Category: Software

I use this category to discuss software that I use and either like or…. not.

As has been noted on this blog multiple times, I use Linux. Specifically, I use SuSE Linux. For my desktop environment, I use KDE. There are several music players available for KDE but the one that is far & away the best is amaroK. It’s got some great organizational tools, a cover manager and can even copy songs to your iPod. It rocks and if you listen to music under Linux; you’re missing out if you’re still using XMMS.

Another thing I like is Magnatune. This is a website that allows you to listen to MP3s of all the albums they offer for sale as CDs, plus they let you podcast with their music without paying for some ridiculous license. They’ve got a wide selection of music (e.g. blues, ambient, rock, medieval, etc…) and when I’m looking for something new to listen to; they’re the first place I go.

In fact tonight, I started poking around their site for some new music when I ran across this post on their founder’s blog:

A few months ago, the developers of amaroK (the amazingly gorgeous music player for Linux and Unix, that really does give iTunes a run for its money) asked me about Magnatune cooperating on their new release of their version 1.3. Their idea was to make a self-booting linux image, that boots into a linux desktop, with amaroK running and some Magnatune music included.

It’s like Reese’s Peanut Butter cups, they’re getting peanut butter (Magnatunes) mixed in with my chocolate (amaroK)! Nice move people! 😀

Yesterday, I finished downloading a large file which had been archived in multi-part RAR format. I went to unrar the file but unrar for linux just wasn’t working and Ark1 wasn’t recognizing RAR files after I upgraded to the lastest beta for KDE 3.5. This was an unacceptable state of affairs as I really wanted to get a look at the complete file I downloaded. Then it occured to me:

  1. I dual-boot with WinXP on this computer.
  2. I have WinRAR installed under WinXP.
  3. I have wine2 installed under Linux.

I fired up a terminal window and typed in: wine /path/to/WinRAR.exe WinRAR started succesfully, so I told it to decompress the archive and it di so without error! I was most pleased. 😀

1 KDE archiving tool
2 Wine version#: 20050830-0.1

Firefox Privacy Options

Have you been using Firefox for several months? And during that time noticed that it’s taking longer & longer for the Save File dialog box to come up? Then likely, you’ve got the same problem that I’ve had. Fortunately, there’s an easy (but slow) fix for this.

 

Instructions:

  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go into Tools -> Options (or Edit -> Preferences).
  3. Click on the Privacy icon in the left-hand pane.
  4. In the right-hand pane, click on Download Manager History.
  5. Click the Clear button. At this point, Firefox may appear to have crashed but in reality it should be going through and clearing out all of the items from your download history. On my home machine, this took several minutes to complete but I’ve been running Firefox since v0.9 and have never cleared the download history before.
  6. Optionally, you may wish to change the “Remove files from the Download Manager:” from “Manually” to “When Firefox exits”. To help prevent this slow down from happening again.

This fix works on both the Linux & Windows versions of Firefox. I would presume it also works for the OS X version, but I (sadly enough) do not have a Mac to try it out on.

Product Image: TiBR Pro

My rating: 5 out of 5

I recently finished reading the last of my unread stack of books, took a look at my bank account and realized that continuing to buy more at the current time would be… unwise. So I started looking around the apartment for something else to read, but nothing really sparked my interest.

It probably wasn’t helping that a good friend of mine kept writing in her journal about how much she was enjoying rereading The Count of Monte Cristo. Then it occured to me that story is most likely in the public domain, so a quick jaunt over to Project Gutenberg and I’d confirmed that it was in fact in the public domain. Then I started downloading a copy of this and a few other stories when I realized that I didn’t have a book reader on my PDA any more. So I looked around at some review sites and ran across TiBR Pro by inDev Software. Niiiiiiiiice.

TiBR Pro supports reading eBooks off my PDA’s memory stick and even cooler; it allows me to rotate the screen sideways for a much more natural viewing area. They also had a free version, but the description didn’t mention reading from a memory stick and I’ve got enough stuff on my PDA that I really wanted that feature. So I coughed up the measly $9.951 and I’m most pleased with my purchase. So far I’ve worked my way through ~50% of The Count of Monte Cristo and I’ve already downloaded several other books that I look forward to reading using this great new tool!

As a side note while I was searching for eBook readers to load on my PDA; I ran across the ManyBooks website. ManyBooks takes etexts from places like Project Gutenberg and converts them into popular eBook formats. This makes it easier for lazy people like myself to quickly get the stories onto our PDAs for reading whenever we have a spare moment (e.g. during boring meetings).

1 I’ve seen other readers for my PDA costing twice that, which would definitly be out of my budget for the moment.

Paul Griffin has released a new version of Simple PHP Gallery. This is the software that I use for my gallery and I’ve just loaded the new version up. It needs some tweaking to fit back into the site’s overall design. If you have any problems with it; please let me know.