Dear Diego, let's have a wager

Diego, here's a little bet for you. The supporter of the losing team in tonight's final will organise the FreeFA tournament?

I pay my TV license

Therefore, I'll want to listen to 5 Live tomorrow lunch time, when I'm in France, but United play Stoke.

This is more a little for me, but could be useful for other expats :)

1. Create a Socks5 proxy:
ssh -D 9999 your.remote.host

2. Build the tsocks library

3. Create a tsocks.conf file:
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 9999
server_type = 5

4. Launch a (simple) player with proxy support:
TSOCKS_CONF_FILE=`pwd`/tsocks.conf LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/libtsocks.so.1.8 mplayer -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/live/live.asx

Voila. See also Bug 505456.

Wheepee! Yay! Whoohoo!

Update: Found in the comments of this story on OSNews (the title certainly caught my eye), this image:

Wheepee! Yay!

Evil!

Now, that wasn't funny. I asked for nice souls to send me stuff via my Amazon wishlist. Braindead and American Beauty DVDs, great. But this:



is sick. A copy of This is Anfield. Liverpool's Kop songs. I'd have preferred a ManU CD. The jury's still out on the fate of the CD, and the constables on the identity of the culprit(s). Call your local police station if you have any evidence on the perp, or your Daily Mail correspondent for possible punishments. Or leave a comment either way.

Update: The perpetrator has been identified. Comments included:
«Of course...if you send me a tom jones CD... I will retaliate» (the accused)
and:
«Frankly after sending mr jones, you are lucky you only got dvds and cds, and not shit-in-a-box» (his defence attorney).

I found a new home for the CD. Will be on its way when Royal Mail stop striking.

Well stripey week-end (aka stripey #5)

Lapo Calamandrei went a bit mad, and produced a clever piece of artistic genius.

I'm sure he'll post the full icon theme somewhere soon for all of us to enjoy (he sent me a copy, but it didn't install properly).

Another little computer gets on the market (where you at Jeff? missed the Zonbu?), runs some form of Linux with KDE, but uses Totem for their movie player. Can I get a free one, guys?


On Friday, I managed to solve that really annoying problem that made the browser plugin with the xine-lib backend just not work at all.

Good and bad things this week-end:

• Cello, creepy, although not the best of the kind
• Man United finally won it! After the debacle of last Wednesday against Milan, we'll get a row of honour against Chelsea on Wednesday evening.
• Pan's Labyrinth, a special fairy tale. Beautiful. Narnia is for weenies.
• Ma Mère, a couple of tits, but horrible French art-house malarkey
• Arsène Lupin, pretty shite
• Michel Vaillant, pretty fun if you remember the comic from when you were a kid
• Les Poupées Russes, where you see that Romain Duris can be a good actor
• Shite results in the French elections (not that the alternative was much better, but it still was). Berlusconi, I'm sure Nicolas can show you how to be a better crook, his predecessor has quite some experience too.

Guess what I did this week-end? (with stripes)

I watched another nerve-wrecking performance from United. I didn't yell that much though, as I was watching the game with Everton fan Gareth. I'm not one to rub it in.

We also went to said Gareth's girlfriend's birthday party, and had very little luck getting the Kärcher going. The hose keeps popping out under the pressure from the tap (ar, ar).

I've also spent some time trying to get both my laptop and my desktop to suspend. The laptop was fairly straight forward. No hacks, no quirks, just echo mem > /sys/power/state, and you're done. But I'm still hitting a weird bug when using gnome-power-manager to do it.
The desktop (a Dell Optiplex GX620) is a bit more problematic, as pm-suspend doesn't seem to use vbetool at all (despite having an Intel video card in there, but being an older FC6 install...), and the video is completely screwed up (yellow lines, and a lot of flashing blue and red) when resuming under X.

Watched Filles perdues cheveux gras (stopped after 20 minutes, French variété is only below some of their TV shows in things I hate about France), 300 (stopped after about 30 minutes, and finished some weeks later, why would Spartans behave like they were Gulf War I vets), and a Journey Through Porn (stopped 10 minutes near the end to watch Match Of The Day, not great, but still the best docu about pr0n I've seen).


PS: What on earth is going on with them stripes? The window of the local JJB Sports shop. Could it be the metrosexual influence of David Beckham?

More plugins, again

This time, the hero is Jan Arne Petersen, who added activation failure support to the plugin API, and then ported the GNOME 2.18 media player keys support, and LIRC remote control support to plugins. He also ported a lesser known functionality of Totem to the plugin system. The Gromit plugin allows "telestrator" mode. A picture speaks a thousand words.



It's not that well integrated into Totem itself, but the default configuration is still pretty good for Paul to have used it with his tablet to show american football moves.


On Tuesday, I received my new work laptop, a Dell Latitude D420. It's a shame I received it the day before they announced they were doing flash-drive versions. The latch sucks, the right of the underside gets pretty hot, and the screen is not as good as on my Sony laptop. But I didn't pay a penny for it, it's very light, and has cool shit like an ambient light sensor and a fingerprint reader, so it's all fine by me. I started filing a good bunch of bugs about making it work better, which will hopefully get fixed in due time.

And I yelled

I fucking love those games. What a night yelling at the screen, us, the el cheaopo pundits.

Update: And you can buy Dida for cheap as well.

Love today

I spent my Saturday around B&Q and homebase looking for a pressure washer to clean up my patio and some garden furniture, finishing off watching a nail-biting/frustrating draw against Boro.

My Sunday was more helpfully spent drinking beers with a few guys in London after Pete Graner decided to drop in the city. The French presidential election results didn't come as much of surprise, but Chelsea dropping points did.

Mika's Love Today rocks the same way the Scissor Sisters rocked a couple of years ago. More things change, more they stay the same, which makes for good days.

Sqeaky bum time!

Fedora 7 is gearing up, and I'm spending most of my time fixing bugs. If you have a pet peeve (a bug, not a feature) for Rhythmbox, or Totem, be sure to let me know (by filing bugs in Bugzilla!).

I'm very happy that project for accepted for an SoC project. It means I won't have to do it myself, and that the person got the best mentor possible, the BlueZ man himself. And I'm never tired of hearing some success stories with the browser plugin. Changes a bit from all the bugs :/

I hope Aaron finishes his encoding profiles code in time for GNOME 2.20, as I don't won't to have to deal with gnome-media's profile code anymore.

Watched a couple of films: The Interpreter (I wanted to slap and drown Nicole Kidman for most of the film, certainly not her best film by a margin, and Sean Penn should stick to indie movies, which is what we like him for), and The Jacket, a tip-top if weird thriller. Bit like bath water near the end (soapy).

PS: In case you wonder where that title comes from. Plenty more goals where that came from.

What a night!

I got my evening out to go to the pub to watch my team play their quarter-finals return game against Roma, all expectant, a bit reassured that the result might go our way with the good passing in the first 10 minutes. I needn't be too worried as United showed Roma how to play. What a night!

What did I miss?

Pfff. I go away for a couple of days to watch a football game, and both RHEL 5 and GNOME 2.18 get released in my absence. In a somewhat related way, I didn't know Zara had a men section. Hoooo, manic monkeys!

Football

Plenty of footie lately, never enough really, but still a lot. I watched a couple of games on telly, including the great FA cup tie against Reading on Tuesday. I'm also going to watch Man Utd v. a Europe XI at Old Trafford Tuesday a week. Hopefully a good game of football given the talent on show.

I'm enjoying my 6-a-side football, putting in some decent performances. Defensive midfield is where it's at. I've scored a couple of interesting goals: coming from a defensive position, I wasn't closed down in midfield, and whacked a swerving and dipping 20-yarder in the middle of the goal. I also like my pass in the net from the left of midfield. Lots of bodies in between me and the goal, but my cross just evaded everyone. The defense wasn't happy at the goal keeper, and vice-versa. The last one was a right-footed volley from the right of midfield, for Erkut's last game with us. And today, I'll be hoping my new jersey gives me some skills.