Totem news

At least some sort of news.

First off, I just committed support for xdg-user-dirs to Totem, so your Movies and Music directories will show up in the file choosers (which fixes a bug where Ross tried his hardest not to understand what I was talking about, and used "fab").

Secondly, Tim and Thomas have been hacking on codeina, the interesting part of Codec-Buddy. It allows users to purchase the codecs from Fluendo when they can't play a proprietary format. Hopefully, it will be useful for users that want to support Fluendo/don't know where to get Open Source alternatives/want great Windows Media support.

Paying for stuff can look good!

Finally, I committed some rough code to watch TV in Totem (xine-lib backend) using DVB cards. It's far from finished, but after creating a ~/.xine/channels.conf using w_scan (the easiest way I've found to create tuner data yet), "totem dvb:" will list all your channels in the playlist, and you're ready to lose some time.

Films: one great film, The Machinist (for those who liked Memento), 2 decent ones, Angel-A, and Cars, one I'm ashamed of, but not that much, The Devil Wears Prada, and an utter pile of crap that I stopped before the end (actually, near the beginning), Ultraviolet.

Chuck Norris can divide by zero

Chuck Norris still rocks. And Walker Texas Ranger dubbed in French is still funny as hell.

Exclusive GUADEC posters for Comic Relief

Much like Paul, I'm selling some exciting memorabilia on eBay for Comic Relief. I had a lot of fun watching tonight (there's DVDs of the program for sale, well worth the pennies), and thought I'd sell my recently recovered posters.

Held by booze and fags, a wonderful poster

Unlike the picture, the poster doesn't look washed out. You will get one autographed poster, with the likes of Tigert, Jimmac, Miguel, Telsa, Jim Gettys, and many more (including yours truly). You will also get a clean one, to compare, and all. I expect to get at least a 100 quid off of it, so don't let me down.

BUY IT!

Stripey

A good friend (Ezio shall remain nameless) is going a bit stripes-crazy, buying pretty much every Paul Smith pinstripes item sold on the planet. Last week, I found some (nearly) matching umbrellas as a special offer in the local Co-op.

Nice umbrella, gringo

But yesterday, it all got a bit worse. This is the window of a stationery shop in Manchester's city centre.

That's it, he's going mental now

Ezio, you're a slave to the stripes, aren't you? What next? The iPod case? Or, as Jose keeps telling you, the boxer shorts?

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!

Less connectivity please!

Today was mostly spent wondering why France couldn't repeat their Ireland heroics to snatch victory against England, and getting Linux installed on A's laptop, in place of the virus/malware/spyware/bloatware infested Windows.

I was quite lucky to manage to find Grub4DOS, and associated tools. The laptop's busted CD/DVD drive (it can only read pressed CDs, and not even that fast) didn't make things any easier, and thank fsck I have a floppy drive in my desktop machine. The first install, bootstrapped from WinXP using the NT version failed halfway through with a network error, leaving me with a bricked laptop. The second try was more successful after I managed to get FreeDOS installed on the hard disk, got all the Fedora images over via floppy, and finished the install over the network.

I also saw for the first time the ACPI error message telling me that the BIOS cutoff date was past (the BIOS claims to be from 1997, even though the machine is 5 years old). I still managed to get quite an impression after showing suspend-to-disk, and boot/login of under 5 minutes (Windows is so shit).

Some old film news: Hot Fuzz, Bienvenue chez les Rozes, The Italian Job

Comic genius

I can make farts with my armpits. That is all.