Return of the Blog

No, I'm not dead yet. I just never really "got" this whole blog thing, so I rarely find stuff I feel is worth blogging. Maybe it's time to try it again.

Mega-blog catchup ahoy!

Drivel
Using Drivel to post this. Love the HTML syntax highlighting and office-style squiggly red line spell checking.

So far, I like it better than GNOME-Blog.

Dapper
So, I've upgraded to Dapper Drake, the next development version for Ubuntu. Most notable changes so far are new versions of the usual stuff (GNOME 2.13.3, Firefox 1.5, Xorg 7.0), a simplified menu, better work network-manager support, a cairo-based clearlooks, and a much more complete tango icon theme for maximum bling.

More on this to come. :)

Xorg
Nice to see Xorg 7.0/modular finally released. I'm pretty confident in saying this is the biggest milestone since the X.org Foundation was created. It should allow for easier development and save packagers an extreme amount of pain.

Also nice to see Xorg 6.9 (simultaneously released with 7.0, just not modular) hit Debian/unstable just over a week after release. Great work gravityboy and the rest of the XSF! 7.0 is already in dapper, for us bleeding-edge maniacs.

GStreamer 0.10
Been playing around with GStreamer 0.10 and Totem 1.3.

Totem maintained perfect A/V sync no matter what I did. Really, I did everything I could to try and break its A/V sync. Even going as far as to seek all over a 3.2G xvid/a52 avi file over smb:// (using gnomevfs). It just wouldn't budge. :)

I was also pleasantly surprised to see how many formats it supported. I tested it with avi (xvid/divx and mp3/a52), ogg (theora/vorbis), mov, mpeg2, and wmv. Of those, only the wmv file didn't play (asfdemux hasn't been ported yet). Also note that the DVD plugins haven't been ported yet either. With all the talk of 0.10's lack of plugins I was worried it would only support theora/vorbis and xvid/mp3.

In somewhat related news, I'm having a tough time choosing between rhythmbox and banshee now that banshee has an rb-style artist/album browser. On the one hand, banshee has better ipod support. On the other, rhythmbox's built in podcast support is dead sexy.

I look forward to the coming music player war giving us two really kick ass players. :)

Sirius
So, I picked up one of those new-fangled Sirius satellite radios yesterday. Been listening to Howard100 and the rock/metal stations a lot. It's odd at first to hear the radio go on and on without commercials and to hear people talk like normal human beings, but you get used to that pretty quick.

Overall, I'd recommend it to anyone, especially if you drive around a lot like me. It's well worth the $12.95 a month.