Happy New Year! Kelly’s due date has come and gone, so we will be welcoming in the New Year any day now with a baby.
Resolutions this year? A few off the top of my head:
Kelly got me one of the best gifts I’ve got in a long time, The Complete Calvin and Hobbes Collection.
Weighing at just over 22 pounds, the collection consists of 3 hardcover bound books, with every comic done by Bill Watterson. Kicking off with a 14 page foreword, which was worth it a lone, as Mr. Watterson discusses his love of comics, and touches on why he never granted interviews or went ahead with merchandising.
Each book contains 3 years worth of strips, interspersed with water color paintings that take up a whole page. The comic strips are laid out in order, and the background color of each page is an off-white that really makes the strips stand out. Each page has the dates the comics on the page were originally run.
I love Calvin and Hobbes – not only does it take me back to my childhood, but those strips still make me laugh out loud as I was reading them this weekend. It truely is one of the timeless classics.
The Gstreamer team at Fluendohas licensed the MP3 codec for use on Linux! From the article:
Why are we doing this ? Quite simple. mp3 is a very widespread format, and the fact that Linux could not legally play it out of the box in countries where patents apply is posing a lot of problems for adoption. It is one of the most commonly heard complaints about distros these days. Fluendo still fully supports open formats, and we hope people move to using them. Part of that move is being able to play your legacy formats, where you have no choice over the format. Remember, we are not giving away a free encoder.
What does this mean? That one of the biggest oversights in all Linux distributions has been fixed – Distro’s can bundle in MP3 decoding support out of the box, and not have to worry about patent issues.
Thanks Fluendo!
According to this post on BoingBoing, Cory Ondrejka, a Second Life programmer for Linden Labs, will be showing the first public demo of Second Life on Linux this weekend at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.
Sweet, I can’t wait!
Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays to all of you!
What am I thinking?! For multiple reasons, but more to come…
Here’s a screenshot as I start to attempt to install World of Warcraft via Cedega on Ubuntu 5.10
Senate Rejects Extension of Patriot Act
Sen. Feingold has Senators listening! With a vote of 52-47, 8 short to override a filibuster, Senators today rejected extending the Patriot Act. Senators from all sides joined Sen. Feingold in opposing this terrible piece of legislation that stomps on American’s civil liberties.
“We can come together to give the government the tools it needs to fight terrorism and protect the rights and freedoms of innocent citizens,” said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., arguing that provisions permitting government access to confidential personal data lacked safeguards to protect the innocent.
“We need to be more vigilant,” agreed Sen. John Sununu (news, bio, voting record), a Republican from New Hampshire, where the state motto is “Live Free or Die.” He quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Those that would give up essential liberty in pursuit of a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.”
8 Foot One of a kind Lego Star Wars Republic Attack Cruiser..
8 feet! It appears to have been commission by Lucas for Celebration III and Comic-Con. Built by one of the few Lego Master Builders, current bidding is only $25,000.
Flaming Sheep Software has released the Classic Doom mod for Doom3. Bringing back the look, feel and maps of the original Doom now running on the Doom3 engine.
Quake IV on Linux has been a breeze to run, I’m going to have to install my Doom3 copy that’s around here somewhere and try this mod out.
The first Ubuntu Desktop News has been published.
It contains an overview of all the work being done on the upcoming 6.04 Dapper Drake release of Ubuntu, specifically around desktop improvements.
With lots of topics, including speed improvements, being able to install packages by just double-clicking on a .deb file (!), Rhythmbox mention, and an interview with Sebastian Bacher, if you’re an Ubuntu user, this is worth a read!
