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.

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.

Like everyone's new toy

I received my new Nokia 800 yesterday, and got to play with it a bit. Apart from having been able to settle an argument about which CPU the XBox 360 uses (thanks Wikipedia), and toying with the chat apps, I've added a few apps to it, including a terminal (which will please my housemate), Chris' Dates, Tuomas' Plankton theme. No luck getting Plazer installed (some missing deps).


The web browser has a great resolution, and makes browsing large web pages easy, some bits of the interface are rather immature though (2 buttons to click to select the "Off" button action, the spinner showing up when clicking a link in the browser, etc.), and the application manager is a bit flaky and the error reporting blows.

The other disappointments, hardware-wise: no screen protection, apart from the sleeve (not really rugged), and the smaller power connector than my current Nokia phone (there must be some adapters so I don't need to carry 2 power supplies...).

The VMWare SDK image could turn out to be useful.