before. The intro to Unearthly Kingdom is quite ear-catching, but it doesn’t do much other than provide a calm bit before the guitar kicks in and we’re back to basics. There aren’t any mind-blowing riffs, and there is never any change of pace in the music – pretty much all of it trudges along in the same tempo, with the same guitar, vocals and drums as always. You’ll also get a serious sense of deja vu after listening through the album a couple of times, as a lot of it sounds very much the same.

So is this album good or bad? It’s hard to tell. For an Immortal album, it’s hardly noteworthy, and unless it grows on me, I would be prepared to call it their worst. It’s repetitive and quite unimaginative, and so, even though it’s only 40 minutes long, it feels stretched out, thin and unsubstantial. On the other hand, compared to everything else you get these days, it’s not bad. And you can’t deny the fact that it’s been some time since Immortal was on top of their game.

A Dutch court has put a 13-year-old girl under state care for two months, stalling her bid to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.

Ah, of course. It’s a record-breaking attempt. It’s very important to teach our young that if you want to be anything in today’s society, you need to compete with others, and what better way to compete than to break a world record?

Peter de Lange, the Dekkers’ lawyer, described the case as “exceptional”.

“The crucial question is whether it is wrong for parents to allow their child to indulge in her passion,” he told Radio Netherlands.

There are many things we don’t let children do. Drink alcohol, smoke, have sex, go late to bed… But as long as it’s for the sake of competition, why not just let them go ahead? After all, it’s merely allowing our children to indulge in their passions, no?

It’s not so bad if she has to wait a few years – or even a few months – to go on her sailing trip, is it? All she’ll be losing is her name in the Book of Guinness World Records and her picture on the front page of the media. Is it really that wrong to keep adolescents from “indulging” themselves in that?