Zombified
Worked solidly from 07:00 26/04/07 to 17:20 27/04/07
I. Am. Tired.
Updates from April, 2007 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Dark Liquid
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Dark Liquid
LRL2007 is looking sweet
Jono has just released the full speakers list for LRL2007 and it’s looking to be a fantastic line-up this year. I’m really looking forwards to it. LUGRadio Live 2007 is going to be sweet.
Come on July!!!
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Dark Liquid
Feelin’ Feisty
I must say I’m pretty damned impressed with the new release of Xubuntu.
I’ve got everything setup nicely – and quickly – with a minimum of fuss. Got beryl running nicely, it’s fast, real fast.
There isn’t really much that is particularly obvious about this distro that distinguishes it from the last one. It just feels better, more polished and it Just Works(tm). With Beryl running, it makes MacOSX, look like a piece of crap. Installing all the codecs and what not I needed was easy too. After following some howto’s I’ve got the font rendering looking sweet, it looks as good as if not superior to MacOSX’s native font rendering.
I’ve decided to try out some new media players on Feisty, but I’ve found I’m still leaning towards Quod Libet as my media player of choice.
Exaile looked really good, and was an instant win in all categories for me except one – it didn’t remember my library. It had to process the whole thing every time it loaded, and if my music drive wasn’t mounted, I had to import the whole lot again. I don’t like having to wait 10+ minutes before I can listen to my music. Also, its album art finder just didn’t work. It just got stuck on the first item and there was no way to tell it to skip onto the next one.
Listen looked pretty awesome too. Tons of cool, useful features, but it kept crashing. I’m not sure why it did this, but the number of tracks it detected kept changing – after it had already imported my whole library – so I’m guessing that was somehow related.
So far, I’m trying out Banshee again. I didn’t like it last time but this version seems pretty good. I’ll see how it copes properly when I get home today and rip my new Porcupine Tree CD that I was listening to at work this morning.
If all else fails, I’ll stick with ‘Olde Reliable’ – Quod Libet, it’s served me well so far and it can always do so again, even if it does sometimes mess up its own music database (though I expect that was probably my own stupid fault and not the softwares).
On Feisty I’ve also found that Cedega 6 doesn’t work for me when playing Oblivion, but WINE plays fine (except the sound is screwed up). Oh well. I think I’m going to install a bunch of mods when I get home to improve the available armor, clothing and character generation / styling options because I am sad like that. I feel I have to play around with more visual mods now I have my sweet new graphics card – I need to test it out properly… right?
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Dark Liquid
Update
Haven’t done an update in a while… eep!
Work
Work is busy as usual, too many jobs, not enough hours in the day. We are coping, but my overtime is reaching ridiculous levels which isn’t good for the companies bank balance or my sanity.
Computer
Since getting back into Oblivion again, I felt I needed to get a new graphics card t replace my bottom of the bottom range nVidia 7300GS PCIe card. I got myself a nice EVGA 7950GT 512MB and it is performing nicely. I’ve been using WINE for playing Oblivion as it tends to have better performance over Cedega 6, though with WINE my sound is screwed up and certain graphical effects don’t work / are wrong, but it a matter of time till it gets sorted.
Downloaded Xubuntu Feisty today so I am looking forwards to installing that alongside my Xubuntu Edgy install (I don’t want to dist-upgrade since I’ve fiddled so much with my install and its full of unmanaged crap and junk).
Stuff
I bought myself some new stuff, a signed copy of Leaving Eden – Antimatter’s new album (which kicks ass by the way) and have got Porcupine Tree’s new album on order along with the new China Mieville book ‘Un Lun Dun’. I’m looking forwards to by pre-ordered book by Neal Asher – Hilldiggers. Other than the above I’ve been fairly good with my expenditure. I’ll have to be because I’ve got saving to do…
Good news
You may know that me and Dru are buying a flat via a shared-equity scheme. Well, so far things are going pretty well, we were made an offer, grabbed a 2 bed flat, signed some forms, signed some more forms, signed even more forms and set off our reservation fee, so, all going well, we’ll have a flat soon once we organise a mortgage and have the solicitors sign off on it all. It’s all looking pretty positive though so far!
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Dark Liquid
Pure awesomeness
Well, anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I love cheesy scifi/action/violence media. Recently I’ve found out about some stuff that looks like pure, distilled awesomeness.
First of all, is Grindhouse. Quite frankly, I was sold on the fact that a main character in the first film is a stripper with a gun for a leg. I quite frankly don’t think it’s possible to get better than that.
Next, is Heat Vision and Jack. An awesome TV pilot by Ben Stiller starring Jack Black as Jack Austin – an ex-astronaut exposed to ‘inappropriate levels of solar energy’ turning him into a genius when the sun comes out, and his unemployed room-mate turned motor-bike – Heat Vision. Really, how can it not be good when they are ‘blocked at every turn – by adventure!’. If only someone would pick this up and run with it, it could be good in the same way that Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place is good.