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2005

Joining the revolution



podcasting, originally uploaded by silwenae.

I’ve joined the podcasting revolution, and am now downloading podcasts like a madman. Shown here are iPodder on Ubuntu, and the new Monopod, a much more simpler and user friendly podcasting client. Both are running on Ubuntu Hoary.

I had a really tough time last weekend trying to get Monopod 0.2 to work, and this is 0.3 (I had to install a bunch of dev stuff). iPodder was ok, it’s the latest release that came out this week, but you have to chmod one file before it will work.

My two favorite podcasts so far are:

Acts of Volition and MAKE Magazine’s Podcast.

More to come, and a rant about my MP3 player.

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A bit warm

I flew back in from Atlanta yesterday. It’s cooler there, than it is here in Minnesota. That doesn’t seem quite right.

Turn your laptop into a picture fram

Turn your laptop into a hangable, on the wall, picture frame.

It has to be seen to be believed. Disassemble your laptop, mount it to a picture frame, and just follow the step by step instructions.

Think about it if he wasn’t using XP: you could take some really, really old laptops that can be had cheap and do a bunch of them using say, free software like Linux. 🙂

Nevertheless, a very cool hacking project.

Broadcast Flag not dead yet – we have 48 hours!

The EFF is reporting that Congress may sneak in the Broadcast Flag into other legislation in the next 48 hours. This is not trivial – HD content is available over the airwaves unmodified already today and the Broadcast Flag will stop that single-handedly – once it goes forward there will be no going back to using your media and your hardware the way you want to.

Fill out the Action Alert now and / or contact your Senators.

Just say no to the Broadcast Flag.

Required Reading

My new favorite magazine and website is brought to you by the geniuses behind Make Magazine.

From their website:

The first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration.

It’s like Popular Science was, except for the 21st century.

The MAKE Blog is fantastic, updated often with lots of DIY tricks and links.

I even downloaded two of their Podcasts last week, and those were pretty good too.

The magazine is fantastic – it’s a quarterly, nice and thick, with information on what others are out there hacking on, one project with detailed step by steps per month, and tons of cool other articles.

O’Reilly has done it again.

Zoe is smarter than me

I came home today to my desktop looking like this (look at the top panel):

Zoe killed my desktop

You can’t even tell there is a panel there in the screenshot, click for full view.

A normal panel should look like:

Normal GNOME desktop

I unlocked the Firefox icon so I was able to move it around, I moved the panel to the side just to check, I added a new panel to the top and clicked properties, but no joy on re-adding the Applications / Places / System drop down menus. I’ve played with the menu settings, and you can add specific programs to the panel, but I haven’t found the menu settings.

I’ll have to reach out to the Ubuntu community and figure this one out. Gotta love that a 1 year old can remove it with a few clicks, and it stumps me.

Update about 5 minutes later: To reinforce the discussion Novell gave at the recent GUADEC, there are some usability issues in GNOME, this being one of them. Right click on the panel, click add to panel and choose “Menu Bar – a custom menu bar”. What’s so custom about it? It’s the default panel menu option in GNOME – it’s not custom at all.

At least it’s back.

OS X for x86

Mac Daily News is reporting that OS X for x86 is available on P2P networks after someone took the developer version and seeded it.

Supposedly, it will work on any Intel processor, and the iLife applications are already compiled for x86. Mac Daily News goes on to theorize that Apple knew exactly what it was doing when it offered the developer edition after watching Tiger burn up the p2p circuit. The theory is Apple is offering a try before you buy scenario for OS X right now.

I wish I could say I thought Apple was that smart… they had to know this would happen, but that they planned it? A bit of a stretch.